There were always rumours about the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Rumours that ended up becoming a myth: that one of the movie’s sex scenes — in which Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange hook up in her kitchen — wasn’t simulated. That the two actors simply had sex on camera. Postman isn’t the only film to be whispered about like this; the 1973 horror classic Don’t Look Now had a similar response, with the sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie becoming a site of controversy.
Some mainstream — which is to say non-pornographic — films have gone one step further than films like Postman and Don’t Look Now, and feature real, unsimulated sex. And with New Queer Cinema firebrand Bruce LaBruce’s next film, The Visitor (a remake of Pasolini’s Theorem, featuring unsimulated sex) being filmed in London, now is a perfect time to look back through the history of films that have chosen to bare all on screen.
Pink Flamingos (1972)
The work of John Waters is the ideal starting point for any list of films that push up against the boundaries of good taste, something that Pink Flamingos, the director’s most infamous film, is full to the brim with. Whether it’s Divine’s final act of eating dog shit or the hard-to-watch chicken sequence, Pink Flamingos is full of things that shock precisely because they’re real.
And if all of this wasn’t enough, the film also features unsimulated, incestuous oral sex, as Divine and Crackers are so turned on by the chaos they cause at the house of their rivals, that mother and son end up taking their relationship to another level. Pink Flamingos will always live up to its tagline: “An exercise in poor taste.”
In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
Worlds away from John Waters when it comes to ideas of good or bad taste, In the Realm of the Senses exists at the intersection of erotic and art films. It tells the story of an all-consuming affair between between a sex worker-turned-hotel maid and her employer.
With explicit sex and shocking moments of intimacy, the film was subject to censorship and bans upon its release, and the question of “Is it porn?” – and all of the baggage that question comes with it – still lingers over it.
Time has been kind to In the Realm of the Senses though. From its strong critical response, to its release through The Criterion Collection — a distribution company that puts emphasis on important films, both classic and contemporary — Realm makes it clear that unsimulated sex doesn’t exist only to shock, and that even the most explicit films still have artistic relevance.
The Idiots (1998)
Today Lars Von Trier is no stranger to controversy, but his earlier work shows that the director has always been a provocateur, with the dark comedy The Idiots showing that there are no targets he won’t take aim at.
The Idiots was made in – almost – strict accordance with the rules of Dogme 95, a creative manifesto dreamed up by Von Trier and fellow director Thomas Vinterberg. Dogme was a kind of radical minimalism, one that refused to indulge in special effects or post-production modifications. And it’s through this framework that Von Trier built The Idiots, the tale of adults who try to shed their inhibitions by releasing their “inner idiot.”
Controversial for more than just its moments of unsimulated sex, The Idiots also raised questions of what it means to represent disability on screen; questions that are more important to answer now than ever.
The Raspberry Reich (2004)
As sexually frank as it is politically furious, The Raspberry Reich shows director Bruce LaBruce at the height of his punk, provocative powers. Whether it’s montages of actors having sex or long recitations from books of Situationist theory, the filmmaker crashes high and lowbrow culture together.
Following the kidnapping of an industrialist’s son, the personal and political entanglements of queer revolutionaries create a chaotic atmosphere that might just hold the key to the liberation. In Raspberry Reich, LaBruce asks the important questions, like: “Are you revolutionary enough to give up your girlfriend?”
But beyond the satire and chaos of the film, LaBruce’s revolution still feels like a rallying cry for the queer community, offering them the chance to go “out of the closet and into the streets”.
Shortbus (2006)
The eponymous Shortbus in John Cameron Mitchell’s erotic comedy is a sexual salon, where his eccentric ensemble go to open themselves up to new experiences; from a couples counsellor who can’t have an orgasm, to a former sex worker who wants to open up his relationship.
Mitchell has talked at length about the importance of unsimulated sex in Shortbus – saying as a point of comparison “[people] don’t ask whether I could’ve done Hedwig [and the Angry Inch] without the songs.”
Shortbus is a film about pleasure and connection, with sex functioning as both a narrative metaphor, and a way of understanding the film’s characters on a deeper level.
Dogtooth (2009)
Before making the pitch-black romcom The Lobster, or anarchic Oscar-winner The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos made a name for himself as a unique voice in Greek cinema. And 2009’s Dogtooth – nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature – shows how well-honed his distinctive style was before he came across the Atlantic.
Dogtooth tells the story of an isolated family, ruled over by a brutal patriarch, in minute, brutal detail. They live a life of dysfunction: words have different meanings, games of endurance are commonplace and bad behaviour is punished with violence.
In a similar way that Shortbus uses real sex as a way to explore themes and characters in depth, the explicitness of Dogtooth becomes a way of showing the kind of relationships that are born out of these levels of extreme isolation. Films like Dogtooth make it clear that unsimulated sex is by no means a shorthand for eroticism, or the pornographic.
Stranger by the Lake (2013)
This French thriller, full of echoes to filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, brings together a fraught cocktail of cruising, desire and death. Franck, a regular at a nude beach, finds himself immediately attracted to another man there – even after watching his new object of desire drown someone in the lake.
This murder mystery is less about who the murderer is, but instead about the powerful force of attraction; being drawn to someone because of — rather than in spite of — the threat that they pose. Stranger, which received critical acclaim, is another example of real sex and artistic power coming together.
L.A. Plays Itself (1972)
L.A. Plays Itself is different to every other film on the list. While it, like all of the others, contains real sex, this is the only that falls explicitly under the banner of pornography. But irrespective of this label, Fred Halsted’s experimental feature is full of as much challenging artistry as more mainstream films.
This uncompromising 1972 film is in the permanent collection of MOMA in New York, and was recently re-released by Vinegar Syndrome, a distributor of genre film gems, and important work in the history of adult film. Treatment like this shows the important of taking not only the idea of unsimulated sex in cinema seriously, but adult film alongside it.