by Roberto Rivera

I've got a confession to make: I've always hated St. Valentine's Day. The pressure of having to make the perfect romantic gesture every February 14 is more than I can take. After all, what if I've had a bad day at work, or, heaven forbid, I'm angry at my significant other? If you blow Valentine's Day, you are in serious danger of having the other person call the entire quality of your relationship into question. Well, thanks to the film industry, the stakes have just gotten higher-a lot higher. In case you hadn't noticed, in the movies, romance is usually indistinguishable from sex. And, what's more, the past few years have brought films that tell us that not only is sex a good thing; it's the most important thing in life. In fact, it isn't too much to say that, in these films, good sex is what makes life worth living. Talk about pressure! Mind you, very few people will come out and say that sex is the raison d'être or sunam bonum of human existence. And, they almost never call it sex. Instead, they call it "love." But, when you strip away the artistic pretensions, you're still talking about sex. After all, most of the evidence for this "love" takes the form of two people doing what people do between the sheets.
[snip]

Another film that blurs the line between love and lust is Shakespeare In Love. The film, which stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes is up for thirteen Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Original Screen-play, Best Actress (Paltrow), and Best Direction (John Madden). The Bard we meet at the start of the film is a far cry from the man whom, as Yale English professor Harold Bloom puts it, invented the modern idea of the human. He's a man who has lost his muse. He's under pressure to produce a play, preferably a comedy, but the best he can come up with is something called "Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate's Daughter." Well, how does he get his muse back? Well, he needs a woman to love. "Wait a minute" you may ask, "What about Ann Hathaway?" Well, the Oscar-nominated screenplay disposes of Mrs. Shakespeare in less than a minute, telling us that Shakespeare had been kicked out of his wife's bed after the birth of their children. Fortunately for the course of Western Civilization, Shakespeare soon finds his objet d'amour in Viola de Lesseps, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. And, in less time than you can say "Love's Labors Lost," "Romeo and Ethel" becomes "Romeo and Juliet." As with Breaking The Waves, the script has a limited way of depicting the love between the principal characters. Aside from a solitary sonnet, love is only expressed in sexual terms. We know that Will and Viola love each other for the same reason we know the Bess and Jan love each other: They can't keep their hands off each other. If all "Shakespeare in Love" had to tell us was that lust and love are interchangeable, it would be no different from many other recent Hollywood pictures. But it goes one step further. It's something that might escape if you aren't looking closely. Elizabethan-era England was, how shall I put this?, a pretty gross place. The streets were filthy, the people looked dirty and, oy gevalt, the teeth. Everyone in the film, from Queen Elizabeth to the theater owner, has rotten, disgusting teeth. Everyone, that is, except for the two principals. A female friend of mine remarked on Paltrow's impossibly perfect skin and teeth. And Fiennes' teeth are as good as Paltrow's. What are we supposed to make of this? It's certainly not unintentional. The message seems to be that the love shared by Will and Viola has an ennobling quality; it causes them to rise above their peers and elevates their sentiments. (Mind you, Will and Viola aren't the only people engaging in intercourse in the film. But they are the only people doing so who claim to care about one another.) Now, this idea might only rise to the level of romantic tripe if the film had more than one way of illustrating what it means to love another person, but it doesn't. So, not only is sex redemptive, it's ennobling.
[snip]

While some film critics, notably USA Today's Mike Clark, found Ross' style preachy and his attacks on the 1950s "specious" and "simplistic," even they bought into the notion that sex was a metaphor for something else: creativity, freedom or nonconformity what have you. They fail, however, to understand why directors like Ross rely almost exclusively on this metaphor. For them, sexual freedom is synonymous with personal freedom. You see, at the heart of the 1960s, when many of these directors grew up, was a rebellion against traditional sources of authority: government, moral standards and the church. What replaced these sources of authority was a notion of radical personal autonomy-the belief that every person should be free to do what he pleases without fear of punishment or even judgment. Sex was at the heart of this belief in personal autonomy. It was the easiest way to express your freedom from authority. After all, it's not as though obeying civil and criminal laws was ever going to become optional. That's why it isn't a coincidence that the sexual revolution is the most enduring cultural legacy of the sixties. This is why filmmakers are so dependent on sex. It's the only way they can depict the world they imagine-a world with no boundaries or restrictions on personal freedom. So, if they want to tell us that people can achieve their creative potential by being free of convention, there's only way to show people acting without regards to convention: sex. If That's why films like Pleasantville, and Shakespeare In Love are only the tip of a very large iceberg. Film directors fancy themselves as portrayers of a new world. And in this new world, before anything worthwhile gets done, people need to tell us that they're free from the shackles of the past. And the bed is the soapbox of choice in Hollywood.