by Catherine Gillligan
Contributor
Sam Levinson, son of filmmaker Barry Levinson, has gotten himself in trouble once again. Perhaps best known for his sparkly teen torture-porn series Euphoria, Levinson is now responsible for yet another behemoth of an HBO program by the name of The Idol. The show stars eating disorder Twitter’s favorite nepotism baby, Lily-Rose Depp and Canadian pop sensation Abel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd. In it, Depp’s character Jocelyn, a troubled pop star begins a complicated relationship with Tesfaye’s character, the leader of a new-age cult. Director Amy Seimetz filmed about 80% of the first season before leaving the project altogether last April, supposedly due to the fact that Tesfaye felt she was giving the show too much of a “female perspective.” After Seimetz’s departure, Levinson took over as director and chose to essentially reshoot the entire project, blowing 75 million dollars in the process. Production nightmares aside, the show is now catching even more flack for reports of various violent sexual scenes included in Levinson’s revised script. Among them include a scene in which Tesfaye’s character beats Depp’s character, giving him an erection, and a scene in which Depp’s character is made to carry an egg in her vagina and told that if she drops or cracks said egg that Tesfaye’s character will refuse to “rape” her further (though it’s worth noting that both of these scenes appear to have been cut).
Levinson is no stranger to including controversial sex scenes in his work. Euphoria, one of the most popular teen dramas in recent memory, contains explicit depictions of high school girls participating in BDSM, DDLG, and webcam “domming”. Sexual content that you likely would’ve had to seek out on a handful of seedy websites 15 years ago can now be viewed from the comfort of your living room every Sunday night. In my mind, it’s not wrong to characterize significant swaths of contemporary American pop culture as pornographic. It’s easy to dismiss the increasing ubiquity of graphic sex scenes in shitty teen melodramas, but it really does seem reflective of a larger culture of sexual exploitation in the internet age. “Pornsickness,” as the term has been coined, is a uniquely 21st century affliction, one where the sheer saturation of violent, exploitative pornography accessible online warps people’s perceptions of sex in ways they likely aren’t even aware of. As said pornographic content permeates more and more into the mainstream, one can imagine that this is a problem that will only worsen with time.
Due to all of these factors, there’s a growing number of young people attempting to push back against the “pornification” of the media they consume. Unfortunately, most of them seem to be woefully misguided at best and troublingly censorious at worst. Pejoratively dubbed “puriteens,” there is a growing online movement of Zoomers who oppose what they perceive to be gratuitous sexual content in television and film. It’s not uncommon to stumble across threads with tens of thousands of likes discussing why sex scenes in movies are unnecessary, problematic, or even “violating” in some sense, as the audience did not “consent” to them. It’s also not uncommon to see 17 year olds with Picrew avi’s espousing rhetoric about on screen “indecency” that wouldn’t be out of place on a “Moms for Liberty” Facebook group, sans the Tumblr cadence and a few choice buzzwords.
As someone who has both a hatred of the porn industry and a love of vile, perverted cinema, I find myself caught between a rock and a hard place when discussing shows like The Idol. On the one hand, I find most of Levinson’s work to be unimaginative, high budget fetish content, the multimillion dollar wet dream of some Hollywood jerk-off whom I don’t feel particularly inclined to defend. On the other hand, when a piece of media is condemned for containing graphic sexual content, I feel wary. Levinson is not, and never will be Waters, Solondz, Cronenberg, Araki, or even Korinne - but when he’s labeled a pedophile on Twitter for showing teens having sex on screen, I can’t help but feel that so many more compelling, groundbreaking filmmakers are being condemned alongside him. Typically, I’d say that no one who’s frontal lobe is still the consistency of cottage cheese should have their online opinions scrutinized too harshly. However, this “puriteen” movement seems to have unfortunately coincided with a much larger, much more insidious national push to remove “explicit content” from books, TV, movies, advertising and more broadly, public life- which when we read between the lines, essentially refers to anything gender-bending, queeny or worth something creatively.
So what’s a girl to do? Don’t watch The Idol (or do, I don’t give a shit). Stop spending so much time on social media reading the opinions of people who are still in Algebra 1. Donate money to LGBT organizations in Tennessee and Florida. Watch that awesome scene from Crash (1996) where two characters have kinky lesbian sex in the wreckage of a car accident. And pray that boring pornsick perverts like Levinson are replaced by a fresh crop of innovative, artistic perverts expeditiously, if not for the sake of culture, than at least for the sake of my Twitter feed.
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