There are movies that bring out the most abusive side of critics. For example: Deep Waters, by Adrian Lyne. “It’s the cinematic equivalent of waiting for toast to be made and realizing later that you haven’t turned on the toaster,” said American Matt Pais. “Worst movie I’ve seen in a long time. The story never progresses and keeps you waiting for a climax that never comes”, he also wrote. Even those who left the film in which Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas fell in love, released last March, doing so with some important caveat of the type: “with all the gothic, tacky and soap opera that the film is, in the end you want know who wins.”
Lyne’s film, based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel about a wealthy married couple who torture each other despite their semi-polyamorous arrangement, does indeed have many laughable moments – Variety ordered them in an article, minute by minute – but its main sin it is that of being out of touch, completely out of tune with his times.
Lyne had not directed any film for twenty years, since Unfaithful and in those two decades that he has spent living in France and trying to make films that did not bear fruit, the genre that made him famous and paid for his house in Provence, the erotic thriller , went from being synonymous with commercial adult cinema to becoming a joke.
There was a time when Lyne dominated the box office and cultural conversation with Fatal Attraction, Nine and a Half Weeks and Indecent Proposal. This year, her Deep Waters was seen directly on a platform (Hulu) in the United States after its theatrical release was delayed twice, which never came, and was received for what it is, a relic of another era.
Before trying to find out who killed the erotic thriller, perhaps we should start by understanding why it was successful. “There was a time when if you wanted sex in movies you had to wear clothes. You had to find a room that was showing adult movies and sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers. It was the time of Deep Throat. But in the eighties, home video was invented (…). My theory is that Hollywood had to keep bringing people to the movies. So they thought: let’s take sex and make a whole plot around it. And they turned it into a genre. The genre ended up being called an erotic thriller. And in it, men and women have sex and sex is the thing that sets the story in motion.” The cultural critic Wesley Morris thus summarizes in The New York Times podcast Still Processing, the advent of this type of film that started in 1980 with American Gigolo and practically ceased to reign at the box office with the arrival of the new millennium.
The peak of the trend must surely be placed in 1987, the year in which Adrian Lyne premiered Fatal Attraction, one of the films of the eighties that has resisted the passage of time the worst due to its genre clichés and the film that established the idea of Michael Douglas as a leading man sick of sex, by excess or by default. Five years later the genre reached its baroque phase, the one that anticipated decline: in 1992 Basic Instinct was released, but also The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Single White Woman Seeks.
Film historian Karina Longworth has just dedicated an entire season of her You Must Remember This podcast to eroticism in 80s cinema, and will continue this fall with another season dedicated to 90s. There she has space and resources to analyze the phenomenon throughout its magnitude, from the neo-noir of The Postman Always Rings Twice – it is interesting to contrast the 1940s and 1980s versions of the same script to understand how what was considered sexy on screen had changed – to the influence of the called MTV aesthetic in movies like Flashdance and Risky Business.
The movie age rating system, which was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s, was also key in defining the aesthetic of the erotic thriller. Adrian Lyne himself was a master at making the viewer believe that he was seeing something much more graphic and horny than what he was actually seeing, thanks to those pseudo-erotic choreographies (see the Nine and a Half Weeks thread) that allowed him to dodge the X-rated and fall into the safer “not suitable for under 17”: the movies that couples between the ages of 18 and 70 chose when they went to the movies on Fridays before it was considered normal for that demographic to watch superhero movies and movies. elves paying and not being bound by their minor children.
“No one fucks!” filmmaker Steven Soderbergh complained about the films that he includes in the “fantasy-spectacle universe” genre. And that is a common conversation, the way in which sex has disappeared from the screens and has taken refuge, if anything, in series like Euphoria and Pam
Seen through the eyes of 2022, the erotic thriller as a genre generates a certain nostalgia – “it was very exciting to see a film starring two adults who have sexual lives,” Longworth, one of the few dissenting voices on Waterdeep, said in an interview. that any day will be revisited as a cult classic– but at the same time its cheered return presents many difficulties. To start with, content. The slightly psychotic woman who uses sex for her own benefit, the rabbit-boiler, as Glenn Close typified after Fatal Attraction by the scene in which her character, Alex, puts her daughter’s pet in a pot. her lover, presents logical difficulties of verisimilitude for several generations literate in fourth wave pop feminism.
The platforms, in which (almost) everything fits and who love content with brand recognition, are making some attempts to resurrect the genre. Paramount is preparing a new version of American Gigolo and another of Fatal Attraction, with Joshua Jackson and Lizzy Caplan. The series will pick up where the movie left off, with the character of Alex, the homewrecker, dead. And according to the producer who has promoted the idea, Nicole Clemens, she will be told from the “female gaze”. Who knows if pets will be boiled, because of nostalgia.
