Why Hollywood Dislikes Desire In Movies? In 1946, in The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks sat Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall down at a nightclub table, put a drink in front of each of them, and had them talk about horses, and in doing so he produced one of the most erotic sequences ever committed to celluloid. The whole of the scene is two people at a table discussing thoroughbreds, their form and their breeding, whether they run best out in front or whether they come from behind, and how one cannot really say until one has seen them over a distance of ground, and not one syllable of it is about sex while every syllable of it is about nothing else. The Production Code was in full and merciless force in those years, the censors were reading every page of every script that crossed a studio lot, and the result is a scene that remains, some eighty years later, more charged than anything our multiplexes have managed in a decade. Yet the detail that ought to shame the present day is that the scene was not in the picture at all when it was first completed in 1945, and was written and shot only when the studio went back into a finished film for the express purpose of adding sexual tension to it, which is a sentence that would be met with blank incomprehension in any executive suite in Hollywood today.
What does this have to do with the films and television of today? Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, because we need a few facts first, and more importantly, we need to be honest about what it is we are actually mourning, since the crude version of this complaint has poisoned the well for the serious one.
So let’s set the tone. I am not asking for nudity, nor for graphic sex, nor for the return of the obligatory studio-mandated love scene, that artless and perfunctory thing which has padded out the second act of a thousand mediocre pictures and improved not a single one of them. The vulgar version of this argument simply wants more skin on the screen, and it is wrong, and it is tedious, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with what has genuinely been lost, which is not flesh but desire. Our films no longer feel sexy, they no longer crackle, and the charge that once ran beneath a scene, that unmistakable sense that two people wanted something from one another and might very well be refused it, has been methodically drained out of the mainstream picture and replaced with something sterile and bloodless, a parade of platonic co-workers and sexless comrades-in-arms who quip at one another in costumes, who never once look at each other because they are far too busy looking at the threat over each other’s shoulder, and who part at the end of the picture with a handshake and a promise to reconvene in the sequel.
Consider, for a moment, what we were once handed as a matter of routine. Consider Casino Royale in 2006, and the train carriage in which Vesper Lynd and James Bond sit across from one another and take each other apart line by line, a scene in which nobody touches, nobody undresses, and nothing at all happens save conversation, and yet by the end of it you understand precisely how the entire film is going to end and precisely what it is going to cost him. Later that same picture gives us Bond holding Vesper in the shower with her dress still on, a moment of enormous tenderness rather than heat, and it is devastating precisely because the film had troubled itself to earn the heat first, and the entire enterprise is drenched in sexuality without ever once being graphic, because it understood the thing the franchise has seemed visibly embarrassed by ever since, which is that a Bond without appetite is nothing more than a very fit man running violent errands for his goverment.
Consider Pride and Prejudice in 2005, a film in which the single greatest erotic event is a man and woman walking twords each other, and in which Joe Wright understood that the entire architecture of the story is built upon suppression and therefore shot the thing like a fever dream, with its dawn walk across the field and its ballroom that empties around Elizabeth and Darcy until there is nobody left in the world but the two of them staring at one another. Not a single button is undone in that picture, and it remains almost unbearably sexy, and it is sexy for the very reason that its characters want. Consider Wonder Woman in 2017, which did the thing that the modern superhero picture has now rendered functionally illegal, in that it allowed its hero to be beautiful, and to know that she was beautiful, and to be looked at, and to look back, and it gave us Diana and Steve Trevor on the boat, and the slow dance in the falling snow of a ruined village square, and the gentle fade out before they consummate and the film was not diminished by any of it but rather made by it, because the heroism only lands when there is something recognizably human beating away beneath the armor. Lastly look at Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End in 2007, a pirate picture which closes upon Will and Elizabeth on a beach in a sequence so charged and so aching and so heavy with the consequence of everything that came before it that viewers are still discussing it two decades later, a scene that is not remotely graphic and which crackles like a live wire regardless.
Now, to make a long story short, films like the ones discussed are fading away, and the reason why is not the reason you will read in most columns on the subject. While a great many observers view this new chastity as nothing more than a fresh puritanism arriving with younger audiences, pointing to the surveys in which the young declare sex scenes unnecessary, or blaming the intimacy coordinator, or the streaming algorithm, or the telephone in everyone’s hand, the deeper truth is a good deal colder than prudishness and considerably more insidious, because our films are not chaste at all, they are simply and comprehensively risk-averse, and genuine desire, the sort that Hawks put across that nightclub table, is a risk that no committee will ever willingly assume.
Here is the thing about putting real want on the screen, and it is a thing that ought to be understood before anybody blames the audience for its absence: desire requires an author to make a choice, it requires two performers to be directed toward one another and given time and silence and a scene that does not advance the plot but exists solely to establish that these two people are alight, and above all it requires the filmmaker to declare in public what he or she finds beautiful, which is perhaps the most personal and most exposing thing that anyone can place inside a frame. It cannot be arrived at by committee, it cannot be focus-grouped, and it certainly cannot be reverse-engineered from a spreadsheet, and the modern franchise machine has been built, from its foundations upward, to eliminate precisely that species of choice. A romance is an inconvenience to a cinematic universe, since it pairs off an asset, ties a character to a co-star, and forces its audence to face desire and want, and desire and want is risky and makes people feel something that may be uncomfortable. It is not a storytelling decision at all, it is a liability shield, and it has been installed as the default setting of the American blockbuster while we were all arguing about something else.
The visual language followed the same insidious trajectory, and you can see the culmination of it in the desaturated palettes and the tactical grey and the practical jacket and the hero rendered as a soldier rather than as a person, in stars who are lit as though they were evidence at a trial rather than the most beautiful people of their generation, and we have somehow talked ourselves into believing that this constitutes maturity, that a film which refuses to find anybody beautiful is inherently more serious than one which does. Yet it is not maturity in the slightest, it is abdication, and there is a certain hubris in it as well, because Hawks had censors reading his mail and still contrived to set a nightclub table ablaze with nothing but two actors and a conversation about racing form, while we labor under no censorship whatsoever and simply cannot be bothered.
The audience, meanwhile, has never once stopped asking, and you may observe as much every single time a picture or a series happens to remember, whether it is the reaction to a period drama that permits its leads four uninterrupted seconds of eye contact, or a solitary ballroom scene, or the enduring and frankly decades-long devotion commanded by the four films named above, because the hunger has not disappeared in the least, it has merely been starved, and it is enormous, and whichever studio finds the nerve to feed it will be rewarded handsomely for its courage.
In the end, sexiness was never a matter of what was shown, which is the entire lesson of the last century of cinema and the very lesson we have somehow contrived to forget, for sexiness is tension, it is want and restraint and the ever-present possibility of refusal, it is a hand on a bare leg on a beach, a slow dance and two people in a train carriage who never once lay a finger upon one another, and it asks nothing of a studio beyond the nerve to concede that human beings desire each other and that this desire is not a distraction from the story but very frequently the only reason that any of us are watching at all. Much like Hawks and his horse race discussion, the finest romantic moments in the history of the medium have almost always been conversations about something else entirely, and we used to know this, and we built an entire art form upon it beneath a censorship regime that makes the timidity of the present day look faintly absurd. Our screens, therefore, are not sexless because anybody forbade it, but because nobody in the room wanted it badly enough to fight for it, and that, I would submit, is a far sadder thing than any censor ever managed.
