Three Two Six: Vintage

Erotica ages badly. 

I think we can agree on that. 

Erotica from past decades has bad fashion, bad music, and body choices that feel...somehow wrong in the present. 

Last night I watched a c.1978 French-Italian film called "Laure", supposedly written as a novel and then adapted for the screen by Emmanuelle Arsan, the nominal author of the "Emmanuelle" novels. The lead actress was called Annie Belle-- a French actress with platinum-dyed hair cropped as short as my own Russian-gangster haircut. She'd have been twenty-two when the film was shot. A rather pretty girl, but my tastes have been shaped by fashion and bodies from later days. My thought was immediately was that she should've been taller and more aerobicized. Waxed, too. Beautiful blue eyes, and I do like girls with garçonne hairstyles, but while she managed to be suitably panty-free during the entire film, she was just a bit off from what popular culture in the last twenty or twenty-five years has favored. 

Odd note-- Annie Belle does remind me of the 2021 porn star Skye Blue. Same platinum-dyed 1922 boy's haircut, same lovely eyes, same large areolae. Though Skye Blue is taller, with good abs and a sense that sex is based on irony and transgression.

I think-- think --that I did once own a copy of the Arsan novel Laure, or at least a German translation of it. Something purchased at an "alternative" bookshop in Vienna, back in the days when porn, Marxism, and New Age books were all thrown together. I bought it only because it was by Emmanuelle Arsan, and the two novels (Emmanuelle-- L' anti-vierge and Emmanuelle-- La leçon d'homme) attributed to her had been the sources for the classic Just Jaeckin films with Sylvia Kristel. So I bought Laure and...puzzled my way through the German before giving the book to some long-forgotten girl in my past. 

Laure and the two Just Jaeckin films still have hot scenes, true. But the horrid, syrupy French soundtrack music kills anything approaching arousal. So of course do the hairstyles and the costumes. All the films are set in a quasi-imaginary Asia (Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong), and while there are some elegant white-linen colonial looks, the women's outfits are so painfully 1970s-- bad platform sandals, lots of patterned Qiana blouses, hiphugger bell-bottom slacks --that you break into laughter even when the actress is busily shedding the Anne Klein knock-offs she's wearing. We won't talk about the male looks and costumes. Let's just say that both things are...tragic. Or tragicomic. 

The films were all shot in the Orient-- not Asia, mind you, but an imaginary Orient filled with languidly decadent expats and willing natives. Pretty much everything that has any trace of political, social, or ethnic/racial issues will set your teeth on edge in the year 2021. 

Underlying the storylines of all three films is the belief in some kind of Free Love. Not the grindingly earnest polyamory of our own day, but a belief that sex is something beautiful people do when they're bored, or when they've just found someone interesting. Jealousy exists just as a plot device to give characters an excuse to have sex with the partners of people who've been having sex with the main characters' husbands or wives. Older, wiser expats give long lectures about how "monogamy is dying" and how sex is an avenue to a higher state of consciousness, or at least to higher aesthetics. It's taken for granted that all lovely teens will acquire older lovers, and that while bisexuality is taken as a given for all expat females from fifteen into old age, male bisexuality is solely between fey young native men, never for any expat who isn't rich and sixty...and who prefers gazelle-like native boys. 

Everyone of course speaks in long, complex sentences filled with justifications for giving up monogamy and for membership in relationships that are as complex as DNA chains. Lots of theory, but...nothing taken from Foucault. There are no earnest and moralizing looks at power dynamics, no sense of self-righteous political analysis. Well, everyone Laure or Emmanuelle meets is rich, at least by 1970s Manila or rural Thai standards-- so politics never has to intrude into the Arsan world. 

I may watch the two Sylvia Kristel films again, though. Not for the plots, of course. Just for a couple of Ms. Kristel's scenes with lovely girls, or in unexpected settings. There is a scene in Emmanuelle 2 where Ms. Kristel reaches orgasm via acupuncture needles that I've found hot for years and years. But it's too hard to avoid laughter when considering the plots.

Erotica is built what we find arousing in the here-and-now, in the present moment. Watching Laure in the Land of Bush A-Plenty (as a friend calls the 1970s) sets off so many aesthetic and fashion warning signs that it's barely possible to see the film as sexy at all. And whenever the characters talk, they pontificate about beliefs we all find ludicrous if not sinister here in the age of Default Friend and other neo-Victorian blogs.

Maybe porn clips are the only way one can approach visual stimuli these days.