In Jack Goes Boating, which I recently saw at the Public Theatre off-Broaday, featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman, a couple discuss nothing particularly interesting while the title character (played by Hoffman himself, if that makes it better) fingers his girlfriend. For like 10 minutes. Straight. You almost feel less stimulated than the actress who has to fake that painfully pitiful orgasm 8 shows a week.
Later, I turned on my TV to find a married couple talking about their family, finances and future plans. A rather lackluster scene, made no more lustrous by the fact that the couple was fornicating the whole time. (I use the term fornicating, because it was as clinical and unsexy as it gets - at least I hope it doesn't get less sexy that.) This was on the most recent episode of The Riches, the new “hit drama" (I use that term loosely, perhaps referring to hit-you-over-the-head and it's-a-tragedy-that-this-in-on-tv, respectively) featuring Minnie Driver (why Minnie, why?) and comedian Eddie Izzard. (I know, Eddie Izzard, in reversed drag, as a completely average straight man. It’s like camp backwards, and I have no idea what a gender-theorist would say about that.)
Back to the task at hand which is: sex. Or more aptly: sex and conversation therein. Everywhere I seem to look these days (and pay-either for in the form of a ticket or cable) no one shuts up during sex. And I don’t mean dirty talk or tender yet awkward affection a la every teen coming (entendre intended) of age film out there. It’s not sexy. It’s not sensational. It’s not even substantive. It’s just boring, It’s mundane discussion, that could be seen at a kitchen table, a coffee shop, or even post- coitus if that's your thing.
So my question is as many-fold as the number of barely noticeable orgasms I’ve been forced to witness lately. Is this a failing of theatrical convention? Post-post modern popular culture is just plain boring? The new kitchen sink, is perhaps the bed? Is it that art is more and more mundane and small and un-theatrical by the second?
Or is it our view of sex itself? In the last season of the incomparable (another term I use loosely) Sex and The City, Charlotte and Harry discuss his conversion to Judaism matter-of-factly during sex. (She’s on top and leading the conversation, so maybe we can write that off as metaphoric staging?) Are we just seeing the outcome of the 'sex and the city generation'? Is it the old adage that sex has been so desensitized and mass produced for so long - so now it's the new kitchen sink? OR, is it perhaps a meta-theatrical comment about how sex is just as mundane as the discussion of coffee filters and mortgages?
Maybe writers and directors are just getting lazy. Or maybe, they’re getting tired of being told by producers and the public alike, that sex sells. Is that it? Am I being cynical and missing how this is all indicative of some big progressive cultural shift? A subversive statement on the part of those who have started to say: Ok, you want sex? Well we’re going to make it as boring and inconsequential and monotonous as possible. Take that pervy public and producers alike! To which I must say, here here you rogue boat-rockers! Too bad what we get out of the deal is some very boring entertainment. Could somebody rebel against that, please?
