The Erotic Thriller series available on the Criterion Channel this month seems to have a fluid definition of the genre, which might be articulated as “any movie in which sex is understood to be a struggle for power.”
Any erotic thriller worth its salt certainly grasps such a sentiment, but I would go a step further: Erotic thrillers are a decadent medley of sex and danger, symphonies contrasting our deepest, most ridiculous and forbidden desires with our fears of what might happen should said desires be satiated. Running through these films is a ripe sense of possibility: that taboo yearnings will be broached, that the numbing moralism of most movies will be temporarily suspended.
Elusive and tantalizing possibility, a price so high yet potentially worth paying – this is the realm of the erotic thriller. It is obsessed with what might happen. Like many erotic moments in life, these films often prioritize foreplay over the deed itself. It is revealing to watch the films in Criterion’s Erotic Thriller set and find there’s not much sex in many of them. There’s an emphasis instead on following and watching, whether someone is driving into the lonely night or peering through a window to see just a glimpse of shapely flesh. There’s an emphasis on titillation, on the wonderful agony of coveting. Watching Lawrence Kasdan’s “Body Heat,” one responds more to Florida’s humidity as a sensual state of being, rather than to the bodies actually on display, though they are nothing to scoff at either.
Remove the literal smoke and mirrors from the sex scenes and characters are often shown to be having rather pedestrian intercourse. But the smoke and mirrors are why people pay to see these movies. Skin is creamy and flawless, kisses are velvety, and the clothes are stylish—impeccable wrappers ready for removing. Most pivotal, the work of having sex is effaced. No miscommunication and little sense of strenuousness (though there are pointed exceptions, particularly in “Basic Instinct”). Mostly, sex in these movies resembles a steamy, light-nudity spa.
There’s an issue of class at play in the erotic thriller. Notice these films are never about poor people. The fantasy of the erotic thriller is chiefly a fantasy of screwing above your station. Working-class men are drawn to rich and beautiful women, their differing castes evened out by virility. Men with money and virility are a rarity in these pictures, though women frequently possess both and are at their wit’s end trying to find a man who deserves such a package. Frustration and innuendos are more powerful than the act in these films, and this sense of frustration gives us an empathetic “in” for daydreams and nightmares that are otherwise divorced from life as lived.
By this criterion, I’m not sure that, say, John Dahl’s 1994 “The Last Seduction” qualifies as an erotic thriller. It is a memorably nasty neo-noir, released at the height of the genre’s resurgence in the ‘90s, but it’s not especially sexy and that’s the source of the film’s dry, low-down comedy. It is so obsessed with power—featuring a femme fatale who figuratively castrates every man in her way—that your defenses never relax. Linda Fiorentino’s performance is audaciously disinterested in likability. You see her coming a mile away and her obviousness is a joke on the profound naiveté of the yokels she targets. Thriller, yes, and it’s nice to see it spotlighted here, but erotic? Not by my mileage. In sensibility it is closer to Stephen Frears’ ice-cold “The Grifters” than, say, Brian de Palma’s intoxicatingly dangerous and horny “Dressed to Kill.”
Femme fatales should muddy your sympathies, playing you as well as the marks. There should be a hint of “maybe she actually likes me,” a.k.a. “maybe my dreams can be true.” Sex with a femme fatale should look fun. Fiorentino’s Bridget appears to be as ruthlessly efficient in the sack as she is at pitting fools against one another. This gender satire—of the woman assuming the male’s worst traits in order to enjoy the spoils of war, or of the male finding a manipulative tack in “playing the woman”—runs through this Criterion series. And in certain cases, such as in Donna Deitch’s 1994 “Basic Instinct” clone “Criminal Passion,” which is in this set, the reversal is an intermittent turn-on.
In many cases, Criterion’s Erotic Thriller series seems to be a case of spotlighting what was available during its cultivation. Any survey of American sex thrillers of the 1980s and ‘90s is incomplete without Harold Becker’s “Sea of Love” (1989), which plays like a more empathetic and human version of what Paul Verhoeven would get up to with “Basic Instinct” (1992). Al Pacino is a lonely cop with a drinking problem who becomes involved with Ellen Barkin, who may be murdering men she meets from want ads. The film is poignant and quite sexy, with the stars at the apex of their charisma. Richard Price’s lean-and-mean script eloquently rhymes the tropes of the erotic thriller with the vulnerabilities that creep into the dating scene when one reaches middle age. But it’s not in this series. However, bonus points to Criterion for including Sollace Mitchell’s 1988 thriller, “Call Me,” which shows that you can take female characters seriously and treat them with respect without losing a sense of danger and fun. Mitchell and her superb lead, Patricia Charbonneau, make empathy, well, sexy.
A few more pet peeves though, just because. Brian de Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” and “Body Double” are here as they should be, given they are erotic thrillers through and through on a biochemical level. But de Palma’s “Femme Fatale,” one of the sexiest movies I’ve ever seen, as well as one of the most underrated, isn’t here. Yes, “Femme Fatale” was released in 2002 and Criterion has clearly designated this as an ’80s and ‘90s set, but their liner notes don’t actually set that rule.
And how is a survey of cinematic American sex and power, not to mention its hang-ups over the intermingling of the two, complete without any titles from Adrian Lyne, especially “Fatal Attraction?” [Set to become a new television series on Paramount+ on April 30]. Does anyone believe William Friedkin’s 1995 stinker “Jade,” which torpedoed the goodwill that Fiorentino earned with “The Last Seduction,” to be more essential than Lyne’s films? It’s also difficult to discuss the American erotic thriller without eventually landing on David Lynch’s 1986 “Blue Velvet,” but that omission is forgivable. A. That film is included in another Criterion series this month spotlighting Lynch. B. Genre categories don’t work for art that singular.
But one can play this game all day. Any series, like any list, invites a game of “what about” that becomes tedious. It is refreshing to see a label with Criterion’s prestige spotlight the erotic thriller, especially at our particular cultural moment. The erotic thriller genre is currently in hibernation mode, for reasons as frustrating as they are obvious. For starters, we’re in a puritanical phase in America, in which even the left is cheering the censoring of classic books, as well as decrying any art that might not teach us how to be better citizens, either through endless civics lessons, or calculated diversity optics and gender representations. These are the kinds of people who count how many lines are spoken by male characters versus female characters.
Such an environment, in which agendas are valued over expressions of emotional impulses, is not conducive to a genre that thrives in the realm of the politically incorrect. Even the notes that the Criterion Collection released with this series are careful and defensive, citing the “delirious plots” and subversion of gender roles. Translation: Don’t worry. We’re championing these films for the right reasons.
Sex is risky anyway. To conceive or perform a sex scene is to reveal what you think about sex. To envision how a character moves sexually is to potentially show the world how you move, or how you think someone should move, or how you are imagining someone moves. Since we are conditioned by society to both covet and be ashamed of sex, we are understandably defensive and confused on the subject. Add the Me Too movement and a history of institutionalized sex crimes and the stone-throwing of Twitter and its ilk and you’ve got an environment in which any mention of sex is fraught, in which everyone must speak in careful bromides that are, among other things, decidedly not sexy. It’s easy to see how an artist would find the subject to be unworthy of the damn effort. With world-class hornmeisters like Brian de Palma essentially in retirement, not a single American auteur currently working ever broaches issues of sex.
Sounds like hyperbole, doesn’t it? Try to name one modern American name-brand filmmaker with any interest in even acknowledging that sex between humans is a thing that exists. Hell, few of our current American auteurs even deign to acknowledge the existence of the present day. They work on long period epics designed to elicit our awe for their timelessness. This is a shrewd way for acclaimed filmmakers to pretend that our current social upheavals don’t exist while nevertheless minting their prestige.
In the present day, it’s impossible to imagine “Dressed to Kill” or “Basic Instinct,” which airs on Criterion May 1st, existing at all. They are sleek, beautiful, trashy and utterly, fearlessly absurd. “Dressed to Kill” is a straight, horny man’s idea of a horny woman’s frustrated sex dreams and fears, while “Basic Instinct” is a straight horny man’s projection of, well, a horny man’s fears of obsolescence. Even for this genre, they are confrontational and defiantly un-timid, as they both have interludes of sex and violence that are probably more shocking in this skittish modern day than they were in 1980 and 1992, respectively. They were both controversial then and remain so, but now their relative old age has grandfathered them into respectability. What did John Huston’s character in “Chinatown” say? “Politicians, old buildings, and whores become respectable with old age.”
That loophole allows us to fill a current cultural vacancy—the gleefully naughty, implicitly personal sex thriller—with the artifacts of a less hinged age.
“Erotic Thrillers” is available on The Criterion Channel during the month of April. Check the site for full listings.
