"Erotic '80s" starts at the birth of the ratings system and the brief heyday of porno chic (think the zeitgeist's love affair "Deep Throat") and goes on to interrogate the working conditions on "9 ½ Weeks" and the conservative politics and sexual anxieties of "Fatal Attraction" and "Dirty Dancing," and dovetails into the new world of the home video market, the proliferation of sex tapes and Steven Soderbergh's "sex, lies, and videotape." "The casting couch is real": Author Karina Longworth on Hollywood's long history of power abuse If something feels slightly different about the "Erotic '80s" and "Erotic '90s" seasons compared to previous entries of "You Must Remember This," it is perhaps because our collective temporal proximity isn't as distant as it has been to, say, stories about the Hollywood Blacklist or Kenneth Anger's deranged mythologies of early Hollywood. And her season on "Song of the South" examined how a film as racist as it is has stayed, even subconsciously, within the American pop cultural lexicon through re-releases and theme park rides.įor the past two seasons, however, Longworth has been considering the era of when sex and sexuality were so saturated in mainstream popular culture that strings of films like "Fatal Attraction," "Pretty Woman" and "Showgirls" could convey a shifting, excited, anxious, unpredictable and uncertain feeling about sex, power and capital in the country. For almost a decade, she has excavated the stories of the film industry's first century, from the Manson murders to Joan Crawford, and deconstructed, demystified and reflected on the sociocultural contexts of both their time and ours. Longworth has come to be known for her cinematic clairvoyance, or at least her ability to channel this on the podcast, her voice often described as dreamy. They ruminate on the film historian's uncanny ability to access Hollywood's past, its specters, the things that haunt the industry, leaving orb like traces on our current entertainment landscape. Most articles about Longworth and her podcast start with something ethereal. But, the "You Must Remember This" host, who has guided listeners through Hollywood's first century for over eight years, is more than just a soothsayer of cinema's history. And there's no better person to do that than Karina Longworth. Perhaps to understand the present we have to summon the past. It is a confusing time, augmented by both the normalization and proliferation of internet pornography, meaningful progress on conversations about sex, gender, identity and power, and a Hollywood film industry that has seemingly eliminated sexuality from a cinematic ecosystem that primarily courts comic book fans and children. (There’s also “just the tip” of a churro at 1:07.In the last days of Twitter, one thing is constant: there's barely a week that goes by before someone stirs the sex scenes in movies discourse pot. When a shirtless sweaty guy waves his banana at another shirtless sweaty guy in a Luca Guadagnino movie (see: the 38-second mark of the Challengers trailer), you know it’s not just a banana. Starring Zendaya as a professional tennis player named Tashi, it’s a movie ostensibly set in the world of tennis that seems to be more about a love triangle. Guadagnino is back with Challengers, set for release this September, whose first trailer dropped today. If Sam Levinson gives us sex that’s really about trauma, Guadagnino offers trauma that’s really about sex. Which makes this the perfect time to remind the world of the existence of Luca Guadagnino, the arthouse darling who gave us Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet and that peach in Call Me By Your Name and romantic cannibalism in Bones And All. The Idol seems to have silenced that talk temporarily, giving us plenty of sex but maybe at the cost of that sex feeling jaded and decadent. In the last few years, many writers have wondered why no one makes great sex scenes anymore.
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