March 8, 2004
Rock Star Quote of the Week
Nikki Sixx: The girls want to fuck the band and the band wants to get laid. Hey, just do it and get it over with. Actually, we keep points...
Vince Neil: Yeah, you get 10 points for a centerfold-type chick, one point for a good-looking chick, and five demerit points for an ugly one...
Nikki Sixx: But the ugly chicks are cool 'cause they'll do anything you want. Anything!
-- MOTLEY CRUE proving that romance is not, in fact, dead
Not the “all-time greatest,” not an obligatory “top 10,” not concerned with BASIC INSTINCT, Godard or Tarkovsky, just The Six Sexiest Scenes In My DVD Collection...
THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999)
Artist: Sofia Coppola
Subject: Kirsten Dunst
Beginning at 1:17:54, with a vision of pre-Raphaelite beauty hunched in half-shadow, spaghetti-strap languidly pushed back up over willowy shoulder, and closing at 1:19:46 with a resigned exhale and backwards look—all sleepy lids, fetishized chemical wisp, and road-to-Golgotha fatalism—this scene just kills like a bloodthirsty old-Hollywood diva on PCP. For these few precious seconds, Kirsten is every luridly beautiful painting by Waterhouse or Rossetti—grieving eyes downcast in Messianic self-pity; every film-noir vamp; the embodiment of a grandiose, Radcliffe-heroine-come-to-earth blueprint, a cigarettes-as-sexy, sadness-as-sexy archetype colliding in a flush of lipstick and candy with the essence of insouciant girlishness. She is the Ideal—everything at once, an Elysian fictional figure causing boys to be "scarred forever... happier with dreams than wives" (as in Jeffrey Eugenides' novel).
She's hot, and you can't have her.
Not only because she's ridiculously beautiful; not only because she's mentally elsewhere, communing with Olympian gods, running her too-exuberantly painted nails through Apollo's hair, but because she'll soon be dead—immune to carbon-monoxide, the corrosive caress of air and boyish eyes against her skin, the burden of being ethereal and bursting with touchability all at once.
Watch Dunst elsewhere—it's always a diluted Lux Lisbon. SPIDER-MAN, BRING IT ON, GET OVER IT—regardless of context, there's always something distant, vacant, knowingly demure, dangerously Siren-like about her gaze, her demeanour. The day somebody decides to photograph her in a bathtub with a prayer-book in one hand and an opium-pipe in the other, everyone will understand.
For now, get deliriously drunk on the paintings of JW Waterhouse. And watch this film. Again, if you already have.
NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)
Artist: Alfred Hitchcock
Subjects: Eva Marie Saint, Cary Grant
It's in the visually arresting way that Grant leans over a dining-car table to touch a barely-there flame to Saint's expectant cigarette at 0:48:24—but also, more viscerally, in Eva Marie's faint gasp at the tail-end of her exhale, a languorous loosening of the jaw, a wordless, almost post-coital (or para-coital) exclamation of ecstatic separation from the mundane. Her doe-eyed deviless hails from the same Madonna-whore crucible in which Dunst's Lux Lisbon would be forged 40 years later—even when folded supine into her captor's arms, she remains unowned, somehow elsewhere (incidentally, seek out Cedric Kahn's 1998 French film L'ENNUI for a frankly hypnotic hallowed-and-hated-femme story as told from the lover's perspective). The fact that Saint's Eve Kendall is such a serpentine Impossibility seems gleefully consistent with the ensuing dialogue's artifice—these characters speak almost entirely in one-liners, snapping at each other's heels with an undeniable verve and concentration… but it's not the fire of love; rather, it's fire for the sake of fire—gratuitous verbal excitement, a winking acknowledgement of the camera's frame, the glorification of artificiality. By being simultaneously further from the giggly ineptitude of the lovers in BEFORE SUNRISE and the carnivorous practicality of those in Catherine Breillat's ROMANCE, Hitchcock's train-bound pair achieve a dream-like, alien quality. The fact that nothing is more erotic than the unknown, or, better still, the impossible, seals Cary and Eva Marie's legacy to the sexy-scene-seeker.
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LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995)
Artist: Mike Figgis
Subjects: Elisabeth Shue, Nicolas Cage
When swim-suited hooker Elisabeth Shue straddles Nicolas Cage's reclining alcoholic and pours whisky down her cleavage at 1:17:40, transfigured by the poolside white-out of desert sunlight, she is apotheosized as his Ideal woman. Again, this takes place in what seems some luminous heavenly antechamber or the slow-motion skull of a summer-afternoon daydreamer, despite the subject-matter involving, well… a vomit-encrusted guy dedicated to killing himself and his similarly doomed lover not being able to stop him. The accompanying rendition of 'Come Rain or Come Shine' is heartbreaking without irony—a spectacularly naked hymn.
The whole sequence represents extreme romanticization, in terms of being extremely estranged from reality—and, as such, functions as one of the sexiest scenes in recent film history.
LOST HIGHWAY (1997)
Artist: David Lynch
Subjects: Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty
This film signals the viewer's entrance into a realm in which aesthetics equal not just morality but common sense—and, consequently, was always going to contain some sort of seminally sexy moment. The moment, when it arrives, is luridly bathed in artificial light, dust, and THIS MORTAL COIL's reverb-heavy rendition of Tim Buckley's 'Song To The Siren'. Balthazar Getty and Patricia Arquette have driven out into the middle of a desert to find God, left-over TWIN PEAKS props, Robert Blake in lipstick, and, yes—the meaning of life. This is achieved, ZABRISKIE POINT-style, by fucking in the sand. At night. Beneath their car's headlights. The meaning of life, as it turns out, is that Patricia Arquette looks fantastic naked. Even so, her response to Getty's fractured 'I want you' is a whispered 'You'll never have me', succubitic breath coiling warmly in his ear as the weight of her silver-screen-icon curves crush out his longing.
If you've seen this film before, re-watch it with intent. These few seconds punched me in the guts only on my third or fourth viewing—at a revival house, my first experience of LOST HIGHWAY on a cinema screen.
BLADE RUNNER (1982)
Artist: Ridley Scott
Subjects: Harrison Ford, Sean Young
The entire sequence leading up to Harrison Ford and Sean Young's kiss at 1:08:44—horizontal slats of neon strafing their faces, Vangelis' lazy-eyed, fat-on-its-own-debauchery saxophone lolling endlessly in the middle-distance—stands as the sexiest scene in a sci-fi film ever, more reminiscent of Fitzgerald-esque six-martini-lunch ennui than event horizons and particle theory. The dialogue—'I want you.' 'Again.' 'I want you.'—seems cliché on paper and yet bewilderingly electric onscreen: something vibrant and strange and magical is going on here. Watch it as a double-feature with WHITE SQUALL, G.I. JANE, or even GLADIATOR. Promote anticipation; watch it second—you'll soil your jeans.
FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)
Artist: Amy Heckerling
Subject(s): Phoebe Cates
That sequence begins at 0:51:53, if you must leave now and cue up the DVD.
It warrants a mention simply because of its balls-out gratuitousness—the fact that it has nothing to do with anything, the fact that a torrential cascade of mist appears out of nowhere to rain limpid glitter all over Phoebe Cates as if she were a tantalizingly condensation-heavy beer bottle just now wrenched from a gleaming ice-box standing sentry beside the most comfortable couch ever passed out upon. In fact, the entire sequence is exactly like a beer commercial—if up-and-coming actresses were in the habit of introducing their breasts to 35mm splendour in the name of hops-based beverages. Elisha Cuthbert? Are you listening? Budweiser? Are you? We'd pay $20/sixer in Australia. No, really.
And thus, proving that VELVET is as adolescent as the next English/Lit. professor, I leave you with this thought:
It's okay. I understand. Go; find your DVD. We'll re-convene next week.
© Reuben Ham
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