The Porning Of Pop Culture

"Vagina's everywhere..."

Discretion used to be the better part of TV sex scenes. Even as portrayals of love and lust got steamier, the anatomical particulars were left to the imagination, off camera or under covers. Hollywood's old visual pun, the camera panning from a couple romancing in the foreground to fireworks exploding in the background, was updated over the years. Now the precise style, duration and heat register of sexual fireworks are enacted onscreen, notes Denver Post's Joanne Ostrow, and in cable and broadcast TV dramas, the sex scenes are gymnastic...

The first evolution in TV's approach to sex involved the quantity of the sex on screen. The next evolution, the one going on now, seems to be in the manner of the sex portrayed. No position is too acrobatic, no amount of skin too graphic to depict on television. The potential awkwardness of the act seems to fascinate TV directors. It's not just television: from the popularity of E.L. James' "Fifty Shades of Grey" to the ubiquity of kink on the Internet, from a recent New York Times story on the proliferation of S&M clubs to the nightly prime-time disclaimers (TV-MA, L, S, V), the porning of pop culture is upon us.

Thank cable for ushering more graphic depictions of sex, violence and sexual violence from the World Wide Web into the living room with a wealth of literate (and award-winning) adult dramas. Depictions of sex and sexuality of every flavor are on view, not least in otherworldly settings ( Battlestar Galactica) and fantastical comedic settings (Sex and the City). True Blood and Mad Men raised the stakes. Increasingly, athleticism is the hallmark of small-screen sexual encounters. A bed is often the last place you'd find a sex scene. The unlimited varieties of the act were explored by cable, where customers pay for the privilege of seeing sadistic sexual acts (Game of Thrones), humiliating sexual encounters (Girls), bodice-ripping sex (Spartacus), paid and disabled sex (Legit), beach-chair sex (Magic City), fee-based sex play (The Client List) and more.


Meanwhile broadcast TV showcased more and younger sex, especially on shows about high schoolers played by older actors. Parenthood, Bunheads and Glee toyed with adolescent sexual exploits. The tragi-sex-com Girls on HBO brings the current state of affairs into cringe-worthy focus. This season's penultimate episode "On All Fours," as graphic as its title, explicitly referenced porn imagery in the interaction of Adam and Natalia. First they had fun sex, then they had quasi-rape sex. The dynamics of the positions, the meaning of the physical relationships, the emotions that result from the encounter are meant to be pondered on this increasingly dark post-post-feminist comedy.

Now that graphic style is edging into mainstream commercial TV. Desperate to win audiences back from cable, the broadcast networks do what they can to mimic, imply and suggest. Even a political drama about the White House sneaks off for a quickie in the computer tech closet (Scandal), as parents in the audience scramble to clear the kids from the room. The raunchiest network comedies talk endlessly about "doing it" but don't show much. Jess (Zooey Deschanel) of New Girl on Fox is not nearly as sexually exhibitionistic or self-sabotaging as Hannah (Lena Dunham) of Girls on HBO. Two and a Half Men amounts to a decade's worth of sexual innuendo but actual sex is only implied.

Here's how we know we've arrived at a newly sexualized time in mainstream America, an awkward age of transition on matters of sex: The waitress Max (Kat Dennings) on the CBS half-hour Two Broke Girls recently complained that the word "vagina" has lost its power to shock. "Vagina's everywhere," she said. Cue the leering short-order cook Oleg: "Where!?!" Clearly, the writers share Max's lament about the difficulty of getting a laugh now that the word is commonplace, but they hope for some residual shock value. Ironically, TV's reality shows are the least graphic when it comes to sexual interactions. Series like Big Brother and Jersey Shore offer bad, obnoxious and unethical behavior on display, but the sex is usually blurred, in the dark or beneath the sheets. The TV genre that purports to be most authentic and uncensored turns out to be the least revealing in sexual situations.

The easy inclusion of graphic sex scenes in TV dramas in particular has challenged writers to play with the nature of intimacy in novel ways. This creative rethinking turns out to be good for dramatic character development. The power dynamic involved in sex is now a focus beyond the physical event.

* The husband and wife power-mongers in House of Cards on NetFlix like to share a cigarette in a window late at night, their version of intimacy. We never see them in a sexual encounter with each other; that's reserved for others, their inferiors in terms of rank and power. The result is subtle: The lack of sex between the leading characters (played by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright) makes the viewer think harder about their intriguing intimate moments, as they borrow a page from "Macbeth."

* In the superior FX drama The Americans, the very idea of sex is fraught since the couple, played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, are actually an arranged covert spy team who have yet to develop a real romantic relationship. Can their work blur into a romance? Will things heat up in the bedroom while they pursue the Cold War? Meanwhile, views of Russell's character enduring demeaning, sadistic sex as a trade for information are intensely graphic. (As a lethal spy, she gets her comeuppance.)

* It's not spoiling anything to note that the only really romantic, loving expression of sex in recent TV memory occurred on ABC's Red Widow, just before the central character was widowed. Now that true love seems to be out of the way, the doors are open to more dramatic, aggressive or conflicted expressions of sex.

* FX's Bates Motel finds its starting point as a contemporary prequel to "Psycho" with a Twin Peaks vibe. The sexual tension here is novel for television: mother and son, played by Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore, are intertwined in unhealthy, incestuous ways. The sexual hints are subtle at first as the audience witnesses the psychological implosion of teenager Norman Bates.

We can only hope the sexual tension in that case remains more subtle than gymnastic.
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Sex Scenes And TV

"Can I be the woman who screams 'I'm squirting!'?..."

Any discussion entitled "Changing Rules for Women and Sex on TV" was bound to include mentions of a certain HBO comedy series, notes Alison Willmore. Reporting in Indiewire, she states the always provocative Girls was certainly a central topic at Saturday's SXSW panel, which was moderated by ThinkProgress' Alyssa Rosenberg and populated by fellow journalists Noreen Malone (of The New Republic) and David Haglund (of Slate), as well as Sarah Shapiro, the writer/director of "Sequin Raze," a short making its world premiere at the festival, and Anna Camp (The Mindy Project, True Blood), the film's lead. The group dug into Lena Dunham's young career and the portrayals of sex, relationships and nudity in her show, along with the power dynamics of the intimacies of House of Cards and what constitutes a good sex scene. While the panel covered a lot of interesting ground, some familiar to anyone who follows the work of the writers on it, the most interesting viewpoint may have been that of Camp, who as an actor has participated in her fair share of sex scenes and who has to navigate them as part of potential roles.

Camp spoke about scenes in Mad Men ("I feel like competing to prove myself worthy of him sexually," she said of the blow job her character Bethany Van Nuys gave Don Draper in a cab) and in House of Lies (she auditioned for the role that ultimately went to Kristen Bell, leading her to ask if instead "Can I be the woman who screams 'I'm squirting!'?"). Actors have to give their trust to the directors, writers and producers in charge of the project, which she noted can be frustrating or frightening. "I want to be picky for when I do that," she said of sex scenes, noting that many of them were just the "same male fantasy" and that it was often taken for granted in films and TV that attractive characters would have great sex, but that she was interested in getting beyond the usual depictions.


The scenes that dominated the conversation included Dunham's several with Patrick Wilson in that much-debated recent episode of Girls (he was an "idealized male figure instead of an idealized female figure," noted Haglund, who was actually not a fan of the installment); and the Melissa Leo segment from the past season of Louie thanks to his depiction of sex and desire, particularly a scene that treads the line between consensual interaction and forced reciprocation. Camp cited as noteworthy the scene in Mad Men involving Jessica Paré's Megan Draper and the white carpet. Shapiro brought up the scene in the pilot of Girls in which Hannah (Dunham) refuses Adam (Adam Driver) when he goes off to get lube ("to be grounded in your own body enough to say 'I don't want that'" was striking to her).

Cable is, for obvious reason, the home for most of the shows that were discussed, but the freedom to be explicit wasn't always, for the panelists, a good thing. Haglund spoke of how quickly Homeland managed to show a nude Morena Baccarin, saying that the cable-style rush to that made him distrust the series at times, Malone noted that it's often the lead-up to sex that's more interesting ("I want a good buildup") and Shapiro said that for her, "the sexiest thing in the world is the closed door."

Network TV has generated discussions of its own in how it's dealt with one of the consequences of sex -- pregnancy, including how some characters have dealt with fertility crises. Rosenberg pointed out Robin Scherbatsky's (Cobie Smulders) learning that she can't have children in the past season of How I Met Your Mother and Cece's (Hannah Simone) finding that she only has a limited window in which to conceive on New Girl. Watching the latter development, Malone said that at first "I was angry that one of my favorite TV shows was inciting this personal panic in me," but then realized that it was a natural part of the conversation. As these characters approach or begin their 30s, it's something they would think about, because "sex is not divorced from childbirth." It may not be as audacious as Hannah Horvath's hookups, but shows "would be leaving rich territory unexplored if they didn't" go there.

Writing in The Horn, Emily Kausalik agreed that one of the most contested and fascinating developments in television over the past few years has been the changing scope of female representation and sex on TV, but admitted disappointment that this very frank dialogue about shows challenging age old questions of double standards and female desire existed entirely within the male/female, heterosexual binary and didn't explore same-sex and LGBTQ relationships and desires. Though that may be a telling reflection on American television in general.
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Coming Up Trumps

"If I wanted to fuck you, you'd know..."

If you typically watch a lot of recently made Washington-set shows, you might have started to notice a pattern, notes Sarah Gilbert. There’s usually a fictitious version of the Washington Post where an ambitious, Hollywood-gorgeous young reporter argues with her editors about blogging versus 'real' journalism (Political Animals). There’s a Machiavellian authority figure with no conscience whatsoever whose primary purpose is to antagonize everyone else (Homeland). Who gets elected and who remains in power depends entirely on a handful of scheming people as opposed to the decision of an informed electorate (Scandal). And none of the locations look remotely like Washington, with the exception of a few scenes of stock footage that punctuate the real action (all three).

House of Cards, produced by and starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher, does all of the above, but it adds a darkness and a sense of moral implosion that makes it extraordinarily compelling, if sometimes uncomfortable viewing. Adapted from the 1980s British drama of the same name, the show is Netflix’s first foray into making a television series, and the provider breaks with tradition by releasing all 13 episodes of season one on the same day, February 1. It’s a bold move that also seems appropriate given our propensity in these post-cable times to devour entire seasons of a TV drama in one weekend... usually via Netflix.

Spacey plays Francis Underwood, both protagonist and antagonist, the majority whip in a House of Representatives of unspecified party affiliation (he’s called Frank by most everyone except his wife, the brilliantly chilly Robin Wright). Having canvassed hard for the incoming president, Garrett Walker (Michel Gill), Frank is under the impression that he’ll be given the position of Secretary of State as a reward, particularly given that he’s also helped Linda Vasquez (Sakina Jaffrey) into the plum role of chief of staff. "I’ve done my time. I’ve backed the right man," he purrs malevolently at a victory party for the new President. Except Walker reneges, and Frank is told he’s needed in the House instead, which kicks off his personal mission to bring down the new administration, goaded by his ice-cold wife and a night smoking Marlboros out the window of his DC rowhouse (if he does have a constituency somewhere, we don’t find out where, at least in the first two episodes). On his hit list: Walker, Vasquez, new Secretary of State Adam Galloway (Ben Daniels), and anyone else unlucky enough to cross his path or get on his nerves. The only person Frank seems to be moderately troubled by is a creepy lobbyist named Remy (Mahershala Ali) whose pocket he appears to be in. Also featured prominently is a handsome, priapic, hard-living congressman from Pennsylvania (Corey Stoll) whom Frank blackmails into acting as his pawn.


These episodes are focussing on the confirmation process of the new administration, so although the timing is not as impeccable as that of the original series was (the first episode happened to screen just days after Margaret Thatcher was toppled from power after 11 years in Number 10, back in 1990), President Obama's recent difficulties in this regard do make it at least somewhat timely. Frank frequently talks directly to camera, as Francis Urquhart did in the British original, and while this allows plenty of insight into his Machiavellian scheming, it’s a device that feels rather dated. It doesn’t help that writer Beau Willimon (Farragut North, The Ides of March) gives the character an endless stream of dramatic metaphors to growl while gazing cruelly at the camera. "This is how you devour a whale: one bite at a time," he says, followed by, "I love that woman. I love her more than a shark loves blood." And then there’s Gilbert's personal favorite, which makes him sound like a Twilight baddie: "I never make such decisions so far after sunset and so long before dawn." We get it, okay? He’s evil.



Nevertheless, after the first episode draws to a close the Dr. Evil-style utterances cool off a bit, and the show relaxes into what it should be: a taut, compelling, brilliantly crafted drama about power and its inevitable toxicity. Frank lucks out when he meets Zoe (Kate Mara), an ambitious and seemingly ruthless cub reporter at the Washington Herald desperate to break out of the Fairfax County council beat and have her own blog. Only her young-fogey editor (Sebastian Arcelus) tells her snottily, "This is the Washington Herald, Zoe. This isn’t TMZ." A weird chain of circumstances, in which Frank ogles Zoe’s ass while she’s heading to the symphony at a fake Kennedy Center, leads to Zoe going to Frank’s house and offering to be his mouthpiece at the Herald, resulting in the kind of manufactured scoops cub journalists can only dream of. Zoe’s first big break is a story about education reform being "left of centre," which apparently goes ten kinds of viral the day after inauguration. "This Web traffic’s absolutely crazy," says Zoe’s editor, who has presumably never heard of BuzzFeed. At least Fincher’s journalists dress in a realistically slobby fashion, if nothing else.

Silliness aside, House of Cards is gripping viewing. The show subverts concepts of good and bad, so the ruthless and vicious inevitably succeed while those unfortunately burdened with a conscience tend to suffer. Frank, our antihero, is a terrible person but also great fun, despite a Southern drawl that takes the edge off his more menacing behavior until you get used to it. (There’s a reason the only Southern TV baddie in recent memory is Will and Grace’s Beverly Leslie.) The show is also a surprisingly decent portrait of a city ruled by the quest for power, even if Frank is far more dastardly in deed (we hope) than our current Cantors and Pelosis. The credits, while showing the kind of lush scenes of monuments we’re so used to in Washington shows, also reveal a grittier side: trash in the streets, the ugly underpasses that envelop L’Enfant Plaza. George Stephanopoulos pops up to interview Galloway in one scene, and John King and Donna Brazile appear in another; Frank even has an issue of Washingtonian sitting on the coffee table in his office. House of Cards leaves us with an interesting conundrum: If our elected representatives were as evil as Frank, might they actually get something done every once in a while?

Afterall, reasons blogger The Ginger Wanderer, essentially political dramas fall into four distinct categories:

1) Politicians are brilliant, super intelligent, hard working public servants with a nice line in very fast, witty banter - e.g. The West Wing.

2) Politicians are decent people who generally try to do the right thing, but politics is hard, there are no easy answers, and they often get it wrong and have to make messy compromises - e.g. Danish TV series Borgen.

3) Politicians are generally self serving and a bit crap, and are constantly being manipulated by their civil servants - e.g. Yes Minister, the Thick of It.

4) Politicians are TOTAL BASTARDS.

You suspect that the truth lies somewhere between (2) and (3), but why let truth get in the way of a good story? And in any event, which political shows work, and which ones don't, tends to depend on the political culture of the country in which they are shown. House of Cards, needless to say, nestles comfortably into the fourth category, and the impression is that the US public, increasingly frustrated by the relentless partisanship of Washington politics, is ready for a show of this nature. In fact you get the suspicion that the one the US would struggle with is category (3), not category (4).

Having viewed the early episodes, The Ginger Wanderer has already seen enough to conclude: "They get it. They really do". This from someone who has seen the original series five or six times and so has a better idea of how it is likely to pan out than most people do ("I am hoping that they might throw a few surprises in, but, without wanting to give away too many spoilers, I am also hoping they use the ending from the UK TV series, and not the book ending, which I suspect even Michael Dobbs would now admit is a bit of a cop out"). The basic outline of the plot so far is very similar to the UK series, he confirms. New Prime Minister/President has just been elected. Crafty Chief Whip/House Majority Whip Francis Urquhart/Frank Underwood is passed over for the job he wants in the new administration and vows revenge, egged on by his even more ruthless wife, and starts undermining the administration and turning its members against each other whilst appearing scrupulously loyal to his boss. Meanwhile, of course, lots of people are having sex with each other, mostly extramarital.

Most of the rest of the cast are essentially pawns in Urquhart/Underwood's cunning plan, including an idealistic and ambitious young female journalist ("Samantha Harker as "Mattie Storin" in the original version, Kate Mara as "Zoe Barnes" in this version") and a loose cannon PR consultant/Congressman with problems with drugs and (in common with most of the characters) keeping his trousers fastened whilst in other people's bedrooms (Miles Anderson as "Roger O'Neill" in the original version, Corey Stoll as "Peter Russo" in this version). Having 26 episodes to really flesh things out will really help - the original ran for only 12 episodes in total, including the two inferior but still very watchable sequels To Play the King and The Final Cut ("they won't be able to remake To Play The King, of course, one of the many unfortunate unintended consequences of our American cousins getting rid of the monarchy was that they have now senselessly deprived themselves of some damn good TV!")

So turning to the differences, then - it is already clear that Frank Underwood is a slightly different breed of monster than Ian Richardson's Francis Urquhart was. Whilst Urquhart was smooth and serpentine, Spacey's Frank Underwood is slightly more of a brutish alligator. Whilst Urquhart was a superciluous "posh Scot", Underwood has a lovely South Carolina drawl, and is a bit more down to earth. For example he likes to get up and eat a rack of ribs at 7:30 in the morning, and he works out on a rowing machine (albeit after much henpecking from Mrs Underwood) - neither of which Francis Urquhart would have been seen dead doing. Sadly there is a shortage of the Shakespearian ad-libbing that Richardson did so well (so far, at least), which is a shame, as Spacey, like Richardson, is an accomplished Shakespearian actor.

The politics are also very different. Whilst Urquhart was a traditional right wing conservative, Underwood is actually a Democrat this time round. One wonders whether Spacey, himself a well known Democrat supporter, took the producers aside at one point and said "Look, I don't mind the blackmail, the adultery, the murder and suchlike fun and games, but I draw the line at playing a Republican!" From what we have seen so far, as far as Underwood appears to have any ideological beliefs at all, he seems to a be fairly centrist moderate, and is certainly contemptuous of the impractical left wing of the party, but even there, his contempt seems to spring from the fact that he knows what they are trying to do can't actually be done, rather than from anything more ideological. You get the impression that he doesn't really believe in anything at all except that he should be in charge.

In this one blogger's view this is actually a good choice. "The problems I had with the two "sequels" to the British version was that the makers, no doubt riding the anti-Tory wave of sentiment in the mid nineties, seemed to be giving the impression that Urquhart was actually a bad Prime Minister as well as a bad man, whereas what made the first series so interesting was that although he was clearly a "bad egg", he was clearly so much more capable (and charming) than his peers, and patently the best man for the job," he writes. By taking the character's ideology out of the equation, the US version will hopefully be able to avoid alienating its likely audience and can potentially push the "evil guy but great politician" angle more easily .

Having said that, the essence of the character is, of course, the same: both incarnations are clever, ruthless, charming and willing to do absolutely anything and screw over anyone on their path to power. The asides to the camera are still in place - we, the audience, are his co-conspirators, and whilst we are appalled by his actions, once again we find ourselves enjoying the consequences of those actions at the same time and "rooting for the bad guy". In this version, even more than in the original, whilst Underwood is clearly a villain, there are no real heroes. The President and the members of his administration are so obviously shallow and out of their depth that we find ourselves enjoying their discomfort even though objectively they are not really bad enough to deserve to suffer the way they do.

Robin Wright as Claire Underwood is a revelation. While Diane Fletcher was great as her equivalent number in the original version, she was very much a background figure - Wright is getting more of a chance to really shine. Let's just say that she is no Princess Buttercup here, but a full blown Lady Macbeth - put in charge of a charity! With predictably scary consequences. Another interesting thing about the show is that while Mrs Urquhart/Underwood is clearly Lady Macbeth, her husband is not Macbeth at all, he's Richard III. Which makes much more sense as a pairing, if you think about it... no wonder Lady M went mad, being married to a man who needs half an hour of soliloquising even to psych himself up into committing a straightforward murder! As mentioned above, Spacey has recently played Richard III, and, like Richardson, he clearly understands the parallels between the two characters, as there were some striking similarities between his two performances (in particular his wry looks of frustration at the audience every once in a while).

Even journalist Zoe Barnes, who is the nearest the show has to a heroine is, quite frankly, a bit of a bitch (she casually tells a fellow journalist who is lusting after her at one point that "If I wanted to fuck you, you'd know!") Interestingly enough, she already has enough information after the first two episodes to know what Underwood is up to (although he is still shamelessly manipulating her). This is quite a big shift from the original, where Mattie Storin was unaware of Urquhart's true nature until the very end - it will be interesting to see how that pans out and what she finds out in subsequent episodes (and when).

***

Her sister is already a household name and now the talented Kate Mara is catching up quickly. Hailing from American football royalty – on her father’s side, they co-own the New York Giants; on her mother’s, the Pittsburgh Steelers – together with her younger sister Rooney, star of The Girl With Dragon Tattoo series, they are creating another family dynasty, this time in Hollywood. Mara is about to hit our (small) screens in House of Cards, which is the first specially commissioned series for Netflix, the on-demand internet streaming website, and has already starred in Brokeback Mountain ("When Brokeback Mountain came out, there was a shift because the movie was so well received. That sort of started it," she says) and 127 Hours with James Franco. She started out in Harrison Ford's Random Hearts at 16 and has also had TV roles in everything from Everwood to Nip/Tuck before stealing the show in American Horror Story.

Now she plays journalist Zoe Barnes in David Fincher's much-anticipated House of Cards remake; the same Fincher who directed her sister in The Social Network and Dragon Tattoo. "I fell in love with the character and asked Rooney to put in a word for me," she states. "A month later I got a call to come and audition. Zoe is a very ambitious, very tough reporter. She strikes a deal with Kevin Spacey’s character so they kind of use each other in this world of politics to get ahead, and things get sort of messy. She’ll pretty much do anything to achieve her goals."
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