Sexy Times

Whether driven by nostalgia or some other strain of longing, a lot of attention has been paid recently to the racier fare on offer in the 1980s and ’90s. Vulture is spending this entire week revisiting erotic thrillers, and You Must Remember This podcast creator and host Karina Longworth has just launched a two-part season, Erotic 80s and Erotic 90s. The first episode sets the stage, taking us back to a party in the 1960s, when Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern, fascinated by a porn flick someone was projecting, imagined a future in which professional filmmakers used top-of-the-line equipment to make movies starring beautiful actors in the throes of unsimulated passion.

Longworth then turns to the rise of porno chic in the wake of two cultural bombshells dropped in 1972, Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. Over the course of the next two dozen or so episodes, Longworth will address such questions as: “Why did genres like the erotic thriller, body horror, neo-noir, and the sex comedy flourish in the ’80s and ’90s, what was happening culturally that made these movies possible and popular, and why did Hollywood stop taking sex seriously?”

Chris Lee at Vulture and Brian Raftery at the Ringer both zero in on the thrillers. If any one figure stands out in their brief histories of the subgenre, it’s Adrian Lyne, the director of Flashdance (1983), 9½ Weeks (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), and the movie that, according to both Lee and Raftery, brought the curtain down, Unfaithful (2002).

Lyne returned last month after twenty years with Deep Water, and Amanda Hess, expressing her disappointment in the New York Times, writes that Lyne’s earlier films “were not necessarily good but were always kind of great. The sex scenes were never gratuitous, because the entire films were about sex—usually, they were about how disastrous meaningless sex can be . . . Part of the thrill of rewatching Lyne’s old movies is that the sexual politics are the most perverse thing about them. Though the films delight in their explicit sex scenes, they are fundamentally conservative in their values. And though they often feature seemingly disturbed women, the movies are really about men—white men. Every twist sinks the plots into deeper levels of their masculine anxieties.”

Writing about her “fascination” with erotic thrillers in the NYT, Abbey Bender notes that they were a product of the Reagan era, “which was politically conservative yet culturally trashy. These films fruitfully explored this contradiction, and by the ’90s, they were certified box-office gold. They distilled the excesses and anxieties of yuppie culture into psychosexually messy yet stylized commercial products, before fizzling out in the aughts. Building on the moody, femme-fatale-filled world of classic ’40s and ’50s film noir, the erotic thriller was always gloriously excessive, with a laser-sharp focus on beautiful women doing bad things. In films like Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Body Heat, and The Last Seduction, the calculated performance of self-assured femininity inspires fear, arousal, and awe in equal measure.”

As Chris Lee points out, sex has since shifted to smaller screens—not just online porn but also to streaming titles such as Netflix’s Bridgerton and Amazon’s The Voyeurs. Fatal Attraction, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980), and Jagged Edge, the 1985 film written by Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, are all currently being rebooted as series. “Maybe it’s less that porn ruined it,” one anonymous producer tells Lee, “and more that, if you live in a world where you can see anything, it’s like, ‘Well, what’s the level of voyeurism that makes it cinematic now?’ But I feel that someone is going to crack it.”