Upstream - [TEASER] Sex, Desire, and the Neoliberal Subject

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

You can listen to the full episode "The Puritanical Eye" by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. What do sex scenes in the film have to do with the crushing weight of capitalism? How have our bodily desires and passions been ambushed, commodified, and exhausted by the constant, catastrophic impacts of a system that alienates as it extracts? How have we been trained to conflate consumption and activism under neoliberalism, so that the very act of consuming limits our political aspirations and actions? And why the hell are there so few sex scenes in cinema these days? These are just some of the questions we explore in this episode as Robert reads a beautifully-written and wide-reaching piece by friend of the show Carlee Gomes (co-host of the podcast Hit Factory): “The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire.” Further resources: “The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire,” by Carlee Gomes Hit Factory Carlee on Twitter Related episodes: Upstream: Capitalist Realism with Carlee Gomes Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Hey everybody, Robert here. Welcome back to another Patreon episode where I'll be doing another reading. I am really, really excited for today's reading. It's by a comrade and good friend who I'm constantly learning from and who I have a great deal of intellectual respect for. You may recognize her from our episode on capitalist realism, Carly Gomes of the podcast Hit Factory. I've actually been meaning to read this piece by Carly for a very long time now, so I'm really excited to finally be getting to it. It's titled, The Puritanical Eye, Hypermediation, Sex on Film, and the disavowal of desire.

And so right there, I think you can already tell that this is going to be a really, really interesting reading. And so the piece was published, I believe last year in November, and I'll link to the piece as usual in the show notes. But before we get started, please make sure that you follow Hit Factory, follow them on Twitter, sign up for their Patreon. Carly and her co-host Erin are really, you know, not just really great people, but they have such awesome conversations about 90s films and the politics of those films on the podcast. So I couldn't really recommend it anymore.

If you're looking for a good starting point, my absolute favorite episode, honestly, not even just a hit factory, but like, this might be one of my favorite podcast episodes ever. Their conversation with Aaron Thorpe of the Trillbillies on the film, The Matrix Resurrections, which no, it's not a 90s film. You're probably thinking that to yourself, but it is sort of part of a film series that

began in the 90s and it's a continuation of a certain conversation. So I think we can kind of, you know, we can kind of just think of that one as a bit of an outlier in terms of it not being from the 90s, but such a good conversation. And Della and I have also been guests on the show too. So definitely check out Hit Factory and yeah, let's dive into this piece. I'm really, really excited to read this. The Puritanical Eye, Hypermediation, Sex on Film,

and The Disavowal of Desire by Carly Gomes. Introduction. Are movies having enough sex? Winomi Malone is told by the owner of the casino she's headlining at in Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls 1995, quote, you are the show, end quote. We understand Verhoeven's obvious point about the commodification of sex in America,

but there's a deeper meaning to that statement, and the statement of much of Verhoeven's work, including Showgirls, that speaks to the connection between our bodies, our bodily experiences, and the spectacle of consumerism. That at a certain point in time, our corporeal existence was still a space to find thrills, particularly within mainstream Hollywood cinema, to find moments of ecstasy and pleasure, to luxuriate in the feeling of being pulled in by spectacle, being implicated in it, rather than experiencing it at a remove with our bodily involvement suppressed or blocked altogether.

There was a time when, as moviegoers, we were part of the show, when our participation in the story, with our hearts, our minds, our bodies, was part of the experience of watching the film, and essentially completed the work itself. That time is gone. If you ask Paul Verhoeven if movies are having enough sex, he'll patently answer, no. In an interview with Variety in July of 2021, Verhoeven says, quote, There's been a general shift towards puritanism. I think there's a misunderstanding about sexuality in the United States. Sexuality is the most essential element of nature.

I'm always amazed people are shocked by sex in movies." He'd be right. There is a general shift towards Puritanism not just in movies, but in broader popular culture and our political realities, asserted by both liberal and conservative politics to varying degrees. Police budgets are bigger than they've ever been. Abortion rights are being repealed across the country. Countless states are passing dangerous and harmful legislation, ostensibly outlong transgender

people's right to exist. Certainly, the hashtag MeToo movement has changed our societal posture towards sex, with benefits and drawbacks. The culture wars insist we focus our attention on artifacts and language of culture, rather than on our material realities. The list is endless. How should we understand the sex scene in Hollywood, and the absence of sex scenes that were so much more prolific in films of the near past like

Basic Instinct in 1992 and Showgirls 1995, within the context of the broader landscape of the commodification of all aspects of our lived experience, including sex, our bodies, our emotions, our relationships, under neoliberal capitalism. Just as a quick aside, I'm really looking forward to seeing where Carly is taking this because I think some of the most interesting conversations that I've had with Carly are about this sort of commodification of all aspects of our lived experience. But I've never actually spoken with her about this idea of the sex scene and how this relates to that. So yeah, definitely very much excited about seeing that connection, how she draws that connection. And yeah, let's jump back in. The subsection is the sex scene in the algorithm driven market oriented age.

In the last 25 years, the time since the erotic thriller and more broadly speaking, the mid-budget adult drama had its heyday, sex, its depiction, its implication, its exploration, and importantly, our desire and literacy for it has steadily disappeared. Unpacking the complexities of this shift is no simple task. There are several important symbiotic dynamics at work here. The changes to the modes, the actual processes, the mechanisms, and mediums of moviemaking over the last 10-15 years in particular. The changes in the modes through which we consume film and media. The continued expansion of the free market and its demands for higher profit margins and less risk,

particularly in the film industry, and, of course, implied in all of the aforementioned is the continued immiseration of a pleasure and sustenance-deprived populace living under the late stages of neoliberal capitalism. These dynamics have resulted in a chicken-egg type phenomenon, wherein the increased commodifications of film and the ideas and images contained in them, and the winnowing away of our material stability has left little room for sex in movies, and simultaneously bludgeoned the appetite for it out of us.

The fetishization of the free market, deregulation, and privatization has been working its dark magic on our lives for decades. But things have escalated at a rapid clip in the last 20 years. The crash of dot-coms at the Millennium, September 11th, the housing market crash of 2008, the 2016 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing recession we're still in the throes of, and the mass violence we are witnessing against the Palestinians through screens in the palms of our hands are just some of the paradigm-shifting events of the last two decades.

During this time, the consolidation of media ownership has reduced the number of major studios, distributors, and exhibitors in the film industry, alongside the rise of on-demand viewing in streaming platforms and social media apps as primary modes of media consumption. What's emerged is a highly competitive environment where the profit demands are higher than ever, and films are now increasingly designed by boardrooms and artificially intelligent algorithms. In his essay for Vox, Can Monoculture Survive the Algorithm, Kyle Cheka writes, quote, The algorithm is a replacement for our internal monologues and our judgments about what we want to consume. Streaming's passivity is different from linear TV, but in the end, it's still passive. The use of market research, test screen quote, and target specific demographics has led to a definitive

homogenization of media and film. Just a quick aside, this is the idea of pandering to the lowest common denominator or what is perceived as being the lowest common denominator. And Carly mentioned this above, which is like, I think really, really accurate is this desire not to offend. And the desire not to offend is this sort of like evolutionarily stable strategy that capitalism has found, because any kind of pushing to the margins, any kind of pushing people to think

differently, to be uncomfortable, like people don't inherently immediately want to do that necessarily. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time or it takes some challenging to really push the margins of what you're comfortable with. And why put people in that position that might potentially alienate them or might not result in like immediate profit accumulation when you can just result in immediate profit accumulation, when you can just whitewash everything, when you can just kind of suck any kind of life out of everything so that all we're doing is we're watching the same sort of cookie cutter boring scripts that just, you know, they don't challenge you. It's actually really interesting because we talked about this in the episode with Carly on capitalist realism.

In fact, I'm going to pull up a quote from that conversation that I think is really relevant to bring in here. Okay, so this is a quote from the book Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. It's actually a quote within the book by Adam Curtis. And I don't remember if we actually touched on this in the episode that we did with Carly. We had so many notes for that episode and the episode itself was super long, much longer than what we actually ended up keeping in the final version. But yeah, I'm going to go ahead and read from this.

This is Adam Curtis. He's a documentary filmmaker. As a quick aside, his work is also amazing. I would recommend a good starting point for his work to be the Century of the Self. It's a whole series. You can find it on YouTube. Okay. This is the quote in Mark Fisher's capitalist realism text.

The quote is by Adam Curtis. What people suffer from, Curtis claims, is being trapped within themselves. In a world of individualism, everyone is trapped within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations. Our job as public service broadcasters is to take people beyond the limits of their own self, and until we do, that will carry on declining. The BBC should realize that. I have an idealistic view, but if the BBC could do that, taking people beyond their own selves, it will renew itself in a way that jumps over the competition. The competition is obsessed by serving people in their little selves.

And in a way, actually, Murdoch, for all his power, is trapped by the self. That's his job, to feed the self. In the BBC, it's the next step forward. It doesn't mean we go back to the 1950s and tell people how to dress what we do is we say we can free you from yourself and people would love it and so I think where that quote kind of intersects with what Carly is talking about is this catering on the basis of the need for to secure capital on the basis of the need for to secure capital accumulation, this catering to people's little selves, their lower selves, their selves that are afraid to grow to be uncomfortable.

And what it does ultimately is it infantilizes people. And I don't know, if you listen to like advertisements, I think that's one of the places where this infantilization of the US populace just like really shines very, very brightly is in advertising. People are infantilized, like the way that the scripts are written, the depictions of people is really disgusting. I'm trying to think of a good example right off the top of my head, but I feel like you guys probably know what I'm talking about, right? Like people are just depicted as these like, unintelligent, happy-go-lucky, like a lot going along with the flow.

There's this very certain type of humor that like almost pokes fun at the U S consumer while at the same time, trying to appeal to the U S consumer in the most infantile way. And I think that's like, yeah, I mean, it's a phenomenon that exists all over in terms of just not advertising, but I think in the film industry in general. And in the case of the quote by Adam Curtis, also in journalism, right? Like he's talking about the BBC because he, you know, he works with the BBC. But I mean, if you look at the way that Americans are given the news,

and let's just strip aside everything in terms of like manufacturing consent and the invention of reality and how the news is really, you know, it's like corporate news, it's capitalist news, like I think we all kind of get that already. But like the way that that manifests is through this dumbing down of the news. Like we can't even be trusted to be given any kind of like deep analysis. I think if you live abroad and you see how, or even if you go back 50 years and you see how the American public was treated with like some modicum of respect, like if you look

at any of the mainstream news outlets, like the fucking utter contempt that they have for the average American is palpable. And it's just, yeah, it's all encompassing. And so, yeah, I'm really loving where Carly is going with this. Let's get back to it. This was a clip from our Patreon episode,

Sex, Desire, and the Neoliberal Subject. to it. backlog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to. You'll also be helping keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream Podcast or at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.