Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
A spate of new films -- one with girl-next-door Meg Ryan -- depict graphic oral sex scenes. Is the film industry's portrayal of sexuality finally beginning to get real?
Oct 23, 2003 | Those who have nursed dirty Meg Ryan fantasies ever since she told Anthony "Goose" Edwards to take her to bed or lose her forever in "Top Gun" probably already have their tickets for "In the Cut," Jane Campion's choppy, erotic thriller that opened on Wednesday. In it, a mustachioed and criminally attractive Mark Ruffalo takes recovering-moppet Ryan to bed, plants her on her stomach, spreads her legs, and performs oral sex on her from behind in a scene that lasts a breathtaking two minutes. A steady master shot with no quick cuts and no "Is that what I think it is?" moments, the scene depicts exactly what you think it does, and even the most jaded filmgoers will feel their pulses quicken.
There is nothing like the visceral jolt of seeing Mark Ruffalo's face delicately ensconced in Meg Ryan's hindquarters to hammer home exactly how rare it is to see oral sex depicted on multiplex screens -- especially when the relevant roving lips reside on the faces of bona fide movie stars. But Ryan and Ruffalo are about to get lots of company on their travels below the belt, as Hollywood experiences early tremors of a graphic oral-sexual revolution. The results may be titillating, but the cumulative impact speaks less to shock value than to the way the film industry's portrayal of realistic sexuality is beginning to evolve.
"The Cooler," which will be released by Lion's Gate on Nov. 26, chronicles the life of a rusted-out Vegas loser (William H. Macy) who hits the erotic jackpot in a relationship with younger, blonder Maria Bello. After a rushed and awkward first encounter, Macy's character makes amends by paying Bello lip service. The cut of the film that screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January shows Bello's face grimacing in a quiet, almost pained orgasm. The camera then moves lower, where Bello's own hand and Macy's face rest in the actress's thatch of brunet pubic hair, earning the film a dreaded NC-17 rating.
In July, the director of "The Cooler," Wayne Kramer, and Bello appeared before the Motion Picture Association of America's parental guideline ratings board to secure the film an R. In exchange for that rating, the brief glimpse of pubic fuzz is history, though audiences will still see Macy nuzzling some serious lower abdomen.
"Apparently, you cannot show pubic hair in a sexual situation," said Bello, rolling her eyes ever so slightly during a recent breakfast. "Our ratings system is so screwed up."
Rich Taylor, the vice president of public affairs for the MPAA, insisted that there is no act-by-act code for rating movies. Rather, he said, a rating is decided in a vote by a board of adults "with parenting experience."
"There is no such thing as one breast is this rating, two breasts is that rating," said Taylor. "The reason the ratings system exists as it does is to get away from the do's and don'ts that was the Hays Code of long ago."
But Bello said she thinks that the objections to the scene were about something else entirely.
"I agree with my director that the reason that scene had to get cut was not about the pubic hair," said the actress. Dressed in pretty pink silk and a gray felt jacket, she was extremely good-natured for someone who was being quizzed about her bush over coffee and some nova.
"The men I know who've seen it and who are not artists," she said, "are terrified of it, of that scene. And I think it's seeing my face having an orgasm -- a real one, a complicated one -- a woman deriving pleasure from [cunnilingus] is very scary for a lot of people."
Equally scary -- surprisingly -- is the sight of a phallus: While the Ryan-Ruffalo coupling survived the ratings board with an R rating, another scene from "In the Cut" depicting fellatio did not. In the version of the film that was shown to the press as recently as a month ago, the scene -- in which an unidentified man's face is obscured in shadow and a woman's head is shown mostly from behind -- included clear shots of a very wet and very erect penis. That penis, like Bello's pubic hair, got cut from the film like so much foreskin. A toned-down version of the act remains. (As, we hope, does a brief glimpse of Little Ruffalo that comes later in the movie.)
Then there's "The Brown Bunny," Vincent Gallo's controversial opus that screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May. "The Brown Bunny" may never get a release, but its director and star, Vincent Gallo, reportedly received his own: The film features an extended blow job administered by Gallo's ex-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny. Sevigny has said that the act was not simulated.
"Men take their penises very seriously," said 36-year-old Bello to me later, in reference to a line she came up with for "The Cooler" in which she palms Macy's bits and says, "You have a really great cock."
"I mean," she licked some cream cheese off her thumb, "they take them very seriously."
Well, sure they do. Which is one of the reasons that showing them (the penises) or showing a woman pleasured without the benefit of one has been so rare.
So what has prompted this new wave of Hollywood head?
"It was actually Bill [Macy]'s idea," said Bello with a grin. She explained that during the filming of the low-budget movie, she, Macy and Kramer improvised the intense love scenes as they went along, asking each other, "What does it look like?" when two people have sex for the first time, and then for a second time.
It was for this second scene that, according to Bello, Macy proclaimed, "I think it's such an intimate thing for a man to go down on a woman." "That scared me," she said, pushing back from the table. "To be that open and exposed." Bello said it was the psychology that frightened her more than the prospect of actually filming. She and Macy were close, she said, careful to point out that they have children the same age -- he with actress wife Felicity Huffman, she with screenwriter Dan McDermott, her "man" of six years.
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