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“Everyone always lies about sex. If you haven’t lied about it, it isn’t sex,” Carrie Fisher wrote in The Guardian, a response to a plea for advice from a woman who discovered her husband of 30 years had been hiring sex workers. “Have you ever faked an orgasm? Some might say that’s a kind of well-meaning lie – but it’s still lying, no?”
The subject of sex, and showing it, remains taboo in the United States, where puritanical repression has created an enduring obsession with the deed of darkness. As a sort of lubricant, the National Orgasm Day (July 31st) was created to generate conversations about the Big O (or “the Little Death,” as it’s commonly referred to), notably an offspring of the International Female Orgasm Day occurring on August 8th.
Visual representations of sex have long been plagued by censorship and erasure in narrative cinema, an art form that has only recently reached centenarian status. In Sex and the Cinema, Tanya Krzywinska writes “Through the cross-current of exchanges between representation and culture, sex in the cinema has an important role in the formation of dominant attitudes to sexuality.”
But sex in the cinema, whether simulated or not, is also inherently performative, historically funneled through the hetero male gaze, and becomes, in essence, a well-meaning lie. Do the questionable tactics of Abdellatif Kechiche enhance the power of Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulous in Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) after having a better understanding of the process they endured? How can we look at the infamous butter/anal sex scene in Last Tango in Paris (1972) knowing Maria Schneider did not consent to what co-star Marlon Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci had in mind?
Lost somewhere in this agonized deliberation on the appropriateness of sexual spectacle is the coherent depiction of the orgasm. An orgasm is defined as the end result, the climactic moment of sexual excitement. Just how this desired result is achieved in women has its own tortured history regarding vaginal vs. clitoral orgasm, and has been the subject of controversial debate from Freud to the trailblazing Shere Hite. But how are these moments visualized in a medium so perilously censored? Pornography, which exists outside the highly regulated mainstream, has its own various tangential glories and problems in this arena, but it is the visual products designed for the masses which creates a unifying litmus test for not just what’s acceptable but is potentially an enhanced mirror of reality.
So perhaps the “act” of an orgasm is more of a sensibility. In her essay “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag established a means to identify a “camp sensibility” in exaggerated queer realms. She could have just as easily been talking about the essence of the orgasm. “To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion,” she wrote. Watching others engage in sexual activity can inspire titillation, repulsion, or ambivalence, based on any number of individual factors, and yet we can also logically comprehend and understand it as representative of an innately human reality, whether it’s a gratuitous moment or not.
Gen Z’s alleged abhorrence for sex scenes suggests an overwhelming wave of neutered cinematic products have brainwashed a younger generation into the realm of prudishness, where infantilized PG-13 movies satisfy the compartmentalizing urge of existing in a polite society while their social media avatars fulfill libidinous desires through the false anonymity of sex apps. A missing ingredient is “intimacy,” which does not factor into the fast food equivalent of an over-the-counter orgasm.
While depictions of sex have been overwhelmingly compromised in films, every so often something exceptional traverses the zeitgeist. Sex scenes, however, have a unique ability to segue into camp territory. Sontag also wrote, “What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic,” but also asserts “things are campy, not when they become old—but when we become less involved with them.” Thus explains one of the all-time greatest campy sex scenes, with Elizabeth Berkley throwing her spinal cord out of alignment as she rails on Kyle MacLachlan in Showgirls. Whatever’s happening between these two writhing bodies one sordid night in Las Vegas, it’s certainly not orgasmic. But the desperate attempt to convey such raging pleasure is too overwhelming to take seriously, and too distressing to emulate.
There are a handful of mainstays that remain iconic, and important to recognize as trailblazers for going against the grain of toxic austerity, including Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy (1933), considered the first cinematic sex scene. Despite some light nudity, the controversy surrounding Lamarr’s depiction of pleasure regarded her facial expression. We’ve come a long way in the past century of visual representation, but the staging of “climax” remains somewhat enigmatic. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously stated “I know it when I see it,” regarding the definition of hard-core pornography. But when it comes to an orgasm, perhaps we still can’t be quite as confident, because how do we really “see” a feeling generated through genital stimulation when the apparatus affected must always remain discreetly offscreen?
In an effort to convey the significant value of cinematic (s)exegesis, here are 10 compelling onscreen orgasms that are sexy, troubling, moving, and above all memorable in their depiction of “that stuff, that funk, that sweet, that funky stuff.”
10. Meg Ryan – In the Cut (2003)
When deliberating the on-screen orgasm, there’s no avoiding Meg Ryan’s diner scene in Rob Reiner’s 1989 romcom When Harry Met Sally… in which she reproduces the physical gesticulations of climax for Billy Crystal, who is dismayed to learn most women fake their orgasms during sex. A woman nearby tells her waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
And wouldn’t we all? But Ryan’s moment is all about the performative orgasm, the compromised depiction of sex in cinema. Ryan actually has a much more potent scene (and characterization) in Jane Campion’s underrated 2003 psychological thriller In the Cut, dismissed upon its release. A teacher studying “urban” colloquialisms, Ryan’s character embarks upon an affair with a rugged detective played by Mark Ruffalo, investigating a serial killer who’s been “disarticulating” women in the neighborhood. Circumstances suggest Ruffalo may be the killer, and Campion crafts something highly irregular in heterosexual cinema with a woman who is stimulated by a man she also finds dangerous, something that remains a trope in queer cinema, as Ryan’s behavior mirrors the protagonist of Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013).
Campion also succeeds in upending the expectations of the erotic thriller from a woman’s perspective. Only a decade before, Harvey Weinstein’s butchering of Lizzie Borden’s failed Love Crimes (1992), where a sexually repressed DA (played by Sean Young) rebels against her submissive tendencies awakened by a rapist (played by Patrick Bergin), was reduced to cartoonish exploitation. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, after Young came forward with sexual assault allegations, Borden would recount her dealings with Weinstein, including script re-writes without her acknowledgment and the eventual refusal to let her remove her name.
It isn’t so much the sex scene that represents the memorable orgasm for Campion, but how Ryan and Ruffalo process their sex afterwards. The surprise at the pleasure she experiences warrants an explanation because it’s not something she expected to feel, thus his track record becomes a talking point. Campion, who cut orgasm scenes from her series Top of the Lake she deemed overly performative from Elisabeth Moss (according to the actor herself in a 2013 interview with Vulture), explores how pleasure not only overrides logic, but how a sense of intimate commiseration enhances the experience after the fact. Women in cinema don’t often get to compare notes with their lovers.
9. Joan Allen – Pleasantville (1998)
Masturbation remains one of the best ways to convey orgasmic pleasure for women in film because their agency remains intact. Controversial sexologist Shere Hite, who brought the reality of the clitoral orgasm to public conversation with her infamous Hite Report, maintained masturbation through clitoral stimulation was much more conducive for a woman to experience orgasm than penile-vaginal intercourse. While everyone’s personal experience with climax differs, cinema depicting adult heterosexual relationships most often best conveys a woman’s pleasure through masturbation.
Often, such scenes inspire a wide range of reaction as to what’s being expressed regarding characterization (Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding, and on and on), but a clear through-line is control. While it depicts a fuzzy rom-com version of a BDSM relationship, Secretary (2002) only finds Maggie Gyllenhaal experiencing physical pleasure through masturbation while recalling the rigid, controlling commands of her dom master played by James Spader. In the once-controversial 9 1/2 Weeks (1986), a project turned down by Sigourney Weaver, who revealed a lack of trust in director Adrian Lyne (according to a 1997 interview with Movieline), a torrid affair between Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger ends up being quite tedious in execution. But the sexiest scene happens to be Basinger masturbating while thinking of her new mystery lover, to the Eurythmics’ woozy “This City Never Sleeps,” and its most memorable intercourse scene being a metaphorical exercise with food fed through her pouty lips.
One of the more extravagant and elegantly executed masturbation scenes belongs to Joan Allen in Gary Ross’ Capraesque 1998 film Pleasantville. Two Gen-X teens (Reese Witherspoon, Tobey Maguire) are transported into a Leave it to Beaver styled 50’s sitcom only to change the dynamics of the repressed community, who, upon experiencing what life’s all about, transform from black and white to color. With her TV daughter explaining what self-pleasure is, Allen touches her genitals for the very first time in her bathtub, transforming the tree outside the house into a literal burning bush.
8. Noemie Lvovsky – Nobody’s Hero (2022)
Likely the most obscure participant on this list is Noemie Lvovsky in Alain Guiraudie’s 2022 comedy, Nobody’s Hero. A handful of bizarre characters are united on Christmas Eve in the city of Clermont-Ferrand following a terrorist attack. The most stridently heterosexual film from Guiraudie, who most often examines sexual taboos and transactions between gay men in rural isolation, shows formidable French character actress and director Lvovsky as a slapstick sexual icon, portraying a passionately committed sex worker named Isadora.
While specific political insinuations drive the narrative, Isadora explores a thwarted relationship with Jean-Charles Clichet’s hapless protagonist, who doesn’t believe in paying for sex, desiring something more intimate. Isadora’s penchant for cunnilingus is the film’s high point, and her ability to receive oral gratification often dismays her clientele because of her explosive vocalizations, which she cannot seem to curb. Liberating another supporting character from his religious conditioning thanks to her skills, she proudly announces, “That’s what whores are for.”
7. Halle Berry – Monster’s Ball (2001)
Escapist sex motivated by desperation is hardly sexy, but it’s a reality of human behavior wrought by trauma, compulsion, and a variety of other harmful realities.
Sometimes this yields iconically erotic moments, elegantly encapsulated by the grieving parents played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Nicolas Roeg’s eerie Don’t Look Now (1973), with Venice serving as the backdrop to frame emotions coursing through their emotional capillaries. The obscure but recently re-discovered gay erotic film Equation to an Unknown (1980), directed by Francis Savel (under the pseudonym Dietrich de Velsa), is a melancholic queer example of a similar scenario where its handsome young protagonist (Gianfranco Longhi) navigates an increasingly blurred line between fantasy and reality through a series of graphic sexual episodes. As part of the film’s remastered release, director Yann Gonzalez’s splashy quote on the Blu-ray describes it as “the most melancholic porn film I’ve ever seen,” and, indeed, the fulfillment of sexual desire seems to be a dangling carrot forever out of reach (even through the film’s climactic orgy sequence, where the unnamed subject metaphorically becomes the sacrificial center of his own yearning).
But perhaps one of the most controversial examples of the sorrowful sexual apogee is Halle Berry in her Oscar-winning turn as Leticia Musgrove in Monster’s Ball (2001). The film has producer Lee Daniels’ miserabilism stamped all over it. A poor Black mother, whose husband (Sean “Diddy” Combs) was sentenced to death by electric chair and overweight son (Coronji Calhoun) died as the result of a car accident, finds her life in shambles. Her savior arrives in the most unlikely of places with Billy Bob Thornton’s racist policeman, one of the men who assisted in electrocuting her husband. Defined by his own extreme trauma, he shares a bitter bond with Berry, leading to a fantastically depressing sex scene. Begging Thornton to make her feel better, they collapse together on the floor by the sofa, with DP Roberto Schaefer shooting the sequence as if it were the choppy memory of a drunken black-out. Their desperation turns to pleasure, and hence, the reclamation, however momentarily, of themselves.
6. Joaquin Phoenix & Parker Posey – Beau is Afraid (2023)
Parker Posey represents something of a unique fixture in the depiction of the cinematic orgasm. In 2006, Posey headlined two very different indie features in which she was subjected to performing orgasmic pleasure thanks to vibrating accessories in her underwear—a pager in The Oh in Ohio and a cell phone in Fay Grim. Directed by Billy Kent and Hal Hartley, respectively, her climactic convulsions are uncontrollable, played for comedic gags wherein her male co-stars are baffled yet aroused by her contortions.
Ohio is something of missed opportunity of a film, depicting a woman who never experienced an orgasm, sterilizing her marriage with Paul Rudd and eventually leading to self-fulfillment via masturbation before Danny DeVito(!) ends up being the first human to coax her to climax. Rudd’s character mansplains how women really achieve orgasms to a student (Mischa Barton) he’s seeing by explaining how the pubococcygeus works. Barton rejoices with this news, proclaiming it means an end to “the tyranny of the clitoral orgasm.”
Posey’s sublime comic timing plays like screwball slapstick in these sequences, but she experiences something a bit more metaphorically potent in Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid (2023). Though the film is an existential crisis saga about a man’s toxic relationship with his omnipotent mother, Aster crafts a literal depiction of la petite mort. Phoenix’s title character has been brainwashed to believe orgasm will lead to death, and when he’s reunited with the object of his childhood’s affections at his mother’s wake, his comically enlarged scrotum unleashes a torrential outpouring. A condom provides little respite from his secretions, as Posey moans, “You busted through that bag,” while bringing herself to climax, and, turning into a paralyzed statue in the process, her character brought to her intended deadly conclusion. Enhancing the scene’s ludicrous frustration of sexual climax is Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” blasting on repeat.
5. The Beast – La Bête (1975)
Intended as a comedy—according to producer Anatole Dauman’s 1992 memoir—Polish auteur Walerian Borowczyk’s infamous 1975 erotic masterpiece La Bête wasn’t properly released in the U.K. until 2001. In a 1992 publication by Eliza Kazan and Jacques Gerber on the film’s producer Anatole Dauman, Borowczyk remarked it was “a film about dream mechanisms.” Such intentions might be easily misconstrued, and could be the difficulty many seem to have in processing a comedically inclined fantasy film about sexual assault and bestiality that is basically a re-telling of La Belle et la Bête but with exaggerated metaphors of racial and classist subtexts too prominent to ignore. As a dethroning of the serious, La Bête is a rare form of heterosexual camp, and to revisit another avenue of Susan Sontag, who also wrote “experiences aren’t pornographic; only images and representations—structures of the imagination—are,” the film is, in essence, a perverted, kinky camp porno.
And there are loads of orgasms being experienced. A quote from Voltaire (“Troubled dreams are, in fact, a passing moment of madness.”) introduces two horses copulating in a cobbled courtyard, with close-ups of vagina and penis accompanied by noises of exertion. An American heiress, Lucy (Lisbeth Hummel) shows up, destined to marry the horse-loving son of the manor, whose family is embroiled in significant turmoil over a Cardinal arriving to bless the newlyweds (apparently as a way to lift a bestial curse). The young woman learns of the legend haunting the family thanks to a tattered corset kept on display in the living room that belonged to Romilda (Sirpa Lane), an 18th century courtesan who was raped and ravished by a beast creature. About an hour into the film, Lucy has a sex dream about Romilda being assaulted in the forest by the creature, and she eventually comes to enjoy the beast’s advances, killing him through the endless onslaught of her awakened sexual appetite. The beast, who is clearly a man in a costume, is almost completely visually defined by a large, erect phallus (resembling the horse’s), gushing an obscene amount of semen, which gets absolutely everywhere.
Adding to these racial fetish undertones is a Black family servant whose coitus with Lucy’s soon-to-be sister-in-law (a white woman with box braids) is also constantly on display, leaving her to pleasure herself when he’s called away. The rape/bestial fetish is framed as a fantasy imagined by a woman, curiously beginning as an assault. As part of a “fantasy,” this seems troubling, even though we’ve been conditioned to believe such stereotypes of women being taken by force only to have their desires awakened is acceptable (such as the highly touted eroticism between Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange in the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, where her pleasure is only possible after the initiation of violence). But there’s a celebratory aspect to the profusely masturbating women of La Bête, a film of multiple orgasms, and a titular creature who, after likely becoming dangerously dehydrated due to such extreme fluid loss, turns his “little death” into the real thing.
The only film that has come even remotely close to such gleefully sexual outrageousness is Albert Serra’s 2019 title, Liberté, wherein a group of French libertines expelled from Louis XVI’s court seek solace through outdoor group sex in the German countryside.
4. Kathleen Turner – Serial Mom (1994)
The filmography of John Waters, the self-anointed Pope of Trash, is bedazzled with an array of sexual perversions. His penchant for extolling the virtues of “bad taste” offers a multitude of iconic moments to celebrate. A lot of his most ribald moments involve various sorts of sexual assault, though usually through a lens of such ridiculousness they become morbidly absurd (such as Divine being raped by a lobster in 1970’s Multiple Maniacs, or assaulted by her male alter ego in 1974’s Female Trouble).
But tucked away in all this outrageousness is an unsung climax in the oeuvre of Waters, performed courtesy of Kathleen Turner in the gloriously unhinged Serial Mom (1994). Beverly Sutphin, a suburban housewife with a secret interest in serial killers, suddenly becomes one herself following a tense PTA meeting where she runs over her son’s obnoxious math teacher. As she explores her murderous tendencies on a handful of other victims who assault her family or their tastes (Patty Hearst quite memorably gets beaten to death with a pay phone for daring to wear white shoes after Labor Day), her libido slips into hyperdrive. Coaxing her husband (Sam Waterston) into sex while their teenage children (Ricki Lake, Matthew Lillard) lie awake down the hall, Beverly quickly churns herself into a fervor as she straddles her husband. Moaning wildly in ecstasy, her children are disturbed, as witnesses to their mother’s pleasure, but Beverly’s lost herself in the pursuit of pleasure. Waters poses Turner with the determination of a woman whose passions have been loosed. Beverly Sutphin is a woman who’s doing exactly what she wants.
3. Geoffrey Couët & François Nambot – Théo et Hugo dans le même bateau (2016)
As compared to their female counterparts, the performative act of male climax almost always seems anticlimactic. In essence, there is the foregone conclusion of the happy ending, as a man’s orgasm seemingly dictates the end of the interaction. Where the depiction of the male orgasm becomes more interesting and less scatalogical, at least in cinematic terms, usually transpires via gay male sex scenes, even when they lead to the same perfunctory conclusion.
A spectrum of fantastically unrealistic moments proliferate this specific niche of scenes, perhaps most notably between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005)—this heavily sanitized moment is about as legitimate as Meg Ryan’s famous fakery in When Harry Met Sally...
But one of cinema’s most exceptional orgasmic male moments arrived in 2016 with Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Théo et Hugo dans le même bateau, which received the blandly anglicized re-titling Paris 05:59: Theo & Hugo when it was released in the U.S. The titular characters played by Geoffrey Couët and François Nambot meet-cute at a Parisian bathhouse called L’impact in the film’s sensational and sexually explicit 16-minute opening scene. Their first kiss is shared while they lean over the men they’re both currently having sex with, and it’s seemingly love at first sight. The pulsing electronic beat of “Souvenirs de primaire” from composer Karelle+Kuntur heightens the libidinous desire between the young men, who find the red-lit gorge of writhing male bodies melts away as they descend upon one another until sweaty release. It’s this orgasm, however, that provides the dramatic catalyst informing the remainder of their night. During their heated exchange, they neglected to use protection, and since Hugo is HIV+, they seek out a 24-hour clinic for Theo to receive post-exposure prophylaxis. However, this provides them with an opportunity to plant the seeds of an idyllic courtship in the twilight hours, highlighting how innate dichotomies enhance both the prologue and the aftermath of pleasure’s procurement.
2. Misa Shimizu – Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001)
Japanese cinema indubitably corners the market on traversing the thin membrane separating sexual pleasure and pain, and Nagisa Oshima’s violent, erotic masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses (1976) remains the apex of this exploration (though many auteurs have entered similar territory, including Lars Von Trier with 2009’s Antichrist and Kim Ki-duk with 2013’s Moebius). There are countless other Japanese masters who have explored these motifs to various extremes, such as Takashi Miike with Ichi the Killer (2001), which opens with the titular character’s voyeuristic release of semen over the opening credits whilst observing a sex worker being assaulted by her pimp.
Hisayasu Satô’s filmography is defined by such antics, such as 1996’s Splatter: Naked Blood, in which a budding scientist sabotages his mother’s contraceptive experiment on three women by introducing a serum he invented that turns all painful experiences into orgasmically pleasurable possibility, devolving into drastic self-mutilation for its unwitting subjects.
But for his final film, Shohei Imamure crafted something much lighter with the memorably powerful sex fantasy in Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001), re-teaming with Misa Shimizu following 1997’s The Eel as woman whose ejaculations erupt like geysers. Circumstances bring laid-off businessman Yosuke from Tokyo into her orbit, portrayed by celebrated Japanese cinema mainstay Kōji Yakusho (recently of Wim Wenders’ acclaimed 2023 title Perfect Days). He’s searching for a treasure in a small seaside town but is immediately drawn to Shimizu’s Saeko, a woman who claims water collects in her body, requiring sex for its release. She’s fashioned as something of a mythical siren and Yosuke becomes obsessed with her watery spasms, even upon learning her last lover apparently drowned himself due to their chaotic relationship.
Subtexts on pollution and xenophobia enhance the backdrop of her mystical sexual prowess, but it’s overarchingly a metaphorical portrait of the ebbs and flows of flooding desires. Slant critic Ed Gonzalez deemed Imamura’s swan song “a delirious ode to the female orgasm,” and, indeed, it’s her latest relationship that allows Saeko to embrace a bodily function she’s felt ashamed of. Imamura resolves their romantic tension with a final ocean spray of her fluids followed by a rainbow. In other words, their sex is their salvation.
1. Delphine Seyrig – Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Topping this list is a film that fittingly contends with the notion of anti-climax: the 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielmann, 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by Chantal Akerman, who was, stunningly, only 25 when she made it. In essence, it’s a film about time more so than it is explicitly about gendered labor roles or sexual repression, yet it’s impossible not to reflect on such realities in discussing what happens to the titular character, played with exacting brilliance by Delphine Seyrig: a Belgian housewife whom we witness unravel over the course of several days. Time, inevitably, is also a calculated system of control, something that dictates our lives, our abilities, and potential. Having too much time or too little generates dysfunction.
Such is the case with Jeanne, a lonely, isolated widow dependent on adhering, it would appear, to the strict rigidities of her daily routine, which the three-hour-plus runtime painstakingly conveys. She cares for her son, a young man who appears to be somewhat oblivious about his mother. While he’s gone for the day, she moonlights as a sex worker by accepting a regular stream of clients (though her engagement in this labor is always off screen) and depositing her earnings into the tureen on the dining room table.
But Jeanne’s routine slowly begins to fray, small errors leading to domestic travesties like burning potatoes, making dinner with her son agonizingly embarrassing that evening. Later, try as she might, she cannot seem to make her coffee taste right, suggesting a contamination of her sphere that cannot be undone. Akerman at last lets us into the bedroom during one of Jeanne’s trysts, and despite herself, it would seem, she experiences an orgasm. The ultimate interruption of her routine, she quietly dresses and then murders the client.
While certainly not a pleasurable moment, Jeanne Dielman presents the experiencing of pleasure as a formidable disruption, a loss of control, and, perhaps most dangerously, the awakening to something we all inherently realize might dictate and control our behavior in our pursuit to reclaim it. In essence, not properly processing our body’s needs and its requirements tempts ruination. But no one, according to our cinematic reflections, has seemingly mastered the moderation required to navigate the desire to keep re-experiencing our own little deaths.
The realm of the cinematic orgasm is, ironically, akin to the threatening doctrines of religion, as seeing does not equate to believing.
In this case, you might not know it when you see it… but you’ll know it when you feel it.
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