Is This About You? Part II

Editor’s note: Part II of “Is This About You,” written by Eric Francis, is part of the Planet Waves archives, only available to subscribers ofВ Planet Waves Astrology News. It contains thousands of articles and horoscopes written by Eric and the Planet Waves team. –RA

Film normally has a way of disempowering its subjects: I think it does this by making them separate from us, in the process of presenting them to us. Somehow, director Michael Winterbottom has brought us into their space. Many of the shots are close-up; there is never the sense of artificial lighting or any other artifice that creates the plastic feeling that most commercial cinema has. (There was in fact no lighting tech present on the set.) The effect is to involve you in a way that is unusual for film; 9 Songs is an unusually tactile experience.

Somehow the fact that this couple is in the room with the director, camera operator, and a sound tech, is completely transparent. They seem perfectly alone, in a world of their own. By the director’s account, and from what I could see, the sex they have is authentic. They are not acting; they are relating in front of the camera. They must have shared a deep, untouchable bond.

You can hear their encounters as well, in honest detail. There is no false emotionality created by a background musical soundtrack to distract you. Music occurs only in the magnificent, highly charged but relatively short rock concert scenes (set in medium-sized venues with about 5,000 people present), or when they happen to play a CD once or twice. So the experience of their sex is a focal point of the film; and it’s a focal point of their relationship. Their conversation is not intellectually stimulating, but who cares — and whose is? Like many young people, they relate mainly through sex, but unlike many, they do so deeply.

The grainy effect and somewhat disjointed presentation of the story convey the feeling of a memory, which the film actually is: a memory told from the man’s perspective, some time later, when he’s back in Antarctica. Visually, the shots seem to suggest that they are suggestive, but actually are rather openly depicting of what they share; obviously he remembers. Among many other things, you see clear images of both their genitals. American men who get to see this film may observe their first specimen of an uncircumcised penis; male genital mutilation is still a common practice and big business in the U.S.

The two are not in what you would call a Hollywood-sanctioned romantic relationship. It is a relationship for sure, but they never once discuss morals, marriage, children, status, their next promotion, a new car, moving in together, buying a house, or their finances. The whole thing is not driving down the perilous road toward ‘happily ever after’. He does most of the cooking. She thanks him. She has her own apartment; the two never go there, it is her space alone. She has a life separate from his. She has what we call, in current parlance, ‘boundaries’.

When you take away the usual trappings, roles, expectations and games, and take away moral drama, you subtract the power aspect of sex and leave yourself with the pleasure aspect — and that is controversial. We are a society that is still figuring out the difference between rape and sex, and which in general tends to favor rape. We expect sex to have a victim, to be coerced, and to require seduction and eventual impeachment. We practically fall asleep if it’s not that way. (In an article in Penthouse, Erica Jong once asked, “Is sex sexy without power?” and concluded that it was not.) To go away from power and toward pleasure is to abandon the perpetrator-victim trip and gravitate toward compassion, kindness and surrender.

Most filmmakers would yield to the temptation to stick in a moral ending: this bad thing is what happens when you explore pleasure, but that is contrary to the point. The Man Who Loved Women (Francois Truffaut, 1977) gets off to a good start, but then the hero is hit by a car. There is no moral to 9 Songs, and it is not driven by pathology. Somehow it stands in another dimension.

That’s why this film is probably not about us.

If you’re a man, you were — with rare exceptions — taught by your culture that a woman is your privilege, right and property. You were taught to control her movements. You were taught, by various inputs from media, religion and elsewhere, to be intimidated by her sexuality, and worse, to hold it down. You were most likely taught to be nervous about the fact that she grows and changes, that she has had other lovers, and will have more still. You were taught she would take care of you, kind of like your mom. You were probably not given the skills to explore the depths of her erotic feelings, nor were you taught the patience to do so. If you did learn, I would love to know where, because there are exceedingly few examples of healthy sexuality available in our society, and fewer sources of sex education. And you would probably not be able to handle the fact that someone this beautiful was not going to stay with you ‘forever’ but rather is free to do as she pleases with her life. It is true that many men are waking up — I am speaking in general, of an unfortunate tendency that still persists.

If you’re a woman — unless you had a brave and enlightened mother — you were very likely trained to think that sex was something that you had to withhold from everyone but exactly the right man (perhaps the one who would please mom, dad or both), and give sex only in exchange for a commitment that involves security and money — and to feel guilty otherwise. That was the moral even of “Sex and the City” (after all that, she marries someone she calls Mr. Big), and it is the message of Abstinence Only Sex ‘Education’ that is taught, and nearly mandatory, in 49 of the United States. The training to be a woman likely included the mandate of not revealing to others, particularly to men, that you like or need sex, much less directly ask for it. You were taught, with rare exceptions, that other girls and women who like sex openly are whores or sluts. You may have learned to admit your desire, though you were unlikely to have been 21; perhaps you got it some time between 35 and 55. It still may not be easy for you. And you were taught to stay in a relationship even if it’s miserable, not to move on when you’re ready. And most likely, money, emotions, sex and reproduction got mixed up many times, creating traps from which it’s difficult, and sometimes nearly impossible, to escape. Many women do make the escape, but often it seems to be at the expense of any viable model of relationship.

For both genders, we were taught that there always had to be a big drama about, around and because of sex: that ultimately it is a moral issue, not a personal choice. This is the crime. The message, for example, of the current agenda of banning gay marriage is that whoever you are, somebody else decides for you what is right and what is wrong. Somebody else makes your personal choices for you.

It is not surprising that, in the next act, we almost always fall victim to our carefully cultivated pleasure anxiety, and then Adam and Eve-style, God shows up and is judging us for our fun and we wind up in hell-on-Earth because we got laid. 9 Songs offers a break in continuity, and an example, just one example, of a new sexual context for our era in history: one based on level ground and the personal choice to relate one’s own way.