Hollywood is returning to the kind of cautious approach to depicting sex that was taken in the 1930s. Eliza Janssen explains how COVID-19 is making tinsel town keep its pants on.
You know when you’re watching a PG-13 comedy or romantic flick, and the sexy protagonists are getting closer and closer, and when they finally sexily kiss and sexily fall into bed, we get a big, unsexy cut to the morning after?
That kind of coy, avoidant storytelling might become a lot more prevalent over the next year, but not because of prudish moral standards; because of the dangers of spreading coronavirus on-set.
The UK Directors guild has recently made updates to its Directing Nudity and Simulated Sex guidelines, pushing for film and TV depictions of ‘intimacy and connection’ rather than forcing actors to strip down and break social distancing boundaries in the name of steamy, more full-frontal scenes.
The update includes specific suggestions on how film and TV creators could skirt around actors needing to physically embrace, including the suggestive depiction of limbs “moving under bedclothes”, and this ol’ standard: “show the closing of a bedroom door and leave the action to the viewer’s imagination.” The guide mentioned the recent British productions Normal People and I May Destroy You as two highly-successful but frowned-upon depictions of frank, naked sex that might not fly on a post-Corona film set.
The guidelines are pretty reminiscent of the 1930s Hays Code, a set of moral restrictions that placed Draconian limits on the amount of sex, violence and immorality that could appear in Hollywood film. Check out the below clip from Hitchcock’s Notorious, in which Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant were carefully directed to only ever kiss for three-second increments, in order to not break the indecency laws enforced by the Hayes code.
Considering that COVID-19 has more drastic and dangerous immediate consequences than the imagined moral hysteria of the Hayes code, we could be in for a lot more of these clever romantic loopholes on screen: attempts to show us passion and intimacy without stooping to being “a poorer cousin of pornography”, as guild member Bill Anderson warned directors away from.
As for scenes that absolutely require that the characters visually have sex, the suggested work-arounds range from the innovative to the uncanny. Directors are encouraged to cast real-life couples who would not be at risk of infecting each other, or to use animation or green-screen composites to simulate some bedroom magic. Ew.
In summary, 2020 is officially the perfect year for Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis to collaborate on a motion-capture-intensive, steamy romantic film. Make it happen boys.
