What makes a good sex scene? It might be easier to spot the bad sex, but Aisha Harris, Christina Tucker, Ronald Young Jr. and I tried to focus on the good this week on Pop Culture Happy Hour. You can listen to our entire conversation here. (We didn’t originally plan for this episode to air the same week as our episode Contenders, which is already in theaters, but it’s a happy coincidence, as that film has gotten a lot of attention — probably too much, compared to its other merits — for the sex scenes involving the three leads. It’s really very good.)
It’s often very obvious when a sex scene is bad, just like when a sex scene in a book is bad. It can become so uncomfortable to watch that you have to leave the room (and not in a way that feels true to the story). One of my personal telltale signs of a bad sex scene is when all I can think about is how hard the actors are trying to convince me that the characters are having a good time. For example, in recent years there have been many good discussions about Showgirls as a more interesting and competent project than it initially received credit for, but in that pool scene (if you know it, you know it), all I see is the effort.
It’s not always so clear what the scenes are good. This is partly because they serve so many different functions, all of which look different and all of which can be effective. You also don’t want to confuse whether a certain sex scene is used well in a movie with whether it’s hot for you personally, despite the fact that there is some overlap between these considerations.
Here’s what I mean: when Aisha talks about the sequence near the beginning of Magic Mike’s Last Dance, it doesn’t matter that the scene is hot for her (and me). But it also makes sense within the context of the film and the franchise, in part because of the way it sets up the power dynamic between Mike (Channing Tatum) and Max (Salma Hayek Pino). Mike is older now, he knows more, and the way he approaches the lap dance is actually different than in the previous movies.
And not all good sex scenes are equally hot. The one I mentioned in the episode, from the romantic drama Love and basketball, is sexy, yes. But it’s also a scene between young adults (talented basketball players Monica and Quincy, played by Sana Lathan and Omar Epps), and as such, it involves a hesitancy not present in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, to put it mildly. As Ronald pointed out during our discussion, this sex scene is quite different from what happens later in Monica and Quincy’s relationship when they are older and know each other better. This certainly seems to be true in real life, but it’s not always reflected in Hollywood movies, where I would tentatively estimate that 90% of sex on screen is more idealized and therefore less intimate than sex in real life, partly because it isn’t allow them to change over the course of a relationship.
Even further from the heat of the lap dance scene is Ronald’s choice: Kitty Oppenheimer’s (Emily Blunt) imagination run wild in Oppenheimer. While her husband (Cillian Murphy) is being interrogated, she imagines him having sex with his lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). It’s fast enough to seem like a Christopher Nolan flourish for the sake of flourishes, but it’s meant to let you feel her pain over her husband’s affair. Her relationship with Robert doesn’t seem particularly romantic in the film, let alone sexually charged; she finds herself consumed by the idea that he had hot sex with this other woman, and she locks eyes with her vision of a naked Tatlock and tortures herself. Indeed, the intention of the scene is not to excite the audience, but only to give specificity to the form of Kitty’s preoccupation with the affair.
Christina brought up another really important point, which is that sex scenes also confront viewers at very specific moments. Her example from Bound, and the scenes between Violet (Jennifer Tilley) and Corky (Gina Gershon), touch on (among other things) her own history. This is an underappreciated aspect of the discourse of sex in films: performance matters in these scenes as much as anywhere else. I always I wish I could see more sex scenes in movies that include a wider variety of body types; it’s still very rare to see one that includes someone even of average height. That’s one of the reasons I’m curious about the upcoming season of Bridgertonwhich focuses on the beautiful and plump Penelope (Nicola Coughlan).
Good sex scenes are like any other kind of good filmmaking, frankly: it all comes down to purposeful and careful execution, done to whatever the scene’s function is.
Whether it’s spice or conflict or relationship growth or (as in the case of Bound) creating a compelling neo-noir story that wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t hot, damn, form follows function, ideally.
This piece also appeared on NPR’s Happy Hour pop culture bulletin. Subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one and get weekly recommendations on what makes us happy.
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