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.to spice up the life of themind with some raunch and mayhem. 41Both Color of Night and Eyes Wide Shut were controversial sexual films beforethey ever hit the screen.The widely publicized censorship battle over the fullfrontal shots of Bruce Willis s penis and the ultrasecrecy of Kubrick s filmingcombined with the overheated rumors of steamy Cruise-Kidman sex scenes builthigh expectations in voyeuristic film audiences, expectations that both films spec-tacularly disappointed.While both films were surprising box-office flops (afterall the media hype), both predictably found strong second lives on home video.Their dark eroticism, while too kinky and disturbing for public viewing, fit quitenicely into  the privacy of your own home rubric of nineties sexual spin.The psychotherapists of Color of Night and Eyes Wide Shut were contempo-rary Jekyll and Hyde figures (as were nineties film audiences).Professionals byÏ%Sex and the Nineties 197day, wanderers of the sexual underworld by night, these psychotherapists found,perhaps, the most accurate representation of nineties sexuality in the Jekyll andHyde story Mary Reilly (1996).Nineties movie audiences kept up their outwardappearances by day and indulged their voyeuristic sexual adventuring via videoin the privacy of their own homes by night.In Mary Reilly, Doctor Jekyll (JohnMalkovich) is a serious psychotherapist sincerely involved with treating the child-abuse trauma of his housemaid, Mary Reilly (Julia Roberts), which has turned herinto a nearly mute wage slave.Yet he cannot control his own sexual deprivation.What Jekyll is reacting against by turning himself into Hyde, Victorian sexualrepression, is a perfectly fitting metaphor for the bleak AIDS-repressed sexuallandscape of the nineties.The gloomy sexual isolation of nineties life imposedJekyll-like solipsism and Hyde-like illicit desire upon everyone.Sexuality had tofind new ways to express itself and forge new identities to protect itself from socialharm.Nineties sexual spin turned everyone into Jekylls and Hydes, venturing outat night to gentlemen s clubs or staying in to watch pornographic videos.Other screen psychotherapists dealt with their own and their patients sexualproblems in less somber and sinister ways.The psychosex that surfaced in thenineties both affirmed well-known and documented sexual practices and show-cased newer ingenious reactions to the limitations of nineties sexuality.The psy-chotherapist, Dr.Mickler (Marlon Brando), in Don Juan De Marco (1995) is notat all the troubled, cursed solipsist in the vein of the Willis-Cruise-Malkovichsuccession of Jekylls.Brando s Dr.Mickler is an almost grandfatherly psychother-apist whose sexuality, like that of the nineties decade, has been cast into a state ofdormancy until he meets the Don Juan (Johnny Depp) of the movie s title.DonJuan De Marco, light, witty comedy that it is, also serves as a clear metaphor fornineties sexual spin.All of the women that this nineties Don Juan entices into hisdream world are sexually dormant but are sexually reinvigorated by Don Juan swit and imagination.It is as if the film is saying that, in the age of AIDS, onlycreative fantasy can keep the sexual appetites satisfied.Other psychosex noirs explore much more violent, less-romantic metaphorsfor spicing up the dormant sexuality of nineties life.As Don Juan De Marco refer-enced the romantic sexual creativity of Lord Byron s poetic hero, both Madonna sBody of Evidence (1993) and Roman Polanski s Bitter Moon (1994) referencedthe darker sexual imagination of the Marquis de Sade.One critic, comparing thepunky-fresh  trampy insolence of Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), her ruby-red smirk both a tease and a come-on a luscious advertisement forsin, to Madonna in Body of Evidence (1993) might well be defining the differ-ence between eighties and nineties sexuality:  Now, the exuberance the sen-sual invitation is gone. 42 With all of its S&M kinkiness, Body of Evidence isstill just another AIDS metaphor movie.In the courtroom drama that anchorsthe plot of Body of Evidence, Rebecca Carlson (Madonna) is literally a femmefatale.She is charged with killing her older, heart-damaged lover with sex.AhaWatson, death by sexual intercourse! Ironically, that exact outstanding premisedefined the major difference between eighties and nineties life.Like the darkpsychosex of Body of Evidence, sex in the nineties had become dangerous, painful,Ï%198 The Films of the Ninetiesand lethal.Polanski s Bitter Moon is equally AIDS metaphoric.The story is toldin flashback by Oscar (Peter Coyote), the wheelchair-bound and angry ex-loverof Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigneur), the voluptuous and extremely kinky youngwoman whom he has grown to hate and whose violent sexuality has destroyedhim, turned him into a dying shell of a human being. Beware kinky sex! thesefilms rather puritanically warn.It leads to danger, disease, and death.Perhaps the ultimate AIDS-warning metaphor film is Crash (1996) where sexand death come together nicely in the favorite action scenario of nineties filmgo-ers, metal-crunching car crashes.Of all the kinky fetishes that show up in thepsychosex noirs of the nineties, the sex-death metaphor of Crash at least toucheson one aspect of nineties sexual spin that the others have failed to explore.DavidCronenberg s film acknowledges the nineties sexual dependence upon technol-ogy rather than real flesh-on-flesh encounters for its thrills.In a decade wheresome of the most prominent aids to sexual fulfillment are electronic VCRs,vibrators, erotic music for strippers to dance to why not bring the ultimateAmerican sex machine, the automobile, into the vortex of sexual spin? Wherebefore, for example, in American Graffiti (1973), cars were simply sexual play-rooms; in Crash they have evolved for the torpid sexual nineties into the ultimate,most dangerous fantasy in which sex meets death at high speed.In a sexual cli-mate where the thrill is gone and the risk is oppressive, the need to break out,to flee the sexual boredom, becomes an obsession.Historically, when Americansfeel the need to break out of the narrowed margins of their lives as Jack Kerouacdid, inevitably they take to their cars.In the case of Crash as a nineties culturaldocument, both sex and speed kills.All of these kinky, outlandish, deviant, and extravagant psychosexual explora-tions are nothing more than substrategies within the overall sexual spin strategyof the nineties decade.They are desperate measures for coping with the isolation,the sexual dormancy, the loneliness, and the frustration of nineties sexual life [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]