Sex and "The Kids"

[lillibet]

Jason and I recently saw The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko's film about the children of a lesbian couple finding the sperm donor who is their natural father. We really enjoyed it--it's one of the best depictions of marriage that I've ever seen on screen and the acting is fantastically unstudied

Comments

[miss_chance]

I dunno, but I think that when I have sex it's very unrealistic.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I would imagine that if I were to start seeing in my own sex scenes what a camera would see, there's something going horribly wrong in my head such that I'm not particularly engaged or invested. For me, as a participant, I see and experience what the camera can't and can't see what the camera would. Sure, I'm aware of the flab and zits and farts and elbow in eye--'oops, sorry!'--but they're no more an important part of the sex as an errant boom-mic would be.

Perhaps I'm trying to say that I think the difference between sex-on-film and sex-in-life is the difference between a cell-phone-snap-shot and an oil-painting of the same landscape. To capture what sex "looks like" you just need a camera; to capture what it "*is* like" you need an artist. [be that an artist with a brush or an artist with a camera]. The trend toward "realism" in film reminds me of "photo-realism" in painting, and in most cases it's really just not my thing because it tells too little of the whole story.