As for sex, we all know where our characters are heading, so I guess they're just expediting the narrative. My question is "Why am I being shown this at all?" How does this formation of the beast with two backs advance the plot, develop the characters, unpack the themes, etc.? It is exceedingly rare that seeing simulated sex between two characters on film does little more than offer meat. I tend to feel embarrassed for the actors and wonder how their parents feel about it.
I suspect that this process of truncation "(a little less conversation and a little more action please") may have been accelerated by the consumption of other media (sounds like "Corn-Hub") which has accelerated considerably with the advent of "gonzo" which stripped the narrative out the genre. It's kind of pathetic to think of major studios and streaming attempting to compete with the ocean of hard core content. Why ape base content with which you cannot really compete?
I'd rather see just about everything but the barnyard act. Want to be subversive and sexy? Show the stuff you're talking about. Get us to invest in how these people fall for each other.
I very much feel this. I don’t mind sex scenes at all, but I do always wonder why these people are even interested in each other, how they got to that point. Then it gets all philosophical and people suggest ‘no one knows what makes anyone attractive’, but I’d have liked to see the minutiae spelled out in films, E.g. ‘Jack finds Jill sexy because of her sense of humour.’
Anyway, I guess I wouldn’t know as I have a terrible relationship with most ‘romantic’ films. Some I can acknowledge are good and technically impressive, but I don’t get the genre appeal and am never
interested in what happens, because as you said, we know everyone will kiss, ****, break up, potentially make up (depending on the genre), and I do think it’s about that - I’d argue the most interesting thing is how they got to that point, the seduction, or even just the decision,
Given variables XYZ, I want to pursue this with this person. But then, it’s such an esoteric question that I don’t blame filmmakers for ignoring it.
The ‘truncation’ and so-called need to be ‘efficient’ in plotting isn’t something I particularly get, either. In terms of ‘unpacking plot and developing character’, well, until we could call it that, did we even know that that’s what sex scenes/any other scenes were doing, it was all much more intuitive, wasn’t it? I just always find it very funny that people argue in all seriousness that a shot of the ‘weeping letter’ in
Casablanca (where plot is literally written down) is narratively significant but a sex scene apparently doesn’t ‘advance the plot’ (though it’d likely be something like ‘Man becomes infatuated with woman, manipulated by baddies and compromised and betrayed from his association with her…’) blah, blah, blah. No Kubrick, but it’s a plot.
I think it’s a bit like different standards for different things.
I very often wonder why all sorts of things are needed in a film, and it seems to be that sex scenes are always isolated as the ‘unnecessary’ bit, yet the random childhood flashbacks, meaningless dialogues with strangers on the tube or are always helpful in advancing the plot and building up characters. I never feel like I get the logic there.