Why aren't movies sexy anymore? Karina Longworth uses the 'Erotic 80s' as case study on You Must Remember This
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There was a time when movies — and American pop culture — pulsed with sex and a latent eroticism that seeped into everything from film to fashion to magazines.
In the latest season of her hit Hollywood history podcast, You Must Remember This, host and creator Karina Longworth delves into what she has dubbed the "Erotic 80s." The season delves into the pre-occupation with sex in pop culture of the era, deep-diving into icons like Bo Derek and Richard Gere and film trends such as the normalization of pornography with projects like Deep Throat and the complicated gender politics of erotic thrillers.
It's a fascinating subject in and of itself, but it takes on extra meaning when cast against the recent audience (and media) outcry that movies simply are not erotic (or even mildly sexy) anymore. Whether it's the fault of the infantilization of movie-going through superhero franchises, a bizarre hyper-cautious backlash to the #MeToo movement, or some other strange cultural cocktail remains a vigorous and open debate.
Longworth isn't so much interested in that conversation as she is in presenting the social and sexual mores of a bygone era, critiquing them, and letting her listeners draw their own conclusions about our current cultural moment.
"[That discourse] was an element of it, for sure," Longworth tells EW of the impetus and themes of this season. "But I don't really want to talk about contemporary Hollywood. I like to talk about the past, and hopefully, it helps people understand something about the moment that we're in right now."
"Erotic 80s" premieres April 5 (and it will be followed later this fall by another season, "Erotic 90s"), so we caught up with Longworth to find out what inspired this season, what her pandemic research process has been like, and which handful of films are requisite viewing before listening.
Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock; Everett Collection (2)
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The vast majority of your seasons, with the exception of the back half of Polly Platt, have been centered a further back in time. What made you want to go a bit more modern?
KARINA LONGWORTH: Since the first year of the podcast, I've had people ask, "When are you going to do more episodes about the 80s and 90s?" So, it was always in the back of my mind that that was on the table. It's part of Hollywood's first century. But I just started watching a lot of these movies in 2020 after the pandemic started — some for the first time and some I was revisiting — and I wanted to live in this moment a little. There were so many things to talk about, and there's this issue of why Hollywood movies have taken the idea of talking about adults' actual sex lives off the table. It did seem worth doing to talk about this period in popular culture, the most recent period in which sex was a huge part of popular culture and a huge part of movies. Even though not everybody wanted it to be.
Was there one major inciting incident for this season? Or was it an accumulation of things you were noticing?
I don't think there was an inciting incident. I have to be honest, it's really, really difficult for me to come up with ideas for podcasts. If I do come up with an idea, even if it doesn't seem like it's that great of an idea, if I can figure out a way to stretch it across a lot of episodes, I usually end up doing it because otherwise I just won't make podcasts at all.
Both in this era that the show is covering and the corresponding 90s season, how much do you feel TV also plays a role with greater access to cable and things like that? Is that part of the story for you?
I'm definitely going to talk about cable. I'm going to talk about VHS. Yeah, that's an element of the story, but I'm not really talking about TV shows except for Red Shoe Diaries, which started as a movie.
Your research is always very in-depth. But I would think maybe sometimes it's more straightforward, especially if it's particularly biographical. This season feels a lot more analytical. Can you tell me about the research process, and if it changed a lot from previous seasons?
Since the pandemic started, it's been a huge challenge to do research. Because I can't go anywhere. I've had to choose seasons that I knew I could do the research by material that I could order through the mail. This whole season is almost entirely based on vintage magazines that I bought. That is where the analytical stuff comes in because it becomes media criticism. It's about the movies, it's film criticism, it's film history, but it's also film historiography, in the sense of it's about how these things were written about and how Hollywood communicated the ideas that it wanted to communicate through the media, and how the media reflected how these ideas were being received by the public.
Starting with the Polly Platt season, you have steadily increased the amount of pre-recorded interviews that you've looped into the season. Is it just that your access to that has gotten greater or what has driven that shift? Will we see a lot of that this season?
The Polly Platt season I had to do that because the season was based on an unpublished, unfinished memoir that had a lot of holes in it. There wasn't anywhere to go for this information. There was no book. There wasn't any way to answer these questions other than talking to people who knew Polly. That's not what this season is at all. I haven't done any interviews for this season yet. Never say never.As the season unfolds, I might decide that it's important. There could be a version of this story in which I did interviews for every episode, but I wasn't really interested in doing that. I was more interested in doing this media criticism.
OK, but I would say your Dean Martin - Sammy Davis Jr. season featured a lot more of their own words or their contemporaries' own words. Would you say that's something you included a lot of here?
A little bit. It depends on the episode. There's a lot of that in episode 2 about Bo Derek because she did every talk show. If I haven't used that material in the past, often it's because it doesn't exist, or it would be an issue of doing archival audio research, which is not what I do. When that stuff is available, it's fun to use and I'll use it. But it's not right for every episode or every story.
What would you say is the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing this season?
I'm still so deep in the research that it's nowhere near finished so that's hard to say. But I was definitely surprised by the extent to which feminism was as anti-pornography and anti-sex as it was in the early 80s. And how that creates a dialogue with this moment in popular culture.
What would you say has been the most challenging aspect to break down into something that can be digested via podcast episode?
For me, the most challenging thing is having to start from scratch from one episode to the next. It is easier when you're doing something biographical, when you have one or two people's life stories as the structure. Whereas this, it's like, I finish one episode and then I have nothing for the next episode, except for maybe my notes about the movie. I have to go and find the story every time. That's really hard. I don't know if that's really an answer to the question you asked, but that's the most challenging thing.
You mention in episode 1 that so much of this content was part of your formative years of engaging with pop culture ,and I was curious if you feel like you've been learning a lot about yourself?Or has your perspective on how you digested this growing up shifted as you've taken this more media criticism approach?
I don't know. There's certainly been an element of introspection. I don't know if it comes from the media criticism. I think it more comes from the fact that I was alive when these movies came out. I do have memories of a lot of this stuff in the culture. Richard Gere has been a personal heartthrob of mine ever since Pretty Woman in 1990. So, the idea of talking about him as a heartthrob and deconstructing the way the media presented him versus how he actually comes across in these movies is really interesting to me. But I don't think it's really that the magazines cause me to be introspective. If anything the movies do more.
You mentioned many feminists being against this type of content in the era. How much is a sense of empowerment through female sexuality versus objectification and that tension between them at the heart of what you're talking about this season?
it's involved in a lot of the episodes. A lot of these movies, what's exciting about them to me is that they're not one thing. There are a lot of things at once and some of it feels progressive to our eyes in 2022. And some of it really doesn't. There's a difference between the way the movies were marketed and received in the 80s versus the way that we can look at them now. Flashdance for me is a movie that is really exciting because it's about a young woman that completely centers her experience and what she wants. That's something that doesn't even happen enough in movies today. It still feels fresh and radical. But at the time when it came out, it blew people's minds. They couldn't get past this idea that it was a joke that there would be a beautiful welder who was also a stripper who wanted to be a ballet dancer. Some of these movies might feel dated to some people, especially in terms of things like sexuality and sexism and feminism. But you can separate out things about them that are not dated at all and feel very modern.
If people want a primer for the season, what three to five films should they watch?
American Gigolo. 9 1/2 Weeks. 10 because people don't watch that movie or talk about it. And it's really interesting. People have seen Fatal Attraction, so maybe not that one. Maybe Body Double.
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