The Very Unsexy Sex of HBO's Industry
HBO, to me, means sex. That's the implicit promise as that iconic static hiss fades in: you might get to see a titty. The network is obviously also behind some of the best TV ever made—Deadwood, The Sopranos, the first five seasons of Game of Thrones—because great TV and seeing a titty are not mutually exclusive. That’s where HBO excels, normally: titillation that also feels intellectually stimulating, or at least not embarrassing. The network gave us Sex in the City; it gave us Euphoria; it gave us True Blood, and for decades it has been unafraid of giving us steamy sex that pushes the boundaries. (Or, at least the boundaries set up by cable TV.) Industry, which dramatizes a group of young and good-looking graduates competing for jobs at a prestigious London investment bank, is HBO’s latest entry in this tradition.
There’s sex in dingy bathrooms, at the company holiday party, with new recruits to prove a point. One banker sends her coworker photos of her boyfriend going down on her, another does some ketamine, hooks up with a stranger at a club, then heads straight to work. But this time the premium cable sex is not particularly titillating. In fact, it’s kind of horrifying. Because, as these hyper-driven kids are being introduced to the world of high finance, everything is transactional, including boning. The show goes so far as to treat assault and harassment as something to be weaponized at work. But the consensual actual sex on the show doesn’t stray far from that mode of thinking, either: a threesome with two hot coworkers may seem steamy, but as with pricing a tricky options trade, the real action is in puzzling out who benefits and how.
This isn’t the first HBO vehicle to explore sex as a commodity. In The Deuce, for instance, which moved through the seedy haze of ‘70s Times Square, the characters are literally having sex for money, and it's often distressing. But that show can be quite hot, because it has real friction and danger. (The crimes those characters commit actually get prosecuted, unlike any of the wrongdoing that no doubt happens daily at Pierpoint, the bank in Industry.) The Deuce is also arguably helped out by the shabby glamour and funky music of the 70s; there’s very little inherently sexy about the fluorescently lit offices in which Industry takes place.
High pressure jobs can be hot on screen (I’m thinking of every restaurant movie I’ve ever seen), but here, not a single character knows how to be off the clock enough to actually have good sex. Gus, who spends most of his time glancing longingly across the office at his ex, talks business in his Tinder chats. Two grads talk about the size of their bonuses and how they’re going to spend them in lieu of foreplay. In the hottest moment of the season, Harper, a grad with a less-than-legitimate resume, has an ex-friend-with-benefits fly to London to make her Thanksgiving dinner while shirtless. He spoon feeds her a sweet potato casserole before laying her out on the dining room table to eat her out—then she picks a fight with him and kicks him out because he might jeopardize an important work relationship.
Yasmin, a rich girl who at first seems to lack the killer instinct required for this job, is the character with the most fleshed out life outside of work—if dating a guy with long hair counts as a life outside of work. She turns out to be the most transactional of any of them. She cheats on her long haired beau with someone she’s competing with at work, and not out of any apparent attraction, but because she’s into the idea of humiliating and dominating her sex partners. (Robert, a hard-partying grad who seeks approval from everyone and gets it from no one, is too desperate for crumbs of approval to not play along.)
Virtually every sex act in the show either begins or ends as a challenge: Yasmin dares Robert to eat his cum off the mirror after jerking him off at the office; Yasmin’s supervisor hires a stripper to give her a lap dance in front of clients to see if she’ll be too humiliated to go along with it; even non-banker Todd agrees to make a fake transcript for Harper if she’ll get nude via video chat (“If I can make your bank think you graduated, what’s that worth to you?”)
None of the characters seem to be able to get away from the high stress, low-glamour pull of Pierpoint. They’re being indoctrinated: The company demands they give everything to the project of becoming a Pierpoint employee, and that includes their bodies, whether it means chugging Red Bulls to stay up through the night or ignoring a client grabbing their crotch. You are not meant to have boundaries in the program; you’re meant to say yes to anything that’s asked of you. And even when left to their own devices, when they finally get away from the bosses, the characters can’t seem to break out of that bleak, commodified way of being. You live and die at your desk (literally, in the case of one overdosing grad.) This is why everyone there is trying to have sex with each other (they don’t have time for relationships with anyone else) and why they can’t make any of it actually hot. At first, it’s not even clear why they don’t leave Pierpoint and take their highly marketable skills elsewhere. As I watched, I wanted to personally pay for each of them to get a massage and weekend off—before I remembered they make more money each year than I make in five.
That’s the key to understanding everything in this show, including the boning: these kids are greedy. The terrible sex isn’t written in to titillate, it’s in there to illuminate what sort of people are onscreen. This isn’t the first HBO show to use sex this way—it’s a key part of the network’s highborow-but-horny playbook. But unlike, say, the boomtown gunslingers and painted ladies of Deadwood, or the narcissistic literary Brooklyn of Girls, where titilation and sex for the story’s sake have at least some overlap, the depiction of high finance is too bleak to be even a little horny. Industry is above all a damning depiction of the kind of young person that would put up with being indoctrinated into a high-powered financial institution. They are having their brains rewired to only care about winning and willingly giving up any sense of what they actually desire besides money. Their bosses push them too far, their company pushes them too far, they push themselves too far. Why not have sex that way, too? At work and in bed, the question isn’t “What do you want?” but rather, “What will you put up with?” And there’s nothing sexy about that.
A horny candle could be just what your burnt-out pandemic sex game needs.
Originally Appeared on GQ
