Love and sexuality may be the topics with which Gen-X directors have grappled in the greatest variety of ways. While their films depict a dizzying spectrum of sexual behavior—flirtation, monogamy, homosexuality, exhibitionism, and so on—it’s comforting and even a bit endearing to note that despite such polemical sexual content, Gen-X depictions of love often are as starry-eyed as those in classic Hollywood films. Although Gen Xers came of age in an era when free love gave way to sexual paranoia, they still see a vision of commitment and devotion through the fog of deviancy and sexual violence that fills many of their pictures.
As does any love affair or sexual relationship, this discussion of love and sexuality begins with the delicious joy of flirting. It’s a lost art, given that changing social mores have led to sex getting introduced into the dating ritual earlier every generation, so the moments in Gen-X films when characters truly attempt to know each other before heading to bed are precious. One good example of such an attempt is Audrey Wells’s modest directorial debut, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, in which two characters seduce each other over the phone; this allows the female of the would-be couple to hide her looks, about which she is insecure. A more significant exhibition of flirting, however, appears in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise—ironically, a film in which two lovers have sex on their first date.
Because American slacker Jesse and French student Céline consummate their affair with an outdoors encounter that is played offscreen, a cynical reading of Before Sunrise is that the characters’ long, probing conversation is merely glorified foreplay. Their mutual attraction is palpable from the moment they meet, so there’s something to that interpretation, but a more generous reading is that Jesse and Céline never presume their interaction will lead to intercourse. The depth with which they explore and challenge each other’s beliefs proves that their wandering conversation is fueled as much by fascination as it is by arousal. They achieve true intimacy long before they touch each other’s bodies.
For that reason, Before Sunrise towers as one of the most poignant statements about love in all Gen-X cinema. The ambiguous note on which the film ends only accentuates and deepens this poignancy: Jesse and Céline head to their respective train cars and leave Vienna in separate directions, so it’s left to viewers to imagine if love will lead them back to each other or merely haunt their hearts. Given the Gen-X fixation on separation—from family, from social institutions, from each other—the images that Linklater presents of these two lovers becoming separated are heartbreaking for reasons above and beyond their role in the narrative.
Another couple who end up apart are Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and Max Cherry (Robert Forster), two compelling characters in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction follow-up, Jackie Brown. Although ostensibly a caper flick, the film achieves its greatest resonance as a love story involving Jackie, a stewardess drawn to crime so she can create opportunities that evade her in legitimate society, and Max, the bail bondsman with whom she becomes professionally involved. Without going into the intricacies of the plot, it’s sufficient to say that Tarantino puts these immensely likable characters together, and ably communicates that they find their similarities (limited options, advancing years) much more powerful than their differences (Jackie is black, Max white).
One of the warmest moments in the film is a throwaway bit during which Max drives in his car and teaches himself the words to a song by the Delfonics, a soul group to whom he was introduced by Jackie. This vignette shows a man trying to understand something about the woman to whom he’s attracted, and it echoes how Jesse and Céline studied each other before advancing their relationship. Both couples comprise men and women from different worlds, and just as their eventual separations make statements about Gen-X disenfranchisement, the couples’ sincere endeavors to bridge their differences make statements about the best, most tolerant, most hopeful part of Generation X’s collective soul. Connection isn’t impossible, these relationships say; it just occurs unexpectedly.
This same statement is reiterated again and again throughout Gen-X cinema. Look at the affection beyond reason that bonds a hit man to the wife of his brutal employer in Pulp Fiction, a thief to a federal marshal in Out of Sight, and a bisexual gangster’s moll to a female ex-con in Bound. These relationships all begin with flirtation, a notable and charming instance of characters benefiting from Generation X’s gift of gab.
Flirting, if the stars line up right, leads to love, and the romantic couplings in Before Sunrise, Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, Out of Sight, and Bound all seem rooted in genuine love. Yet in each of these instances, the thrill is in the hunt: We see characters circle toward each other and perhaps join briefly, but we’re given no assurances that their relationships will survive. So it’s interesting to contrast the flirtation-based movies with Gen-X movies that actually depict full-blown love affairs. Looking at such films, it becomes clear that illusion is a fundamental element in Generation X’s vision of committed love; just as their vision of courtship manifests in old-Hollywood innocence, their vision of love reaches the screen as a kind of ephemeral wish-fulfillment.
For instance, look at how Baz Luhrmann filmed William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, the brazen adaptation that boosted the careers of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, the actors who incarnate the bard’s star-crossed lovers. Previous cinematic versions of the enduring tragedy earnestly mimicked the chronological milieu of the play (as in Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet) or recast it in modern terms (as in West Side Story), yet Luhrmann’s film juxtaposes the ancient and the modern in a frenetic pop-culture hodgepodge. The language is Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, minus the chunks of text Luhrmann found superfluous, but the setting is modern: Day-Glo colors, blazing guns, pounding rock music. It’s as if Luhrmann found Shakespeare’s theme of a love more powerful than the will to live so archaic that it needed to be presented amid other anachronisms. So even though his picture feels sweepingly romantic, there’s an inherent cynicism buried in its style. By putting ancient British language in the mouths of unmistakably modern Americans, Luhrmann forced viewers to confront the artifice of his enterprise during every scene.
Illusion also is a pervasive theme in Neil LaBute’s Nurse Betty, the warmhearted but edgy film with which LaBute extracted himself from the ghetto of mysoginistic social commentary. The picture’s titular character is a small-town waitress infatuated with David Ravell, a fictional character who appears on her favorite soap opera. Betty Sizemore (Renée Zellweger) is stuck in a dead-end marriage to a cad, but when her husband is brutally murdered before her eyes, the shock shunts Betty into a semipermanent dream state. She treks from the Midwest to Hollywood so she can join David Ravell, whom she now believes is real. George McCord (Greg Kinnear), the actor who plays David, mistakes Betty’s affection for a Method-style audition, so he feeds her illusion.
Victim of love: A small-town waitress (Renée Zellweger) becomes the object of a hit man’s affection in Neil LaBute’s oddball film about romance and illusion, Nurse Betty (USA Films/Universal Pictures).
This setup allows LaBute to mingle several varying perceptions of what is actually occurring. In reality, Betty is a widow stalking an actor; in George’s mind, she’s an actress stalking a part; and in Betty’s mind, she’s connecting with her true love. Yet another layer of illusion is the pretense that George makes of being the kind person whom Betty imagines David Ravell to be. The stage is set for a horrific comedown, because LaBute portrays Betty as an almost virginal innocent who deserves the happiness that awaits her only in fiction. Yet the filmmakers contrive a way to give Betty her sanity and her dream, a reward for her ability to imagine a world better than the real one.
A dreamer who isn’t as fortunate is Charlie (Morgan Freeman), the hit man who kills Betty’s husband and then chases her across America because she’s a witness who needs to be eliminated. Charlie is impressed by Betty when he encounters her at the beginning of the movie, and he slowly gives in to the delusion that he and Betty will run off together. If innocence is at the heart of Betty’s fantasy, however, evil is at the heart of Charlie’s. He’s moved into madness because of his guilt at a life spent taking life, so he fixates on Betty as his absolution—the prize for turning his back on murder. Just as the film spins events to give Betty the happiness she deserves, it twists to put Charlie into his place: the grave.
The killer’s dream was tarnished because of the life he led, the movie says, whereas Betty’s dream is as pure as her life. However, the love that Charlie develops for Betty is the most powerful in the film, because it forces him to evolve into a new identity. So it’s fitting that Betty ends up alone at the end of the film. Neither George nor Charlie deserves her, but through her experiences with the two men, she becomes a person who deserves her own sweet company. Betty learns to love herself, so she no longer needs any man’s love for validation.
A much darker quest for validation is depicted in Kimberly Peirce’s shattering Boys Don’t Cry, the true-life story of a girl who masqueraded as a boy. Teena Brandon (Hilary Swank) has such profound gender-identification issues that she regularly risks physical danger by dressing as the opposite sex, under the flip-flopped name Brandon Teena, and even engaging in physical relationships with women. Teena’s affection for women is a complex aspect of her personality, because it illustrates that she loathes her sexuality, not her sex; the genuine love that develops between her and Lana (Chloe Sevigny) allows Teena to be the best man she can be. Yet while Lana finds that she can live comfortably inside her lover’s illusion—their first sexual encounter is a touching testament to love’s ability to make the strange seem normal—the small-minded townsfolk with whom Teena and her girlfriend interact are shocked into violence when they discover Teena’s ruse.
Teena is brutally raped and murdered for her illusion, which caused no harm other than the pain of confusion and intolerant anger. That the basic facts of this tragic figure’s life and death were extracted from reality, instead of from some screenwriter’s imagination, affirms why some of Generation X’s apprehensions about modern society are anything but paranoia. Betty finds happiness by parting ways with her illusion of love, but Teena dies horribly for refusing to relinquish hers.
Another poignant, albeit fictional, film about illusions is Keith Gordon’s Waking the Dead, adapted by Scott Spencer from Robert Dillon’s novel. The picture depicts the relationship between an ambitious young politician, Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup), and the compassionate activist he loves, Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly). Echoing the imagery of the Gen-X flirtation films, Fielding and Sarah gravitate toward each other because they’re different: They realize they can fill in the gaps in each other’s personas and fuse into a powerful joint entity. The depth of their bond shows in the aching performances of Crudup and Connelly, who pull off the difficult task of making a young couple appear to share mature love. The intensity of the characters’ bond in seen in this exchange, prompted when Fielding is offered a political opportunity that Sarah thinks is beneath him:
SARAH: I don’t want to watch you turn into a cog in their machine.
FIELDING: Fucking condescending. Sometimes cogs can make machines run a little bit better….
SARAH: Mostly they turn in circles and wear out and they get replaced. Come work at the church with me.
FIELDING: Oh yes, don’t work for the U.S. government. Work for the church. Work for the people who brought us the Children’s Crusade and the Inquisition. That’s a moral step up.
SARAH: It’s so infuriating loving you sometimes.
FIELDING: Well, the feeling’s mutual.
Gordon smartly relegates the physical aspect of the characters’ relationship to one heated sex scene, so viewers don’t see these attractive actors entwined until the relationship has resonance. Further deepening the movie is hindsight: The first scene shows Fielding learning that Sarah has been killed in a terrorist bombing, so we spend the whole movie learning what he mourns and then feeling his bereavement with him. When visions of Sarah start invading Fielding’s consciousness as if he’s being haunted by a ghost, we see the visions as he does: echoes of love. The visions are yet another manifestation of the distance that defines Gen-X existence, only this time the disconnectedness is more poignant because it’s a reminder of lost connectedness.
Given these loaded connotations, it’s highly ironic that Waking the Dead takes place in the 1970s and 1980s. On a subtextual level, the film is as much a eulogy for the idealism that suffered the killing frost of the big chill as it is a eulogy for Sarah. Therefore, it’s inspiring that Fielding eventually makes peace with his lost lover’s memory by embracing her dream. Even though Fielding compromised his political idealism to win a seat in Congress, the film ends with the implication that he’ll mature into a leader of whom Sarah could be proud.
Sometimes love takes a less direct route than it does in Boys Don’t Cry and Waking the Dead. While the obstacles that interrupt those affairs are relatively distinct (social intolerance, political differences), the obstacles separating lovers in Chuck & Buck, Chasing Amy, and Keeping the Faith are more nettlesome.
The title characters of Chuck & Buck are successful music-industry executive Charlie “Chuck” Sitter (played by tall, dark, and handsome Chris Weitz) and repressed man-child Buck O’Brien (played by small, pale, and gangly Mike White). The childhood friends were once an inseparable duo—“Chuck and Buck”—but for reasons that Charlie would rather not discuss, the twenty-seven-year-olds haven’t seen each other since they were eleven. When Buck’s mother dies, the men are reunited at her funeral, but it’s immediately clear that time has done its damage: Charlie is a slick, cold professional engaged to sophisticated beauty Carlyn (Beth Colt), while Buck is a dim shut-in fixated on the trappings of his childhood.
At the funeral, though, we discover that Buck may not be the innocent he seems: He downs rum with familiar ease and casually tries to grope Charlie’s genitals. Charlie predictably flees, but Buck pursues his childhood friend across several states to Charlie’s home in Los Angeles. Costar White, who also wrote the movie, takes a wonderfully direct route to showing Buck’s inner workings. His performance lets viewers see every odd thing that passes through Buck’s brain, whether it’s pain, longing, joy, or the staticky noise of confusion. This conveys that Buck is fueled by pure desire—not twisted desire, but the genuine need to connect with someone who once loved him. That someone is Charlie, with whom Buck engaged in playful sexual activity when the two were children.
Through a believably odd series of events, Charlie and Buck find themselves at an impasse, because Buck can’t let go of the bond connecting him to his friend, and Charlie has spent his life forgetting that he and Buck used to fellate and otherwise gratify each other. The characters break this impasse through a distinctly 1990s bargain: Charlie agrees to one more night of physical love with his friend in exchange for getting his life back so he can marry Carlyn. Buck even attends the wedding.
Issues of sexual identity are similarly mired in Chasing Amy, about a young man who falls in love with a lesbian while also sorting out the loving feelings he has toward his male roommate. (A detailed examination of Chasing Amy appears later in this chapter.)
Finally, in Keeping the Faith, a priest and a rabbi compete for the affections of the same woman, forcing them to address their ideas about friendship, loyalty, religious devotion, and love. They eventually find a novel solution, because the rabbi ends up with his true love (the woman), and the priest ends up with his (God). The theological aspects of the film are discussed in Chapter 10, so for now it’s sufficient to note that Keeping the Faith offers yet another example of lovers and/or would-be lovers in a Gen-X movie wrestling with issues that affect them on both personal and spiritual levels.
In all of these films, from William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet to Keeping the Faith, love is presented as an otherworldly force that connects people from different worlds, sometimes softening the friction created by difference and sometimes revealing the glory of individuality. In the most disturbing of these films, lovers end up apart (often because of death), but their love remains intact. And in the most comforting of these films, lovers find ways to stay together despite the forces pulling them apart. One set of images speaks to the ideal of love, and the other to the reality of love. That there sometimes is but a fine line separating the ideal from the reality is what makes Generation X’s cinematic vision of love so fresh and young: Even at their most cynical, these filmmakers seem to believe that some emotional bonds can’t be broken.
Significantly, a key issue connecting the relationships in Waking the Dead, Chasing Amy and other Gen-X films about powerful love relationships is that the paramours are unmarried. Reflecting how deeply divorce changed American families during the formative years of Generation X, filmmakers born in this era share a vision of marriage as dark as their vision of love is bright. Statistics ratify this assertion, as the percentage of young couples who marry dropped substantially from 1970 to 1992. Men aged twenty to twenty-four in 1992, for instance, were exactly half as likely to marry as their counterparts in 1970.1
The bleakness of the marital landscape, as depicted by Gen-X filmmakers, is epitomized by the preponderance of stories about infidelity. American Beauty hinges on two acts of adultery: Lester’s imagined dalliances with his daughter’s young schoolmate, and the actual tryst that Lester’s wife has with a real-estate mogul. There even is another facet to the film’s dramatization of extramarital sex, because Lester’s married next-door neighbor, repressed soldier Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper), makes a sexual overture to Lester. Combined with the images of duplicity, oppression, denial, and resentment that pepper the film, the adultery in American Beauty conveys an idea that marriage is a trap at best and a death sentence at worst. Significantly, Frank’s wife (Alison Janney) is depicted as a zombie-like housefrau beaten down by fear of confrontations with her husband.
As with everything else in the film, however, American Beauty’s vision of wedded misery is exaggerated beyond reason. So this aspect of the movie’s thematic statement ultimately is instructive not in literal terms, but for how it represents the extreme of pervasive Gen-X imagery.
Neil LaBute’s brutal domestic drama Your Friends and Neighbors offers as depressing a viewpoint as American Beauty’s. The film portrays the interaction of several young professionals, most of whom are in committed relationships. Despite his long-term involvement with Terri (Catherine Keener), insufferable Jerry (Ben Stiller) becomes obsessed with bedding Mary (Amy Brenneman), the troubled wife of his friend Barry (Aaron Eckhart). Your Friends and Neighbors shows young people circling each other’s romantic partners like sharks closing in for the kill, which amplifies the American Beauty assertion that marriage is worse than meaningless, that marriage somehow encourages infidelity. The characters in these films are filled with a profound level of bitterness, suggesting that Gen-X filmmakers haven’t made peace with the changes that affected the institution of marriage during their early years.
Slightly more positive imagery is put across in Alexander Payne’s Election and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, both of which show women escaping failed marriages.
In Election, schoolteacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) has a midlife crisis that leads him into the bed of his best friend’s wife, who is crushed because her husband just committed adultery with a teenaged student. Jim’s duplicitous ways eventually ruin his relationships with his wife and his mistress, and he even manages to lose his job. While Payne doesn’t present this material moralistically, his choice to show Jim suffering for his sins reflects a sense of right and wrong that’s painfully absent from American Beauty and Your Friends and Neighbors, in which characters are trapped in cycles of abusive and/or self-destructive behavior.
sex, lies, and videotape offers yet another view: Although the film’s first image of extramarital sex shows philanderer John (Peter Gallagher) sleeping with his wife’s sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), we later see John’s wife, Ann (Andie MacDowell), cheat on John with his college friend Graham (James Spader). While the John-Cynthia tryst is consistent with other dark Gen-X visions of marriage—the lovers perpetuate their relationship to compensate for shortcomings in their personalities—the Ann-Graham encounter is an act of liberation on Ann’s part. Even though her intercourse with Graham affirms that she’s given up on her marriage, it signals the beginning of a new, more loving relationship. So while sex, lies, and videotape has as hopeless a view of marriage as other Gen-X movies, it at least has a hopeful view of other kinds of relationships. That Ann finds her happiness by violating her marital vows, of course, dovetails the disdain for officially sanctioned unions that pervades Gen-X films.
Some of the most moving love relationships depicted in Gen-X cinema involve same-sex partners, an interesting reflection of the fact that alternative lifestyles achieved greater acceptance, at least by young people, during the maturation period of Generation X. Yet Gen-X portrayals of homosexuality are not limited to doe-eyed visions of lovers finding soulmates by looking beyond the opposite gender. Quite to the contrary, Gen Xers often conjure some of their most polarizing material when exploring the myriad complexities of same-sex relations.
Perhaps the most unabashedly positive homosexual relationship in all Gen-X cinema is the love affair between Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and Corky (Gina Gershon) in Bound, the breakthrough film from Larry and Andy Wachowski, the writing-directing partners whose sophomore effort, The Matrix, made them superstars.
In Bound, a stylish caper film loaded with tricky plot twists and feverish erotic tension, Violet is the sleek girlfriend of violent gangster Cesar (Joe Pantaliano). In an elevator one day, she catches the eye of next-door neighbor Corky, an ex-con with an overflow of edgy attitude. When Violet reveals that she reciprocates Corky’s attraction, it’s not immediately clear whether her overture is genuine or a manipulation to get Corky involved in a crooked scheme. Even after the two share powerful sexual encounters, Corky remains unconvinced of her new lover’s devotion, but the relationship finally is ratified when Cesar uncovers the scheme that Violet cooked up with Corky. The lovers have to rely on each other to extricate themselves from terrible trouble, and their shared adventure reveals the depth of their bond.
The movie ends with Corky and Violet driving off into the metaphorical sunset together, and the filmmakers slyly amplify that the women are joined by several layers of rebellion: They beat the mob at its own crooked game, they wiggled Violet free from her stifling relationship, and their love is a celebration of the freedom to defy conventional societal expectations. So while the Wachowskis may have presented this love affair in order to produce lurid imagery and surprising plot developments, they also conjured a potent testament to the power that love has to help people overcome obstacles in order to find meaningful companionship. Bound is in some ways a cynical movie, because it’s a dark crime picture punctuated by grotesque violence and vicious betrayal, but it’s also an optimistic movie because of its sweet attitude toward the commitment shared by the two women.
As noted earlier, Boys Don’t Cry also features an extremely positive vision of same-sex love. In fact, the manner in which dreamy small-town girl Lana embraces the confusing gender identity of her significant other conveys the idea that love can surpass gender entirely. Intolerance intrudes on that union to devastating effect, of course, proving that not every pocket of modern American society has matured to the point of accepting truly unconventional unions. Gen-X filmmakers, however, are mostly accepting of such unions, to the extent that homophobic characters are vilified throughout their films. But because casting aspersions on the intolerant is hardly a new idea in American cinema, it’s more instructive to note Gen-X depictions of homosexuality that are complicated and even contradictory.
Chuck & Buck and Chasing Amy immediately come to mind, because both films involve romantic pursuits that are frustrated by sexual preferences. When viewers of Chuck & Buck realize that all Buck wants to do is revisit the only love he has known—in a sense, to validate that he can be loved—his quest seems more innocent than salacious. By the end of the movie, Buck seems more like a willful, self-possessed adult looking for closure than a deranged stalker fixating on an old acquaintance. The reading of Buck as an actualized person instead of a misguided freak is given additional credibility by the climax of the film, when Charlie makes the offer to sleep with Buck one last time.
The setup for the sexual encounter is painful to watch, because it seems as if Charlie is betraying his own identity in a bitter compromise, but during the halting overtures of the encounter that we actually see, the genuine love between the two men is finally apparent. Buck needed this moment to remind himself of his own worth, and Charlie needed it for the same reason: What kind of man am I, he seems to ask, if I turn my back on such pure devotion? So Chuck & Buck ultimately is a universal love story that happens to involve two men. Homosexuality is embedded in the fabric of the film, so the statement the movie makes about tolerance, understanding, and identity is impossible to miss. But the statement is relevant to lovers of any gender or preference.
Chasing Amy offers a more confused view of modern romance, specifically a triangle involving two straight people and a homosexual. When appealing lesbian Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams) catches the fancy of fellow comic-book creator Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck), the attraction causes complications in Holden’s relationship with his best friend, homophobic Banky Edwards (Jason Lee). Holden falls in love with Alyssa and tries to advance their relationship to the physical plane, but his desires are stymied by Alyssa’s sexual preference and also, surprisingly, by the tug of Holden’s friendship with Banky. These three characters find themselves pushed apart by the very forces that draw them together, so their three-way interaction leads to an impasse similar to the one reached by Charlie and Buck.
With a twist: A young lesbian (Joey Lauren Adams) questions her identity when a fellow comic-book creator (Ben Affleck) falls in love with her in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (Miramax Films).
Exasperated by his friends’ inability to get past their hang-ups about each other, Holden stuns them to silence by suggesting that they all sleep together. Banky meekly admits that he’s open to the idea—revealing that his anti-gay posturing is a macho act—but Alyssa is rightly offended by the insulting proposal. Writer-director Kevin Smith plays into a cliché by having Banky reveal closeted homosexual inclinations, but smartly derails the sensationalistic possibilities of the scene with Alyssa’s angry refusal.
Chasing Amy is a frustrating movie because while it seems to be a thoughtful investigation of modern sexuality—in one bold scene, Alyssa and Banky spout shockingly graphic dialogue while comparing notes about their experiences with cunnilingus—it ultimately lacks the depth needed to advance it past the level of an interesting experiment. For instance, after Alyssa gives a stirring speech to Holden about how agreeing to sleep with him would represent a betrayal of her identity, she inexplicably betrays her identity by agreeing to sleep with him. Smith undoes this narrative inconsistency by ending the movie with the lovers apart (a year after Holden’s indecent proposal, we see that Alyssa is involved with a woman), but his infatuation with vulgar descriptions of sexual behavior suggests that his interest in alternative lifestyles is more puerile than intellectual.
The sexual politics created by the prevalence of open homosexuality also are explored in such films as Boogie Nights and 54, both of which depict painful confrontations between straight and homosexual characters. And Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson portrayed poignant same-sex passion again in Magnolia, through the unrequited love that a former quiz-show champion feels for a hunky bartender. In all of these films, Gen-X directors confront head-on the fact that the sexual landscape of the modern age is vastly different from that inhabited by their predecessors, if only because alternative lifestyles are discussed in full voice instead of a whisper.
That full voice, however, sometimes becomes an angry howl—for not every member of American society has rolled with the changes in attitudes toward sex. In Magnolia, Tom Cruise edgily satirizes his stature as an icon of male virility by playing a self-help guru who teaches men to reclaim their roles as the dominant members of society—with the help of his “Seduce and Destroy” program. In harsh, lurid language, Frank T. J. Mackey (Cruise) mesmerizes an audience of men who believe themselves emasculated by the empowerment of women:
FRANK: Respect the cock—and tame the cunt! Tame it. Take it on with the skills that I will teach you … and say “No! You will not control me. No! You will not take my soul. No! You will not win this game.” Because it is a game, guys—you want to think it’s not, you go back to the schoolyard, you have that crush on big-titted Mary Jane. Respect the cock. You are embedding this thought: “I am the one who’s in charge. I am the one who says ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘Now.’ ‘Here.’ ” Because it’s universal, man, it is evolutional, it is anthropological, it is biological, it is animal. We are men!
Taking the sexual rage of Magnolia a step further is the most brutal scene in Your Friends and Neighbors, an extended monologue by serial philanderer Cary (Jason Patric). Throughout the picture, he trumpets his violently misogynist philosophy, in which women are merely receptacles for the anger he fires out of his body during sex like bullets from a gun. So when Cary retires for a sauna with two male buddies, viewers are braced for another barrage of masculine anger. Yet when the conversation turns to nostalgic boasting—each man is asked to recall his greatest sexual rapture—Cary unveils a secret facet of his personality that’s even more disturbing than his predilection for shallow encounters.
With steadily building intensity, Cary recalls every loving detail of a gang rape he participated in during his younger years. While his revelation that his victim was a man adds shock value to the scene, his target’s gender ultimately is immaterial: The point of the scene is that Cary experienced the most intense orgasm of his life while brutally attacking someone. The level of his depravity is underlined when Cary describes how he felt his victim reciprocate the motion of his rape. This monstrous character is so drunk on sexual power that he believes the moment when his violence took its purest form actually was the moment when he enjoyed his truest sexual communion.
While sexual predators such as Cary are not unique to any particular time, the context in which viewers meet him is utterly contemporary. Cary exists in a historical moment when changing gender roles, the growing acceptance of homosexuality, and the deepening understanding of the relationship between psychology and sexuality has freed sexual identity from the shackles of traditional stereotypes. In this context, Cary’s intertwining of violence and sexuality is a bastardization of the alternative lifestyles that make modern society so rich. He is a horrific example of what happens when someone with evil in his heart is cut free of traditional morals, because he mistakes the freedom and illumination of modern society as a license to behave not just differently, but abominably.
And while Cary could have existed at any time—as history sadly proves, beasts of his ilk have plagued the world for centuries—the friends who listen to the stories of his rape and other vile encounters are contemporary. Discombobulated by shifts in mores, the friends also are exploring sexual satisfaction through illicit means (namely infidelity), so they consider themselves to be in no position to judge Cary. Like the one he wrote for his disturbing debut film, In the Company of Men, LaBute’s script for Your Friends and Neighbors portrays the modern sexual landscape as a barren desert with precious few oases of moral certainty.
Similar thematic material appears in Boys Don’t Cry and Boogie Nights, which depict how particular kinds of people feel threatened by particular kinds of sexuality. The intolerant white-trash men in Boys Don’t Cry who respond to Teena’s transvestitism by raping her, in the vilest possible way forcing her to acknowledge her “true” gender identity, also underline their own tenuous grasps on sexual identity. In fact, the truest sign that Teena’s progressive persona represents a threat to these small-minded hooligans is the coda to the rape: The attackers kill Teena, destroying that which they can’t understand.
A similar sexual assault occurs toward the end of Boogie Nights. After monumentally endowed Dirk Diggler’s career as a porn star has run its course, he ends up turning tricks for money, just as he did before movies made him famous. In a profoundly sad scene, we watch Dirk frantically masturbate while a john waits for Dirk to conjure an erection. When he can’t, the john explodes in homophobic anger, summoning several buddies to help him assault the fallen star while he’s literally and figuratively exposed.
Sex is used as a weapon in a different way in The Contender, Rod Lurie’s political drama about a woman nominated for the office of vice president of the United States. When Senator Laine Hansen (Joan Allen) gets the nod from liberal Democrat President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges), it puts right-wing extremists on the defensive, and the most virulent of their number, Congressman Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), dredges up evidence suggesting that Laine participated in public group sex while in college. Lurie luridly showcases images of a young woman sandwiched between two men, and these photographs spark a brutal debate between Laine, who refuses to dignify the scandal by acknowledging or denying that she’s the woman in the pictures, and Shelly, who fixates on the sex act as proof that Laine—and, by extension, women in general—are unfit for such high office.
In one of the film’s most telling bits, Laine comes face-to-face with Shelly, who pompously declares that the sex act depicted in the pictures is “deviant.” She retorts by asking whose values were used to make that determination, and he bluntly announces that his own morals are sufficient to determine what is and isn’t acceptable. This encounter epitomizes the slippery slope on which people with conservative values often find themselves in contemporary society: Snap judgments and restrictive definitions simply don’t mesh with how the parameters of socially acceptable behavior changed at the end the of the twentieth century. One person’s experimentation is another’s deviancy, so who’s to say what’s right or wrong?
Characters like Shelly may see group sex as the first step down a ladder that leads to inhuman behavior like that described by Cary in Your Friends and Neighbors, but isn’t Shelly’s intolerance the first step down the ladder leading to the murder of “different” people like Teena Brandon?