The Sexual Revolution

Why are all those 1960’s avant garde orgy movies so BORING?

I honestly want to know.

So you have the sexual revolution and everyone’s supposed to have orgies all the time, and then you have the avant garde that’s like “fuck Hollywood and the French New Wave, lets film these orgies and blow everyone’s minds,” and those two things together really sound like they ought to be kind of exciting and wild and indeed mind-blowing, but instead you end up with a bunch of slack, half-asleep people on LSD kind of rolling around in various muds or body paints, slapping at each others’ genitals in what amounts to a really grim and unfortunate parody of the actual sex act. And, because everyone is on hallucinogens, this all goes on for so much longer than it seems possible any human could find it interesting in any way.

I’ve recently seen a lot of these films screened and each time you can tell the audience is like “Oh man, we’re about to see some SHIT” and then halfway through everybody’s secretly looking at their phones to see what time it is. We just watched a Brian de Palma film called “Dionysus in 69” that is ostensibly an experimental stage version of Euripides’s The Bacchae in which the audience is invited up onstage for a massive orgy accompanied by people sort of banging tamborines and singing tunelessly. Euripides would have been so proud, can we all agree? TRULY MY VISION IS REALIZED.

And part of it is performed by this experimental dance troupe, so it makes sense that it’s sort of stylized and not actually enjoyable/sexy, but then the audience is supposed to get up onstage and take off their clothes and start grabbing boobs and being proud to be naked, but it just ends up being a bunch of super uncomfortable and/or unconscious people sort of flailing around, and one fully-clothed dude ogling people and dancing awkwardly. Then 20 minutes later somebody reads from The Bacchae. There are NEVER BONERS in these films, this is what amazes me. How can you have a heterosexual orgy without boners? I mean, that’s just science. I realize that avant garde filmmakers are trying to make weird cool art, rather than literal pornography, so it’s not like these films are supposed to be super erotic or anything. But aren’t at least the people involved in an actual orgy supposed to derive pleasure from it? Maybe I’m unclear as to what an “orgy” generally entails. I thought people were supposed to be fucking and enjoying it. But all the women are asleep, and then it’s just like two guys shaking somebody’s boobs in different directions at once for 20 minutes while a pregnant lady does backbends. And then the camera zooms in and out on a gaping dry vagina for 20 more minutes.

It’s very strange. I guess I was born too late. Or else it really is just about the drugs–I TA’d for a class that had a unit on 60’s-70’s psychedelic rock and the professor insisted on making the students understand that you can’t really understand this music without understanding that everyone was completely out of their minds on psychedelic drugs while listening to it. Thus the 20 minute drum solo in the middle of the 1973 live version of “Moby Dick,” as well as the audience’s 100% enjoyment of said drum solo, becomes explicable. Perhaps these boring orgy movies are similar. I do hope that if I ever attend an actual orgy it will be more fun, though.

I’m probably just too square. Obviously lots of people think these movies are amazing. But give me Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” any day of the week and twice on sunday, before you give me “Christmas on Earth” or whatever. Sex and the body is a crucial and fascinating subject but how many gaping vaginas do you really need to see before you’re like “oh yeah, the body.”

Brian de Palma: still an asshole, even in 1969. How far back do you have to go to find a Brian de Palma who is not an asshole? Perhaps we must journey inside his mother’s womb. Now THAT would be an avant garde film.