The View from the Shortbus, or All Those Fucking Movies

Can sexual representations warrant the term queer if their only evident claim to antinormativity is their unusual frankness within a popular and heavily regulated medium? Is sex in film “public” sex in any valuable or coalitional sense, especially as moviegoing becomes increasingly privatized in the sphere of flat-screen TVs, Netflix, and iTunes? What is “counterpublic” sex, and how might a genre or movement of filmmaking — distinct from but in common with the sexual acts and relationships conveyed in those films — embody a counterpublic spirit or sensibility?

As I began planning this essay and discussing its projects, further questions began to haunt this initial set of motivating riddles. When I told one close friend and colleague that I was drafting an article about the recent trend toward unsimulated sexual acts in commercial narrative films, she raised her eyebrows and asked, “Are you assuming there is such a thing as an unsimulated sexual act?” The hypermediated apparatus of filmmaking, which works precisely to simulate any object or event in its path, might already have given her pause. More at issue in her question, though, were our shared investments in the force and eloquence of performative theories of gender and sexuality, all of which cast imposing shadows along any semantic or conceptual avenue I might follow into this research. “Unsimulated” sex, “explicit” sex, “real” sex: all of these articulations betray a certain naive infelicity, especially given how frequently and obviously the films I had in mind to study have been influenced by postmodern insights into the rituals and social technologies of sexuality, the troubled and ever-shifting relations between the “explicit” and the invisible (or of any compatible binary), the dubious and ideological naturalizations of “reality.”

Elsewhere, when I tethered my account of this nascent essay more directly to John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (USA; 2006), a recent favorite of queer cineasts and a deliberate envelope-pusher in its depictions of actors in flagrante delicto, I was incredulously asked whether any other film had so fully challenged the rulebook for depicting sexual behavior in popular films. My rattling off of titles — for starters, Léos Carax’s Pola X (France; 1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (France; 2000), Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (UK; 2001), and several of Catherine Breillat’s films, including Romance (France; 1999) and Anatomy of Hell (France; 2004) — tended to elicit a rejoinder somewhere along the lines of “Well, those are foreign films.” Even for those rare people who demonstrated a clear or, even more rarely, a fond memory of Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (USA; 2003), the implication persisted that European and particularly French movies were somehow destined to showcase all manner of carnal provocation, and that Shortbus was surely the bolder, rarer creation, if only for having emerged from the same nation whose very ramparts had so recently been rocked by the fleeting apparition of Janet Jackson’s areola.¹ Meanwhile, a cooler form of doubt radiated from the bemused glances of the staff in several of Chicago’s superb DVD rental stores, who briskly sussed a telltale logic behind my sudden, constellated interest in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (Japan; 1976), João Pedro Rodrigues’s O Fantasma (Portugal; 2000), and Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven (Mexico; 2005). When I asked one clerk to post a hold on Rick Castro and Bruce La Bruce’s Hustler White (USA; 1996), explaining that I needed to see this perpetually rented DVD as background for an academic paper, he palpably resisted the urge to ask whether I also read Playgirl for the articles.

All of these public encounters, in their various forms of skepticism, stoked the curiosities behind my interest in this phenomenon of arthouse movies featuring erotic exchanges that the actors, filmmakers, marketers, and critics understood to constitute “real” sex: visible penetration, on-screen ejaculation, and so forth. But then, what is the status here of “and so forth”? My colleague is quite right to place analytic pressure on what precisely is “real” about “real” sex, but the prevailing masculinist discourse...