Sex is back in the movies, and the Irish have a lot to do with it

The new thing is the old thing again. Sex is back in the movies, and the Irish have a lot to do with it. So you are about to be told, anyway (though not by me). A month or two ago the Guardian speculated about the “sex scene’s return to cinema”. Earlier in the year the New York Times went with “bringing sexy back to the movies with a 2023 twist”.

This follows much chatter about an alleged new puritanism among younger people. Legions of youthful Witchfinders General gather online to talk about sex scenes not being “necessary?” (It’s not really “necessary” to make a film at all, you know.)

When, back in February, Penn Badgley, star of the Netflix series You, announced he had asked the showrunners to decrease the number of sex scenes out of respect for his wife, there was a lot of rallying around his supposed cause. No blame attaches to Badgley here. All actors have the right to outline what activities they feel uncomfortable with. But the story offered a focus for the debate.

It’s not all social-media froth. Just this week a report from the University of California, Los Angeles, argued that the young generation genuinely do want less humping on screens. “While it’s true that adolescents want less sex on TV and in movies, what the survey is really saying is that they want more and different kinds of relationships reflected,” Dr Yalda T Uhls, one of the authors of the Teens & Screens study, explained.

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Ha ha! The medium will show those spineless Zoomers. By February we’ll be back to the 1970s. This century’s equivalent of Norman Mailer will be queuing up to see this century’s equivalent of Deep Throat in upmarket cinemas. The queasy dairy-enhanced coupling of Last Tango in Paris will have its own torrid reincarnation. And so on.

Are we seeing pushback against the new prudishness? Is the movie industry again allowing adults the opportunity to savour all the lubricious squelch of human experience? Not where it matters

The thesis hangs around the imminent release of a few acclaimed art-house titles. Yorgos Lanthimos’s brilliant Poor Things, produced by Dublin’s Element Pictures, landed at Venice International Film Festival to deafening hoots. The adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, a sort of high-feminist Bride of Frankenstein, was praised for its wit, daring and extravagance. Your current correspondent was, however, a little surprised at the number of critics – mostly our friends from across the Atlantic – rendered senseless by the sexuality. Alex Billington of First Showing was more overheated than most. “Poor Things is... the raunchiest film of the decade?!” he panted on TwXtter. “Everyone remember how much of a stir Antichrist caused?! Poor Things is that x100! THE WORLD IS NOT READY.”

Let me remind fans of Lars von Trier that the director’s Antichrist features a scene in which – reader discretion advised – the lead character ejaculates blood. Nothing nearly so explicit happens in Poor Things. There is a fair bit of sex, but little you wouldn’t encounter in a dozen Netflix productions. Given that Ira Sachs’s Passages, recipient of a rare NC-17 cert in the United States, opened commercially the same day Poor Things screened at Venice, you could argue Lanthimos’s film wasn’t even the “raunchiest” of the week.

[ No more sex scenes: film-makers advised to revert to chaste style of the golden era ]

[ American puritanism still reigns at the movies ]

Andrew Haigh’s excellent All of Us Strangers was picking up equally strong notices at Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal play newly hooked-up lovers in a film that goes to a few places largely unexplored by vanilla entertainment. One scene in particular may attract tabloid attention. Bodily fluids are there. Then they are not.

So are we seeing pushback against the new prudishness? Is the industry again allowing adults the opportunity to savour all the lubricious squelch of human experience?

Not where it matters.

In truth, art-house and independent films never fully backed away from sexuality. Risky, adventurous cinema was there if you sought it out. What changed was the mainstream. As Karina Longworth explains in the latest, mammoth series of her You Must Remember This podcast, during the 1990s Hollywood gradually cast off its interest in mass-market carnality – films such as 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction – for an embrace of cosy, sexless family fun. Less prohibitive certifications open up wider audiences. You’ll make more on Super Mario than on bloody ejaculations.

Longworth likens that shift to the adoption of “a second Production Code”. Unlike the prim regulations that chastened Hollywood from early 1930s, the new code’s terms are, Longworth explains, “dictated less by morality than by economies of scale swathed in pseudomorality”. There is no sign of that changing.

Fifty years ago the year’s US box-office top 10 included two of the most shocking films of the era. The Exorcist was at number one. Last Tango in Paris was at number eight. Such a situation would be inconceivable in 2023. We are being treated like infants. And too many of us like it that way.