/u/CaughttheDarkness on This is so real 😭

This is why you watch film noir.

Movies where sex and sexuality are everywhere except actually onscreen. There's plenty of implied stuff happening, and it deeply informs the characters' motivations and actions, but it's the Hays Code era so you won't ever see it.

Real talk though, I love Hays Code era films because a lot of filmmakers had to be creative in managing to include themes that the code wouldn't allow, but not violate the letter of the code. Incoming discussion of the history sexuality in film for those squeamish about such things. The code, for example, had (Shocker) some real sexist undertones where women had to be portrayed as virtuous and morally upright and those that weren't had to be morally punished by the end. A lot of filmmakers did have films where more morally grey women were presented and punished, but they made those characters much more sympathetic than the code's framers probably intended. I don't know as much about it, but I've also heard there were some LGBT themes in a lot of Hays Code era films that had to be snuck in under the radar and leads to some really compelling stuff. And in the case of onscreen sex, it was totally out of the question, so filmmakers would basically just cut any explicit reference out but imply as strongly as they could that it happened. This is why a lot of modern films that take influence from noir will skip any explicit sex scenes - it's a stylistic holdover from the era that these films were born in. If you've ever seen Looper or Blade Runner 2049 and wondered why both films, the first of which has a full scene with a topless woman and the latter of which has full nudity for both male and female characters and a scene in a brothel where it's pretty clear what's going on, both have scenes clearly leading to a sex scene and then fade to black, that's why.

And that infodump paragraph is the most autistic thing I've written all day.

February 04, 2023 at 01:15AM