Sexmiotics
John Cameron Mitchell’s recently released “cinematic exercise” Shortbus is somehow a new breed within a family of films that, as Mitchell himself stated, try to understand whether “ultra-explicit sex can be used in a non-pornographic way (i.e., not focused on getting you off).” Mitchell certainly delivers in a fresh, unique way that differs from other films in the family that, as he recognizes in an essay about the film, deviate to an aggressive, violent, dark corner once the element of sex (ultra-explicit) is brought to the screen. Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible comes to mind.
To understand whether there is indeed a new wave of sex films, we must ask ourselves: what turns a sex scene into an ultra-explicit one? The answer flows rather easily: an erect penis. In our macho society, the longer the erect male organ remains on screen, the more violent or pornographic the film. That seems to be part of a collective common sense.
The erect penises in Shortbus tell us a different story. They are used as visual cues that help us understand key characters in the film and perhaps even the director himself. The penises of this "cinematic experiment" are signs of humanness, non-violent, powerless, normal beings. This probably sets this movie in a new category of sexual expression that liberate reproductive organs from moral feelings.
And speaking of moral feeling, that reminds me of an essay by Roland Barthes titled The Romans in Films, in which he discusses “sweat” as a sign of, you guessed, moral feeling. Barthes explains: “Everyone is sweating because everyone is debating something within himself; we are here supposed to be in the locus of a horribly tormented virtue, that is, in the very locus of tragedy, and it is sweat which has the function of conveying this.”
Go see Shortbus, far from a pretentious art house film it is an entertaining, refreshing experience.
