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Screening Sex
For many years, kisses were the only sexual acts to be seen in mainstream American movies. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, American cinema “grew up” in response to the sexual revolution, and movie audiences came to expect more knowledge about what happened between the sheets. In Screening Sex, the renowned film scholar Linda Williams investigates how sex acts have been represented on screen for more than a century and, just as important, how we have watched and experienced those representations. Whether examining the arch artistry of Last Tango in Paris, the on-screen orgasms of Jane Fonda, or the anal sex of two cowboys in Brokeback Mountain, Williams illuminates the forms of pleasure and vicarious knowledge derived from screening sex. Combining stories of her own coming of age as a moviegoer with film history, cultural history, and readings of significant films, Williams presents a fascinating history of the on-screen kiss, a look at the shift from adolescent kisses to more grown-up displays of sex, and a comparison of the “tasteful” Hollywood sexual interlude with sexuality as represented in sexploitation, Blaxploitation, and avant-garde films. She considers Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat, two 1972 films unapologetically all about sex; In the Realm of the Senses, the only work of 1970s international cinema that combined hard-core sex with erotic art; and the sexual provocations of the mainstream movies Blue Velvet and Brokeback Mountain. She describes art films since the 1990s, in which the sex is aggressive, loveless, or alienated. Finally, Williams reflects on the experience of screening sex on small screens at home rather than on large screens in public. By understanding screening sex as both revelation and concealment, Williams has written the definitive study of sex at the movies. Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Porn Studies, also published by Duke University Press; Playing the Race Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson; Viewing Ways of Seeing Film; and Hard Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” A John Hope Franklin Center Book November 424 pages
129 illustrations
6x9 trim size
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4285-5
paper, $24.95
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4263-4
library cloth edition, $89.95
ISBN 978-0-8223-4285-4
paper, $24.95
ISBN 978-0-8223-4263-2
library cloth edition, $89.95
129 illustrations
6x9 trim size
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4285-5
paper, $24.95
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4263-4
library cloth edition, $89.95
ISBN 978-0-8223-4285-4
paper, $24.95
ISBN 978-0-8223-4263-2
library cloth edition, $89.95
424 pages, Paperback
First published September 2, 2008
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About the author
Linda Williams
90 books42 followersLibrarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name
Linda Williams was an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name
Linda Williams was an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 11, 2009
With no little excitement at the prospect of reading high theory while screening black-and-white porn stills (hubba-hubba!), I opened this provocative new work by the (still young) grand doyen of academic film studies, Linda Williams. Screening Sex is the newest addition to the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, and is just as serious, humane, and refreshing as her other works. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" launched respectable academic research concerns with pornography beyond the "pro-anti" debates in feminism, and this research was continued in 2004's Porn Studies.
Screening Sex spans 113 years’ worth of cinematic portrayals of sexuality. “Filmmakers,” Williams writes, “critics, and society have not agreed on the correct place of sex acts mediated by moving images.” She begins with Thomas Edison’s 15-second movie The Kiss (1896) and writes compellingly about big, fat swooning screen kisses of yesteryear (Gone with the Wind); the art house experimental films of Andy Warhol (Blue Movie); the Blaxpoitation flicks of the 1970s (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song); shocking Japanese erotic films (In the Realm of the Senses); the orgasms of Jane Fonda; Marlon Brando's ass; the better known works by Bergman, Almodóvar, and Oshima; those of the lesser known Breilliat and Chereau; and mainstream gay male hardcore. Screening Sex climaxes at the new millennium gadgets and cyberporn of Jenna Jameson.
Williams interrogates image, screen, writer, actor and off-screen chat as much as onscreen dialogue to show why cinematic sexuality is more often implied than explicit: "Over time...we become habituated to this screening and to our sympathetic relations to the sex of others as a kind of carnal knowledge felt in our bodies." Her central motif is captured by the book's title: "I will insist on the double meaning of the verb to screen as both revelation and concealment. To screen is to reveal on a screen. But a second, equally important meaning, as the dictionary reads, is 'to shelter or protect with or as a screen.' Movies both reveal and conceal." Indeed.
By the time I reached Chapter Six, "Primal Scenes on American Screens (1986-2005)," I had again screened The Virgin Spring, Klute, Coming Home, and Brokeback Mountain. Plunging once again into David Lynch's Blue Velvet, a certain line struck me. The lantern-jawed, about-to-become-iconic-faced character Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan) says, "I'm seeing something that was always hidden." Maybe, maybe not, but this tension, this uncertainty about what in film is and isn’t visible captures well the brilliance of the visions of directors such as Lynch and the work of film theorists such as Williams in explicating them. Jeffrey doesn’t see the seamy underbelly of Lumberton until it’s too late. He hasn't the slightest idea why the torch singer, played by Isabella Rosselini, wants him to beat her. He sees, but doesn’t understand why her tormenter, played by Dennis Hopper, alternates between roles of cruel boyfriend and sexually confused son. The sexual prudery generally of Americans and the specific sexual prudery of the Production Code era comprise the scales over the eyes of viewed and voyeur alike. When in one key scene the partially clothed Dorothy squarely examines the genitalia of the now-naked Jeffrey, we viewers are forbidden from seeing what she sees. And that's her point.
There is little about which to complain. I don't agree that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a comedy, and neither can AIDS be "spread" by anal sex, though of course HIV can be transmitted that way. Williams misses the mark in discussing the political (not cinematic) implications of Freud's "seduction theory" as applied to female sexuality. I appreciate her discussion of the importance for adult sexuality of the "primal scene," when child catches Mom and Dad in flagrante delicto, and her semi-autobiographical accounts of her own movie theater experiences work well. I agree that Williams needed Freud to read and critique Brokeback Mountain: "The fantasy of seduction operates as America's first mainstream movie example of the seduction into homosexual desire."
Nevertheless, Freud didn't simply come to "doubt the veracity" of female accounts of seduction. Feminist neo-Freudians—such as Melanie Klein, Karen Horney and Helene Deutsch—argued in psychological terms, and Paul Ferris (Dr. Freud) and Jeffrey Masson (The Assault on Truth) have made clear on archival grounds that Freud talked himself out of female seduction (i.e., rape) on political and ideological, not empirical grounds. Her treatment of Barbarella, Coming Home, and Klute is compelling, but she might have strengthened her case by treating prostitution-themed films as a separate genre. Sada, Pretty Woman, Breaking the Waves, Miami Blues, and Whore reveal norms of male domination that work to “protect” some women and against others.
A new work, reviewed here by Liz Simmons, puts a rather different spin on Blaxpoitation. I am surprised that Williams didn't interrogate the scene in Basic Instinct of the interrogation of Sharon Stone’s on-screen character, Catherine Tramell. She thus missed the chance to discuss Stone’s off-screen claim not to have known that her genitals would be bared in the final cut; by the logic of Williams's schema, this "going all the way" was a cinematic first of sorts. Tellingly, they are bared... but not really. Just prior to the fateful legs-uncrossing she is informed that, "This session is being taped." Sixteen years later, it is still being viewed and downloaded from the Internet, thus also exemplifying the third, technological meaning to Screening Sex.
Review by Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D.
Screening Sex spans 113 years’ worth of cinematic portrayals of sexuality. “Filmmakers,” Williams writes, “critics, and society have not agreed on the correct place of sex acts mediated by moving images.” She begins with Thomas Edison’s 15-second movie The Kiss (1896) and writes compellingly about big, fat swooning screen kisses of yesteryear (Gone with the Wind); the art house experimental films of Andy Warhol (Blue Movie); the Blaxpoitation flicks of the 1970s (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song); shocking Japanese erotic films (In the Realm of the Senses); the orgasms of Jane Fonda; Marlon Brando's ass; the better known works by Bergman, Almodóvar, and Oshima; those of the lesser known Breilliat and Chereau; and mainstream gay male hardcore. Screening Sex climaxes at the new millennium gadgets and cyberporn of Jenna Jameson.
Williams interrogates image, screen, writer, actor and off-screen chat as much as onscreen dialogue to show why cinematic sexuality is more often implied than explicit: "Over time...we become habituated to this screening and to our sympathetic relations to the sex of others as a kind of carnal knowledge felt in our bodies." Her central motif is captured by the book's title: "I will insist on the double meaning of the verb to screen as both revelation and concealment. To screen is to reveal on a screen. But a second, equally important meaning, as the dictionary reads, is 'to shelter or protect with or as a screen.' Movies both reveal and conceal." Indeed.
By the time I reached Chapter Six, "Primal Scenes on American Screens (1986-2005)," I had again screened The Virgin Spring, Klute, Coming Home, and Brokeback Mountain. Plunging once again into David Lynch's Blue Velvet, a certain line struck me. The lantern-jawed, about-to-become-iconic-faced character Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan) says, "I'm seeing something that was always hidden." Maybe, maybe not, but this tension, this uncertainty about what in film is and isn’t visible captures well the brilliance of the visions of directors such as Lynch and the work of film theorists such as Williams in explicating them. Jeffrey doesn’t see the seamy underbelly of Lumberton until it’s too late. He hasn't the slightest idea why the torch singer, played by Isabella Rosselini, wants him to beat her. He sees, but doesn’t understand why her tormenter, played by Dennis Hopper, alternates between roles of cruel boyfriend and sexually confused son. The sexual prudery generally of Americans and the specific sexual prudery of the Production Code era comprise the scales over the eyes of viewed and voyeur alike. When in one key scene the partially clothed Dorothy squarely examines the genitalia of the now-naked Jeffrey, we viewers are forbidden from seeing what she sees. And that's her point.
There is little about which to complain. I don't agree that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a comedy, and neither can AIDS be "spread" by anal sex, though of course HIV can be transmitted that way. Williams misses the mark in discussing the political (not cinematic) implications of Freud's "seduction theory" as applied to female sexuality. I appreciate her discussion of the importance for adult sexuality of the "primal scene," when child catches Mom and Dad in flagrante delicto, and her semi-autobiographical accounts of her own movie theater experiences work well. I agree that Williams needed Freud to read and critique Brokeback Mountain: "The fantasy of seduction operates as America's first mainstream movie example of the seduction into homosexual desire."
Nevertheless, Freud didn't simply come to "doubt the veracity" of female accounts of seduction. Feminist neo-Freudians—such as Melanie Klein, Karen Horney and Helene Deutsch—argued in psychological terms, and Paul Ferris (Dr. Freud) and Jeffrey Masson (The Assault on Truth) have made clear on archival grounds that Freud talked himself out of female seduction (i.e., rape) on political and ideological, not empirical grounds. Her treatment of Barbarella, Coming Home, and Klute is compelling, but she might have strengthened her case by treating prostitution-themed films as a separate genre. Sada, Pretty Woman, Breaking the Waves, Miami Blues, and Whore reveal norms of male domination that work to “protect” some women and against others.
A new work, reviewed here by Liz Simmons, puts a rather different spin on Blaxpoitation. I am surprised that Williams didn't interrogate the scene in Basic Instinct of the interrogation of Sharon Stone’s on-screen character, Catherine Tramell. She thus missed the chance to discuss Stone’s off-screen claim not to have known that her genitals would be bared in the final cut; by the logic of Williams's schema, this "going all the way" was a cinematic first of sorts. Tellingly, they are bared... but not really. Just prior to the fateful legs-uncrossing she is informed that, "This session is being taped." Sixteen years later, it is still being viewed and downloaded from the Internet, thus also exemplifying the third, technological meaning to Screening Sex.
Review by Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D.
August 24, 2016
I read this in preparing to teach a Human Sexuality course, as some of my professional interests are in media psychology, specifically the portrayals of psychological issues in movies and on television. This was a fascinating, reasonably "balanced" look at how sexuality has been portrayed in moving images from 1896 to 2006, beginning with the scandalous nature of portraying even a closed-mouth kiss, all the way up to "interactive" pornography. The author fortunately moves the argument past the typical "it's all good" vs. "it's all the devil" debate (there are many many books and articles that cover that), and onto other areas, such as how liberation doesn't necessarily mean "better" like many progressives would like us to think, and how liberation doesn't necessarily mean "worse" like many conservatives would like us to think. It depends! There are benefits, new problems, and unknowns to the changes that have occurred. One notable issue - ensuring that sexually explicit material was kept out of mainstream film literally stripped (no pun intended, ha) pornography of artistic merit, reducing it to the singular goal of assisting in achieving orgasm. Kids today (most of whom are exposed to porn before they're ready to understand what they are seeing) learn so much about sex through explicit pornography that actually "conceals" more than it reveals about sex and relationships.
A note to readers who have children around - there are a few explicit images in some of the chapters related to the examples that are discussed.
A note to readers who have children around - there are a few explicit images in some of the chapters related to the examples that are discussed.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews