It's hard to imagine now, but not so long ago, men were scouring mainstream movies for glimpses of naked flesh. In Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), Goldstein and Rosenberg, the Jewish neighbors, sit around, smoking pot, waiting attentively for a glimpse of Katie Holmes's breasts (the scene in question, from The Gift, is not sexy at all, though that doesn't stop them from trying to get their fix). In Knocked Up (2007), it was still early enough in history that characters could reasonably spend their time finding and listing the various nude scenes of famous actresses. That was only seven years ago, but it may as well have been a hundred. The era of the titillating mainstream sex scene has abruptly ended. Now on-screen sex is either grim or boring.

Don't Look Now

It was a glorious era, no doubt, that narrow window between the beginning of the sexual revolution and the pornification of culture. Anyone who was an adolescent in the 1990s will remember Henry & June or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, beacons of worldliness and fleshiness. Before then, of course, there was the magnificent sex scene in Don't Look Now, which apparently shocked people. And of course Last Tango in Paris, for millions the beginning of the possibility of straight anal. In hindsight, all of these movies seem ludicrously tame. Sex, Lies, and Videotape may as well have been made by Victorians. Seeing these movies now, the question is, "What was all the fuss about?"

Who can be shocked by anything sexual after the advent of high-speed Internet access, when roughly this happened to men:

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The fact that any man with access to the Internet can see as much nudity as he cares to has consequences for visual culture as a whole, which filmmakers have not yet comprehended. By now it is nearly impossible to shock men with mere images of sex. The sight of Katie Holmes's breast isn't going to cut it. This alone makes the sex scene all the more difficult to execute, even as it makes it so much more tempting to try. The world is far more liberal and less hung-up. But the grand pornification has also been, in part, a grand benumbing. Which makes it ever more tantalizing as a subject for social commentary.

Last Tango in Paris

Two recent films have tried to reinterpret the sex scene for a porn age. The first is last year's French lesbian love story Blue Is the Warmest Color, which contains a nearly ten-minute sex scene between the two co-stars. The second is Lars von Trier's new Nymphomaniac, whose first part is about to be released in theaters and is already available on demand. Nymphomaniac has tried to fuse film and porn in a literal sense. Von Trier has digitally combined the faces of actors pretending to screw with the bodies of porn stars actually screwing. (He always was an innovator.)

Both of these movies are playing catch-up with porn, and both lose in the process. The sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color, as several lesbian critics pointed out, have very little to do with the way real lesbians have sex. Neither of the actresses is a lesbian, and the director is a man. In other words, the sex is "lesbian porn." As such, everybody had already seen it when the movie came out. Watching its infamous sex scene, I had an amazing thought: How is it possible that I am bored? And yet there was no question that it was dull, oppressive even.

Nymphomaniac is much worse. It's what a second-year graduate student enrolled in a program of French philosophy thinks sex is like. Von Trier's movie follows the picaresque sexual adventures of a character played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, as she indulges a series of bland, pointless, totally unbelievable desires that involve chanting in Latin and blowing strangers in public compartments in moving trains, and then relates these adventures to a fly fishing-obsessed old man who offers her pseudo-philosophical approval. It's dreadful. There are "fetishes," which I assume Von Trier imagines to be shocking, though they're nothing compared to what you can find on any free porn site. There are strange sexual "power games," which he images to be transgressive but wouldn't shock any fifteen-year-old boy.

Both Nymphomaniac and Blue Is the Warmest Color play with the conventions of porn as a genre, but they haven't fathomed its most important distinction from film, which is the way it's consumed. A movie is a passive communal experience. We gather together in a dark room and allow somebody's vision to wash over us. Porn is consumed privately, and actively. Porn induces an almost unreal level of specificity among its viewers. The PornMD live search caused a stir when it was released a few weeks ago, mainly because of all the horrible things men were looking up. But once you get past the horror, the weird thing is how narrow the desires revealed are. This list is from literally one minute on PornMD: "Sex nick egyptian directly," "devil angel," "east london," "urethral," "south indian aunty," "retarded & horny," "clothed-sex," "funny self suck," "self anal." (This last one, I assume, is just wishful thinking. Nobody can do that, can they? Can they?)

When we watch a sex scene in a mainstream movie now, what we're watching is somebody else's porn, porn we can't turn off. It is the height of filmic self-indulgence. It is boring and far from erotic. Porn requires a rewriting of the rules of the sex scene, which has clearly not happened yet. Perhaps it will some day. But the new erotic won't be found in porn-focused movies like Blue or Nymphomaniac. It will be found as far from porn as possible. It might even be clothed.

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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