Movies subvert the real-world from a safe distance. Emotions and experiences depicted on the big screen are real enough when we suspend our disbelief. Viewers know why they go to the movies: to escape their lives, if only for a few hours. Films give us the freedom to laugh, think, and cry in times that may frown upon or discourage such expressions. Films also may share a reflection of the time in which they were created. Escapism, intellectual discourse, or pure entertainment are noteworthy reasons why we gather around the modern caveman’s fire.
Another fire burns from the moving pictures. There exists a subgenre that will make you hot when it’s cold and cold when it’s hot. The type of movie that makes you walk out the door of a stranger and run into the arms of a lover. A movie built on so many mixed emotions, you don’t know whether to walk on eggshells or fall into a bed that will curl your toes six ways from Sunday. Erotic thrillers remove all inhibitions, raise a freak flag, all under sultry duress.
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Wanting What We Can’t Have
TriStar Pictures
We all want something we can’t have. For the workaholic, being carefree is a blessing and a sin. The busy bee knows that without work, we would be carefree at the expense of being careless. Erotic thrillers skirt a fine line with love, treating it as either a point of pleasure or danger. Escapism becomes eroticism in a twisted effort to bend the physical world to our every whim. The classic example is the femme fatale and her feminine wiles threatening to throw a monkey wrench (monkey sex is more like it) into the mix. Female charm in the form of flirtation starts off innocent and ends up naughty like in Basic Instinct.
The infamous interrogation scene has esoteric crime novelist Catherine Tamell (Sharon Stone) suspected of murdering her retired rock star boyfriend, Johnny Boz (Bill Cable) during sex. The case is overseen by police detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) who is having an affair with Catherine after he learns that she plans to incriminate him by portraying him as one of her book’s characters; a similar plot point dealing with a defamation case takes place in Fatal Attraction, also starring Douglas.
Stone’s character is enticing and esoteric enough to get what she wants even when she’s under the nose of a detective. Her saying, “I don’t make any rules. I go with the flow,” shows Tamell isn’t just loose with her body; she is free-thinking too. Fantasy plays a part in her circuitous freewheeling debauchery; yet she is measured in its practice. The novels she writes spill off the page and into reality, leaving a paper trail to follow and an urge or desire to be freed.
The genius of showing her money-maker (an unashamed and groundbreaking display of sexuality for an R-rated film let alone the nineties) and the investigators going to get a drink afterward shows how distractions, temptations, and wants to keep us from the reality of things. Unchecked desires can get the best of us, even the sexiest of killers who have a bone (or ice pick) to pick with you.
Hands On the Merchandise
Paramount Pictures
Whether it’s being in a pickle or taking a cookie from the cookie jar, the realization of our desires becomes unstoppable. Consequences become trivial, reasoning becomes insane. Tamell was a sadomasochist, but her better half had the right idea about sex. Intercourse should be exciting, serious to a fault, and enjoyable, which is an understatement for The Postman Always Rings Twice.
In this adaptation of crime writer James M. Cain’s novel of the same name, Cora Smith (Jessica Lange) is married to an older, traditional Greek man, Nick Papadakis (John Colicos), both of whom are struggling restaurateurs. Drifter Frank Chambers (Jack Nicholson) gets breakfast at their diner, tells Nick that he is a machinist, and finds work at the establishment. Shortly after, the intimacy of the space and the similar age between Cora and Nick draws them into a passionate embrace. The star-crossed lovers later consent to murdering Nick to start a new life together during the Great Depression.
Moral of the story: Jack Nicholson is the only man who can kill his boss and get promoted to knocking up the boss man’s wife. A true moral: love is blind and love can keep you blind to the changing world. The eighties saw a persistent social and political upheaval with money on the mind, sometimes with selfish intent. The consequence and constant of love, and the world, is change, but for Cora and Nick, that change steers into a cathartic collision course with cats purring like newborn and unborn babes.
Sexual Awakening
Sony Pictures Releasing
In To Die For, Suzanne Stone-Maretto (Nicole Kidman) makes a living off the evening news. Her husband, Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon) is a restaurant owner (sensing a theme here) who wants her to work in his family business instead. When she rises in the ranks of network television, first as a weather girl, she plots to kill him and finds something she can use. Her work on a TV documentary about teenagers leads her to manipulating Jimmy Emmett (Joaquin Phoenix) to do the dirty deed.
The film was based on the self-titled novel by Joyce Maynard, which was also inspired by the 1990 trial of Pamela Smart, an educator who seduced student and minor Billy Flynn. A similar scandal would occur in 1995 between White House intern Monica Lewinsky and then president Bill Clinton. Kidman’s performance won her a Golden Globe Award and her character has been said to have narcissistic personality disorder, which forces her and her victims into a vicious cycle of emotional entrapment. Sexuality, when repressed and unchecked, can reach the surface in debilitating ways.
False love and playing games never ends well. At best, it ends in heartbreak, and at worst, it ends up like a hog on ice. That pig happens to wear makeup, but it doesn’t make it beautiful. Behind that eye shadow lies a desire to role in the mud. Erotic thrillers continued this messy modus operandi through the big business of the eighties and the alternative, techno and cyber culture sensationalism of the nineties, keeping love close to the chest and spontaneous for a free-falling frisson of sexual freedom.
