Be it Anora or Challengers, Babygirl or Nosferatu, it seems there’s nothing more offensive to the terminally online than the act of two (or three) people fucking on-screen. The sex scene has long been a key factor in narrative cinema, and while it’s gathered some vocal defenders and detractors online, to the writer Xuanlin Tham, the exhausted discourse has been misguided from both sides.
On one hand, they found some dismissed these expressions of on-screen desire to be gratuitous and unnecessary. Meanwhile, those defending them fought for their importance through a framing of “artistic freedom”, capturing something that shapes our daily lives. “That argument seemed insufficient to me, even though it was true,” Tham says.
And so, like any writer, they wrote a book about it. From lite-queerness courtesy of the Walt Disney corporation to sci-fi sex scenes as a vessel for political progress, Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene is a cutting and intelligent take on why fucking on screen is vital. To Tham, these scenes are “one of the most bodily and emotionally moving parts of cinema.”
Tham’s writing on cinema is sumptuous and emotional, and yet perceptive too. For this magazine, they’ve explored the carnal desires at the heart of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All and the “feral” film inspired by Marilyn Monroe’s life, Blonde. Where others see excess, Tham finds merit, something to prod at and pull apart. Maybe, they say, even an antidote to the capitalist onslaught that undergirds our society. “I think the book positions the erotic as something that’s aligned with the same kind of desiring connection that forms a mass of bodies that forms a movement,” they say. Never mind the prostate orgasm, Tham says,“Get ready for the anti-state orgasm.”
In this extract from the book, Tham re-frames the already allegory-loaded franchise sequel The Matrix Reloaded as a film that predicts a mutinying future, all through a widely-derided, but politically rich, sex scene.
The French philosopher Georges Bataille once defined eroticism as “assenting to life up to the point of death.” In other words, eroticism is a realm where we can momentarily suspend our avoidance of pain, fear, and loss in the pursuit of even greater pleasure – where the borders of the self expand to accommodate something bigger. Could this not be an energetic source for revolutionary politics? The Matrix Reloaded says yes. In this sequel to 1999’s The Matrix – perhaps the most influential science fiction blockbuster of all time, and one of the greatest anticapitalist critiques ever contained within a genre film – Zion, the underground city of humans freed from the Matrix, has just been informed that within 24 hours, a machine army intent on annihilating them will reach the city. Resistance leader Morpheus addresses Zion:
“I remember that for one hundred years we have fought these machines. I remember that for one hundred years they have sent their armies to destroy us. And after a century of war, I remember that which matters most: we are still here!”
The crowd of thousands roars with strength, roused by the power of his conviction:
“Let us send a message to that army. Tonight, let us shake this cave. Tonight, let us tremble these halls of earth, steel, and stone; let us be heard from red core to black sky. Tonight, let us make them remember: this is Zion, and we are not afraid!”
Drums begin to beat; bare feet stamp the ground; Zion starts to dance. Our protagonist Neo and his fellow fighter and lover, Trinity, find each other in the crowd. They escape to their room, seizing the opportunity to finally be alone. Acoustic drumming gradually builds to a beat drop, and the city begins to rave to the sound of techno; if the origin of the rave is a defiant, illegal occupation of space, what could be more fitting for Zion – a queer, trans underworld of freed bodies that rebel against enslavement by the machines – on the eve of this revolutionary battle? The camera pans across sweaty bodies in slow-mo, luxuriating over gleaming skin on skin, before cutting to Neo and Trinity having sex; then we cut back to the rave and its grinding bodies, hands gripping thighs, nipples pressed against mesh clothing. The music pulses euphorically as we alternate between Neo and Trinity and the rave, connecting all of Zion in a heady wavelength of embodied, ecstatic pleasure. There is a profound sense that the erotic is political in this moment – that the affirmation of human desire, connection, and sexuality is absolutely essential to Zion’s survival. The sex scene ends with a shot of Neo and Trinity embracing, with Neo’s back to us: as the camera zooms out, it is as if their bodies have melded together, and the individual has dissolved. It is a precursor to what an exiled computer program named the Keymaker will tell them about their mission later in the film, upon which all of humanity depends: “All must be done as one. If one fails, all fail.”
“In the sensate euphoria of Neo and Trinity fucking while their fellow resistance fighters rave through the night… we find the essence of what it means to ‘dissent’”
Reading Audre Lorde, academic Nikki Young writes: “By resurrecting the power of the erotic, Lorde affirms our simultaneity as selves who exist in individual potentiality and selves whose connectivity is based on the freedoms of our sensuality.” The Matrix Reloaded posits exactly this idea – that eroticism is at once a rooting into the power of the self and a radically connective force that extends outwards, allowing us to sense our belonging to a collective. In the sensate euphoria of Neo and Trinity fucking while their fellow resistance fighters rave through the night, we find a beautiful expression of revolutionary eroticism, and the essence of what it means to “dissent”: trans academic Cael M. Keegan elaborates this as literally meaning to “differ in sentiment”; to “sense not what others sense, but something else.” In Zion’s mass of dissenting bodies, eroticism is a forward-looking vision: it proclaims, with every sensation, what their fight for liberation is for. They sense that a future of freedom and pleasure is not only possible, but necessary.
This scene in The Matrix Reloaded won a Guardian poll for the worst sex scene of all time. Reloaded, however, deserves to be considered one of the most radical sequels ever made for how much it circumvented audience expectation, including with this bold, lengthy sex scene. Today, the sequel or reboot has become the primary mode of cinematic narrativity, generating profit from our attachment to the familiar: a mode reflective of the cyclical futurelessness of our present, and our inability to imagine new political formations. Our screens are replete with a litany of Fast and Furiouses, live-action remakes of The Lion King, and edgy takes on Batman villains, as if we are only allowed to want what we have seen before. Yet the Matrix sequels refuse to merely extend the familiar, even at the cost of alienating their audiences. Radically undermining Neo’s straightforward hero’s journey in the first film in favour of the collectivist vision of Zion as revolutionary movement, Reloaded does not just perform a narrative subversion, but a critique of studio filmmaking’s self-cannibalising ecosystem.
‘Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene‘ is out now.