Soft at the Core: “Emmanuelle” (1974)

UNDER WRAPS: In the age of the burgeoning explicit sex film, how was it possible to reengage the audience appetite for eroticism rather than gynecological exhibition? Was it possible for soft-core to succeed in the face of the pornographic evolution of trendy “porno chic”?

    In the world of cinema sex, Just Jaeckin’s 1974 film “Emmanuelle” holds a rather special position between the then newly popularized concept of “porno chic” and the continuing exploration of sexual politics within the framework of the artistically inclined cinema; while in Hollywood, newly liberated from the moral chastity belt of the Production Code, studios were blindly inching their way through the cultural ether, succumbing to the infantile predilection of admitting to the very existence a sexual nature in the human experience by flashing a bare buttock or a pair of breasts in the most sniggery manner possible.

   That the porno end of the spectrum quickly made it’s limited aesthetic intentions clear by the ceaseless procession of gynecological “tunnel shots” and ejaculatory excesses had the curious effect of anti-eroticism as the continuous depiction of coitus interruptus necessary for the seemingly important evidence of male climax, lending the supposed celebration of heterosexual carnality an unintended and certainly curiously unrecognized concession to the homoerotic. This ironic disengagement of intimacy at the moment of satisfaction rendered an ironic impotence toward the illusion of the sought completion of the  any genuine immersive (save for either base curiosity or prurience which are themselves exhausted by the numbing repetition inherent in the porn genre) erotic charge (thus with explicit sexuality, film lost one of its most stimulating characteristics: the sensorial excitement of the imagination (the brain being the most sexual organ in the body) nullifying one of the key elements of judicial guidelines warning about the dangers in pornography- that it results in sexual stimulation or arousal -when in fact, artistically successful material of a sexually charged nature would naturally lead to such physiological or stimulated psychological responses. To expect an aspiring work of art to fail in its stimulative value based upon destructively misinformed standards encouraged not by critics or educated cultural canon but by myopic judiciary creates qualitative void advanced, not by aesthetic but moral evaluations.

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