Films push boundary of onscreen sex

If anything, it's the independent films outside the Hollywood studio system which are likely to test the boundaries between porn and erotica. John Cameron Mitchell, director of the avant-garde indie "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," is seeking financing for a comedy that will include real sex. In the meantime, everyone is waiting to see how "The Brown Bunny" fares.

"It'll be interesting to see if Chloë Sevigny's career gets hurt by this," says Joseph McBride, assistant professor in the cinema department of San Francisco State University, who observes that "Showgirls" torpedoed the career of its star, Elizabeth Berkley. Ms. Sevigny, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for "Boys Don't Cry," parted ways with the William Morris Agency in January. Many speculated the agency had been unhappy with the actress because of "The Brown Bunny."

Hollywood has always had a snobbish disdain for the pornography industry and for porn actresses who have tried to cross over into the mainstream, Mr. McBride says, so it's unlikely that many actresses will follow Sevigny's lead.

The pornucopia of explicit movies is, in large part, a reaction to the often adolescent approach of Hollywood movies: When sex isn't being depicted comedically as a form of male humiliation - think of any Ben Stiller comedy or "American Pie" - it's treated as little more than an obligatory scene wherein actors interrupt the narrative of a story to titillate the audience.

Mr. Kelly favors the idea of directors treating sex more seriously and understanding it as a universal, defining human theme. Still, he wonders whether it's possible to include actual sex in a film without it becoming a stunt.

Every movie has some degree of reality, observes Gregg Kilday, a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter. Some actors actually perform dangerous stunts for an action scene. Similarly, when two stars kiss on screen, they're not faking the act. What precludes directors and audiences from demanding that actors engage in actual sex is taste, decorum, and social mores.

The latest wave of edgy directors deplore such artifice. "What's wrong with showing sex?" demanded Mr. Winterbottom after screening "Nine Songs" at this year's Cannes Film Festival. One argument is that scenes of actual sex in a movie can serve to heighten realism in a story.

But Mr. Kilday says the effect is so jarring for viewers that the opposite is true. "The fact that two actors may be engaged in sex somehow becomes too real, and suddenly you're not watching a fictional representation," he says.

Audience reaction of that sort is likely to check further demand for onscreen sex.

"The truth is not necessarily arrived at through the actual doing of the deed," says Linda DeLibero, associate director of film and media studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "If that were so, there just couldn't really be such a thing as art."

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