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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Inspired by a few Reddit threads: why is there less sex and nudity in movies and television today than in the past?

I don’t have any raw data to back up the claim that there is less sex and nudity these days, but that’s my sentiment and it’s shared by many others. The best concrete example I can think of is Game of Thrones. The early seasons were (in)famous for the amount of gratuitous nudity; Saturday Night Live did a sketch mocking the “guy has sex while another guy getting a blow job watches him through a peephole while another guy watches him through a peephole” scene. Yet, the final two seasons, when it became this massive international phenomenon that everyone on earth watched, had (IIRC) no nudity at all and very little sex.

The second best concrete example I can think of is Marvel movies. There have been 30ish of them and (IIRC) there are no sex scenes at all, and maybe even no make out scenes (I think there’s one in the first Captain America). Sure, they’re PG-13, but so is 007, and they still have sex scenes.

Compare this to the 80s and 90s when every action-oriented movie ever had sex scenes, if not also completely gratuitous nudity. For instance, in Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger throws a bad guy through a motel wall, and just happens to reveal a naked lady with giant boobs having sex. Or if there was any romance, it would inevitably result in a sex scene, even a clothes-on PG-13 sex scene. These seem to be nearly dead in the modern day.

So why do modern movies have so little sex and nudity? My guesses:

  1. Internet porn has lowered the value of movie sex and nudity. In the 1980s, getting porn was expensive and annoying, so getting to see boobs in an action movie was a legitimate draw. These days, everyone has infinite internet porn, so who cares? (Counterpoint – celebrity nudity still has a special appeal over porn nudity, ie. the Fappening, or people going to see No Hard Feelings to see Jennifer Lawrence naked)

  2. MeToo, combined with the backdrop of Jonathan Haidt’s thesis in Coddling of the American Mind, have made (young) people very squeamish about sex. We are in a new low-tier puritan age where men are terrified of being accused of sexual assault and women are terrified of being sexually assaulted, so sex is now a much heavier subject and gratuitous nudity has lost its appeal

  3. here seems to be a new stratification in culture where everything is either hardcore sexual or has no sex at all. Everything is porn or innocent. People are either kinky a f or extremely shy around sex. Tv shows either show no nudity or they’re Euphoria with tons of sex and nudity. Movies are either porn or puritan.

  4. lockbusters are now designed to appeal to overseas audiences more than ever, particularly to China. Non-Western audiences (particularly China) are more sexually conservative than Western audiences, so film studios are reducing sex and nudity. In some cases (like China), literal censors might intervene against a movie if there is too much sexuality. Any other ideas?

I think a lot of that can be viewed through immense impact that boomer generation had on culture. Sixties and seventies when boomers were young adults, it was all about celebrating teenage revolt, and drugs, rock n' roll and all that. Eighties and nineties when boomers were at their prime, it was all about making money, and celebrating being fit and healthy and being full of vigor, and above all else being sexy - it was time of masculine men shagging fit women like in Baywatch. Aughts and tens is when boomers are becoming old and it is time of moralization and experiencing their failing bodies and being aware of their mortality - so suddenly grey is gorgeous and of course sex is suddenly all about power relation of men over young women of young healthy women over old desiccated boomer hags; which means that healthy sexuality has to be suddenly forbidden.

It is all display of cultural power of objectively the most powerful and narcissistic generation of the last century imposing their self-centered worldview on broader culture.

Compare this to the 80s and 90s when every action-oriented movie ever had sex scenes, if not also completely gratuitous nudity.

I'm still amused at how "Demolition Man" had gratuitous nudity that was completely separate from its "sex" scene.

One note about HBO is that 10 years ago the app had a "Late Night" section that was soft-core porn. And given the amount of nudity in its flagship series, including having parts of The Sopranos and The Wire set in strip clubs, I strongly suspect that a certain amount of female nudity was a requirement, at least for early seasons of a series. Nowadays HBO presents as more respectable, but I lay that mostly on Warner and AT&T exerting more influence - HBO went from a sub-sub-brand that had freedom to innovate and pursue quality, to the face of the media conglomerate owned by AT&T, and I fear that their glory days are over.

The discussions of HBO on here often make me feel like I am watching a different network. Euphoria has lots of sex and is a great show. White Lotus, particularly season 2, has plenty of sex and is good. In my view, the are the 2 best shows that HBO has made in a very long time, and The Idol, execrable as what I watched of it was, had lots and lots of sexualized scenes.

soft-core porn

As someone with an interest in erotic stories, but relatively little interest in seeing nudity or sex acts (which I can either experience or imagine, depending on the exclusivity) I miss those days. Sure, the stories were terrible, but I'd rather some schlocky plot that the lazy quasi-incest "plotting" of modern pornography. The only saving grace (excuse the expression) is that the internet has led to an explosion of amateur erotic writing, most of which is terrible, but which is at least more creative than most of the soft core era.

The only saving grace (excuse the expression) is that the internet has led to an explosion of amateur erotic writing, most of which is terrible, but which is at least more creative than most of the soft core era.

You may want to know that all the major platforms are clamping down on anything horny:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4P9yCMNpV-I

Sorry it is a link to a youtube video, but it looks like this more recent push isn't being reported on the news.

Makes sense. The normalisation of any culture sphere leads to the introduction of pearl-clutching women, and humans tend to have strong instincts for ensuring that women feel comfortable.

I also posted about this earlier.

Well, yeah, that’s the entire reason AO3 even exists.

I'm still amused at how "Demolition Man" had gratuitous nudity that was completely separate from its "sex" scene.

Huh? I don't remember that at all.

There is a part where he is checking out his new apartment after getting booted by Huxley, where a random lady wrong-number video calls him while topless.

Good point. I wouldn't call that gratuitous though.

The part where Stallone is frozen in a block of ice, in cryo-imprisonment.

Well, that's technically nudity, of course, but calling it gratuitous nudity in this particular context is rather misleading.

I think 3 is the most likely candidate, helped along by 2. We've become sexually liberated in many senses, and yet, we've somehow also shied away from it in a way that may have also impacted on-screen romances.

Here's a big point you're missing:

Video games stole the action movie audience. These days if a young man wants to see some explosions, gun fights, and mild titillation he's not going to go to a movie theatre.

I don't think these substitute for each other to any meaningful extent. An action movie buff is going to watch, what, like 5-15 action movies a year in theaters? Accounting for modern film runtimes and ticket prices, that's up to 45 hours and $225. 45 hours is nothing in terms of gaming, that'd be easy to cover within a single month. $225 is the equivalent of 3-4 AAA games, so there could be some substitution effect, but honestly, for most people with enough free time and money to be into playing AAA games, the equivalent of < $20/month doesn't seem likely to significantly influence decisions on this.

Anecdotally, the types of gamers who are most into the types of games where you can see explosions and gun fights also are most appreciative of action films. Which makes sense to me, since if you like explosions and gun fights, there's separate and complementary enjoyment from partaking in them in a video game and from watching professionals performing it at a high level. Playing as Nathan Drake hanging off a cargo plane is a poor substitute for watching Tom Cruise hanging off the outside of a real plane as it takes off.

I mean, video games have eaten into that market, but movies are doing just fine and it's not women watching all of them.

There are plenty of male oriented blockbusters, with plenty of gunfights and explosions. The question remains why the titillation has dwindled away, and it's not because the male audience doesn't like it.

One thing people haven’t brought up is the fact that the modern internet allows nude scenes to be stripped from their original context, slowed/brightened/zoomed-in, and widely distributed/collected for easy access.

In the 70s and 80s, a respectable actress could do an artistically-justified nude scene for some artsy, small-distribution film, and if people wanted to see that scene they would have to find a way to view or purchase that movie, and at least watch the whole movie up to that point. Now, if I want to see that scene, all I have to do is wait for some guy to get his hands on a digital copy, then post the scene to Reddit or to any of dozens of other places. A ten-second scene can be shared everywhere, with AI-upscaling and the ability to pause and rewind to make sure I see every detail as many times as I want to see it.

And that means also that that actress’ friends, family members, dentist, accountant, second-grade teachers, and everyone else can see it. And jerk off to it.

All while not only the actress makes no money whatsoever off of it, but the studio who’s paying her also makes nothing off of it either. There’s no upside anymore for anyone involved, unless the actress in question is just an exhibitionist and likes getting naked where people can see it. Certainly this does describe certain people who get into showbiz! However, most of the women with that personality type, combined with the kind of good looks required to make a living off of it, are probably better off just leaning into OnlyFans or a career as an influencer or something like that, since movie studios are no longer willing to pay them big bucks to get naked.

And that means also that that actress’ friends, family members, dentist, accountant, second-grade teachers, and everyone else can see it. And jerk off to it.

IIRC, David Lynch digitally altered a nude scene in Mulholland Drive for its home video incarnation specifically to lessen the online sharability of screen grabs.

In the 70s and 80s, a respectable actress could do an artistically-justified nude scene for some artsy, small-distribution film

Was this actually normal?

Was this actually normal?

Yeah. A lot of the big actresses of the 1970s did nude scenes. Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, you name it. But these weren't necessarily small indie movies -- the studios were making these movies. "Naturalism" was part of the New Hollywood ethos and the new cultural frankness about sex.

Maybe there was some sense during the late 1980s that nudity had become a mark of low-class, but in the 1990s it came back and there was growing talk about how actresses could be taken more seriously by doing nude scenes, and I think Gwyneth Paltrow's nudity-inclusive Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love was used as a common example. It's hard to think of examples of big actresses from the past 20-30 years who have been shy on camera: Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Connelley, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry all had prominent nude scenes in or adjacent to Oscar-winning roles. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for a role involving explicit nudity, so it's not like it's ever fully gone away, there's just been a vocal movement against it.

There actually was a tame (prelude to) sex scene in Marvel's The Eternals. It was a little controversial, but less so than the married gay couple later in the movie. It's the exception that proves the rule, however. I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie, but the culture pretty quickly moved away from scenes in which PG-13 heroes are seen with the most human of character flaws.

It's arguable that we're now entering the backlash period to this recent chasteness. Oppenheimer famously involves a gratuitous sex/nude scene, which doesn't seem to have hurt its critical or popular standing. Poor Things is balls-out sex and nudity. In the last two months, we've had new theatrical releases of the cunnilingus-and-dildo-filled Drive Away Dolls and now Love Lies Bleeding. As those last three suggest, it's likely that there's more appetite in Hollywood right now for sex content that de-emphasizes straight male sexuality -- a subject of criticism in Poor Things -- or that specifically focuses on queer eroticism, as those two new releases do.

Then again, we have the buoyant rise of Sidney Sweeney and the huge success of Anyone But You, which looks like a standard cis sex-com with old-fashioned eye candy for guys and girls. So there's an appetite for that kind of material; it's just whether or not Hollywood has the stomach to look past the scolds on Bluesky or whatever. Maybe the changes Musk has made to Twitter has scattered that kind of hive-mind prudishiness that started some of these movements?

I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie

The post-sex scene in Iron Man was preceded by a more graphic (though still PG-13) pre-sex scene, even. I don't think they were even aiming the MCU at kids until they realized what a cash cow it was going to be; otherwise they'd have toned down the bloody opening scene a bit, or at least given it more of the cartoonish flavor that later MCU battles are full of.

The sex stuff in Guardians was much more clever; kids old enough to understand why he forgot that lady was on board his ship are old enough to watch it, and if there are any kids old enough to understand the "under a black light this place looks like a Jackson Pollack painting" joke then they're old enough to shudder at it.

Of course, with Eternals they were more clever still: if nobody can muster up interest in the movie for long enough to get to the adult elements, then they don't have to worry about exposing kids to adult elements. I'm not even kidding here; I tried to watch that movie and I tuned out before making it that far. I had to hit up YouTube just now to see the (not even prelude-to! thrusting! the only non-R-rated thing here is the camera angle!) sex scene.

As far as Marvel goes, it's a potentially relevant side conversation that so much pop culture that is ostensibly aimed at younger kids -- superheroes, cartoons, YA fiction -- has become mainstream entertainment for adults. It's not just a de-sexing of society that is reflected in that kind of material, but a de-thinking or a de-maturing, which has troubled me. There should, IMO, be a transition in one's teen years from reading YA lit to A lit, because the ideas will be more complex and the conflicts more reflective of the choices and moral considerations that adults face in their lives. They can teach us how to think about complex subjects. I was reading a Reddit thread about Poor Things yesterday, and it's shocking how many people are so media-illiterate that they can't delineate between text and subtext. I partially blame the glut of YA media that has no subtext.

When I was 15/16, as an avid movie-watcher, I was expanding from Star Wars and Superman to stuff like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Akira Kurosawa. I can't imagine how stunted I would be now if I stuck to content that was created with a juvenile audience in mind. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of junk, but I try to keep it balanced. Even though the dumb horror movies I love push some easy pleasure buttons, they aren't what elevates me.

I feel the same way. Like somehow all of American culture is stuck in some sort of eternal Peter Pan loop. Still into things made for and aimed at teens, still playing, incapable of taking anything seriously or having a serious conversation about topics that deserve to be taken seriously and need deep thought to understand and fix. I agree with the Chinese critique of us in the West — we are no longer a serious people who fix problems and build for the future. And we aren’t because we are mentally children.

why is there less sex and nudity in movies and television today than in the past?

If that is so, then all I can say is thank God. I don't recall any sex scenes that I found either interesting, erotic, or anything more than "will they get this over with so we can move on with the plot?" Maybe the one in "Don't Look Now", which did add to the depth of the characters and their relationship. Most of them are just "We need to bump the ratings up because the teen demographic won't watch unless they think there's a chance they'll get to see tits'n'ass".

But I don't care for romance in general, so I realise I'm in a very tiny minority.

EDIT: I wonder if easy and plentiful access to online porn is part of it? When your best chance of seeing female nudity was the blockbuster movie playing this summer, of course that appealed to the teen audience. But if they can get even more explicit stuff at home, as it were, then there's no reason to go to a movie just for the chance of some boobs being flashed. So movies can either go hardcore, which means restricted to a limited audience, or drop the PG-13 stuff and rely instead on the action scenes and CGI for appeal. That also means they can broaden their appeal to a 'family audience' and those who don't want to see Leading Lady's giant spandex-wrapped bosoms shoved in their faces in glorious Technicolor because they're not into ladies, thanks all the same. Leading Man's bountiful chest may be a different matter but even that seems to have gone.

I agree that most sex scenes don't add anything to the movie and tend to be boring, unless you're watching an actual Erotic Thriller like Fatal Attraction. This is most obvious in anything that was made for HBO, where a lot of shows seemingly felt the need to show nudity just to remind you that you couldn't get this stuff on regular TV (Boardwalk Empire being a good example). I watched A Few Good Men the other night and never got the impression that the movie would have been better if we saw Demi Moore's tits. I feel the same way about gratuitous swearing. The best regular TV drama of all time is the original Law & Order (and by regular TV I mean a show that was on an actual TV channel weekly from September to May each year and put out 20–25 episodes a season), and that show had little profanity and no sex. The economics of the film industry are partly to blame; movies tend to get pigeonholed based on their MPAA rating, and the easiest way to bump things up to an R is to add gratuitous profanity and nudity.

I think that was a deliberate strategy by HBO to mark them out as different from the conventional TV stations - "we're like the movies, you can see stuff here that you won't see on mainstream TV".

Not to mention that sex and nudity is always a popular tactic to bring in the punters.

This. If you want to attract an audience, sex is always going to sell. If you are already a big thing, then you come under a lot more scrutiny. (During the last season, there were Guardian editorials calling out GoT for killing black characters.)

Of course, the story of tumblr runs roughly parallel with regard to sex.

This is most obvious in anything that was made for HBO, where a lot of shows seemingly felt the need to show nudity just to remind you that you couldn't get this stuff on regular TV (Boardwalk Empire being a good example).

There was also Rome, but I'd unironically argue that the sex scenes were relevant to the plot.

-5. The line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior during nudity and sex scenes has become fraught, both for MeToo and non-MeToo reasons, and directors and actors are increasingly aware of it. I'd highlight the first two episodes of Stargate SG-1, here, from the mid-90s: the original version had some female nudity and near-nudity pushed onto the showrunners by Showtime, and it got cut and respliced back in 200_8_, partly because it didn't help the actual scene itself, and also because the actress was pretty heavily pressured into it. Most more recent stuff isn't as obviously controversial, but there's reason to be cautious.

-6. Women (are seen to) drive ticket sales, and they are perceived (not without reason!) as not particularly interested in the sort of sort sex scenes or nudity that populated major movie focuses of the 90s and early 00s. The Magic Mike series features full-frontal male nudity for one scene, in the first movie, it involves a penis pump, and even as someone who appreciates hirsuite dudes, it's probably one of the three least sexy parts in the show (and given the competition involves an overdose, that says something). Contrast the workshop scene from XXL -- I'd hope even a straight guy would appreciate a workshop that looks like that, but from an androphillic perspective there's... a lot to enjoy, and from a feminine one the scene's combination of controlled strength and vulnerability is not exactly a subtle shot to the ovaries. Or see the Brendan Fraser George of the Jungle, which is commonly highlighted as an awakening for himbo fans, and wouldn't have benefited from a lot of from doing anything more.

-7. Movies are increasingly seen as playing a different social role; men in particular are far less likely to just go out alone or with a small number of close-in-age male friends, where this wasn't as awkward as, say, if it pops up during a date night or when going with the family.

-8. Horny-but-not-just-porn level works are widely available, but interests have bifurbicated heavily, and as a result people have driven to other formats that aren't as mainstream touchstones in the way movies were. The paid version of Rick Griffin's Skinchange (cw: some violence, donald duck-style nudity) has full frontal nudity-with-bits from page five onwards, with only a few exceptions when the protagonists are in disguise, it's a decent if not particularly genre-busting scifi thriller, and it's even straight-themed and not actually focused on sex or even arousal... but it's a very specific sort of thing to appreciate, and not even all bi furries are going to be able to suspend disbelief re: 'wouldn't that pinch?'. See Oglaf for something that often features fully-penetrative sex, but isn't really sexy. Or Feretta's Tale of Tails, but it's a decently well-written fantasy comic in an original universe that's somewhat given that it does have sex and nudity play a heavy role but also has long sequences without, and not everyone wants a side of sausage (or for a different sort of dislike, pregnancy) in their F/F work. I could turn every playable character in FFXIV into a naked hrothgar dripping from both ends, but that's not really to everyone's tastes, even beyond the ethics of the matter: even fairly tame matters like caking up just my own character, shared to only people in a Mare linkshell, gets into a lot of complicated stuff when others involved may not be androphillic at all.

-9. To the extent that sexual stuff is shared among social groups, it plays a more performative role. Almost every FFXIV FC (read: guild) I've joined has an adult content section in the Discord, but it would be wildly inappropriate to throw a few dozen beefcake pictures at once into any of them, even where full penetration shots might show up on occasion. Posting in these forums is supposed to say something about you and why you drop them. Afterdark twitter will show a lot of stuff (nice 3d-printed gun /and/ dick!), but there's a lot going on there as to what is and isn't the persona each account wants to present. That's always been around to some extent -- trust me, I know what it's like to chuckle nervously and talk about boobs -- but I think the extent is drastically broader.

Women (are seen to) drive ticket sales, and they are perceived (not without reason!) as not particularly interested in the sort of sort sex scenes or nudity that populated major movie focuses of the 90s and early 00s.

Do we actually know how accurate this perception is?

I always heard teenage boys were the biggest driver of movie theater ticket sales. The juggernauts of MCU and fast and the furious franchise would certainly point in that direction.

That XXL scene makes me think of the Simpsons Steel Mill scene 😀

Yeah, I could see the echoes. The 'hot stuff' and disco ball gags take it to self-parody, in the same way that Mike doing a snow angel in woodshop dust or finding a random screw with his kidneys would, but the failed tabletop spin at the end probably feels similar if you're not familiar with/target of the relevant conventions.

For instance, in Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger throws a bad guy threw a motel wall, and just happens to reveal a naked lady with giant boobs having sex.

I think that was just done for the sake of comic relief in a movie with a heavy subject matter.

Link for research: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4RgSmkm5S-k&t=1m55s

Former spec ops guys become (rightwing?) terrorists and are trying to put a Latin American dictator back in power but they kidnapped Arnold's daughter for some reason so he has to kill them all is heavy subject matter?

Well, yes, child kidnapping and blackmail are heavy subject matters. Anyway, the point is that the movie has rather few light-hearted moments.

I think what ChickenOverlord is getting at is that Commando does contain more levity than just that one scene. John Matrix cracks quite a few puns and jokes during that whole thing.

Exactly, the "dead tired" line to the flight attendant, the "I'll kill you last" line to Benny along with the later follow-up of "I lied" right before he drops Benny off a cliff, and I think he says "cool off" or something like that after impaling the final bad guy with a refrigeration pipe or something like that.

I think he says "cool off" or something like that after impaling the final bad guy with a refrigeration pipe or something like that.

Very close, but the opposite; it was a steam pipe. Commando truly might have been Schwarzenegger the peak of his one-liners. "Cool off" sounds like something his Mr. Freeze might have said in Batman and Robin, which also had some fantastic one-liners.

In addition to the points you mentioned, to add to the second point, we also saw a movement against male gaze and sexualization of women. So the rising influence of feminists and liberals in general which goes beyond just me too. Sarkeesian's movement playing a role to that. At some point for enough of those who are influential, their version of ideology updated to something that is more prudish. Whether they adapted to that in their a) journolists and other more direct coordination mechanisms b) Through other ways they ideological converge by whatever signals they pay attention to.

It also might be the case that current generation of young people are less horny and more "tame". This is again a variation of parts of what you mentioned with 2. But it is driven by attitudes that are more embarrassed of sex than primarily motivated by the fear of being accused of sexual assault.

I agree with your points, and also with @2rafa about the course of the sexual revolution. But also:

-- If you're interested in the topic, I recommend the podcast You Must Remember This which did a long series on erotic films of the 80s and 90s, placing them in context and talking about the social movements around them. Karina Longworth always does a good job with the material, trigger warning for occasional performative woke acknowledgement if that kind of thing bothers you overly much. One of the things she highlights is the way that rating systems, censorship, the rise of home video, and pornography interacted to place different meanings on ratings. There was a time when X and NC-17 were legitimate ratings that indicated a real film intended for adults, both slowly succumbed to being viewed as porn. It used to be that a film (often a sexual thriller from overseas) marketed as NC17 would be a hit, all the adults would go see it. Now that is hard to imagine.

-- I theorize the rise of internet pornography has made viewing sexually arousing material outside of privately hunched over a laptop seem perverted, even homosexual, to a modern audience. Even as barely-pubescent teen I caught the tail end of the "finding a foreign movie my parent's didn't know had tits on video" cultural moment. I remember watching stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien with my buddies because there were naked girls in it, I don't think we understood anything about the movie. Once internet porn became practical with DSL, I don't think anyone did that, watching something became a purely private endeavor. Decades earlier, porn theatres existed, where men would congregate to watch porn. The idea of going to a theater to see a movie with a heavily arousing tilt strikes me as strange, if I went to the movies without my wife it might even feel kind of gay to be in a theater full of other dudes also getting aroused. Everyone is a goon-er now, but everyone hides it, that's for your home, not for the big screen, or even for watching with family.

-- Don't underestimate the degree to which one work can ruin an entire genre convention. Don Quixote killed the chivalrous romance. The Daniel Craig Bond Films were so dark and serious because Austin Powers was absolutely huge right before they were made, and everyone on set was conscious of the fact that they couldn't do a sex scene without the entire audience giggling and someone shouting "Do I make you horny baby? Yeah! Shag now or shag later?" at the screen. Today Austin Powers is almost forgotten, but in 2006 it was totally unavoidable if you were making a spy film. An effective parody can kill a genre. So can self-parody. Game of Thrones did the whole obligatory sex-scene thing to death, and then completely self-immolated in the final season. The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale. RE: Dune upthread; GRRM ripped Herbert off pretty directly in using scenes like "bring me a child prostitute to torture" as establishing bad guy credentials, but GRRM abused it and HBO beat it to death on camera, so while in the novel having Vlad torture-fuck-murder child slaves seemed edgy, in the film it would seem derivative (of the thing that was itself Derivative from the book). As with how the Bond films are still working in the shadow of Austin Powers long after we've forgotten Austin Powers, GoT has now been lame for five years, we forget just how bad the Finale was, and just how much prestige and power was lent to the show leading into the finale, how excited everyone was for what the Extended Universe would produce next, and what a complete fucking letdown the whole thing was. But in 2020 when the first Dune film came out, they had to avoid all association with GoT it was overplayed and toxic. That kind of influence can really carry, and can make a scene unshootable for decades at a time.

The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale.

Hm, how does this square with the works like The Witcher (2019), Rings of Power (2022), or Willow (2022) seemingly (I'm speculating due to only having watched the 1st 2 seasons of The Witcher out of these - I don't recommend even S1 due to S2 retroactively making it a waste of time) trying to ape GoT's aesthetic and stylings in an apparent effort to replicate its success? The Witcher was in production before GoT's self-immolation (though GoT was pretty clearly in the process of pouring gasoline all over itself and looking for matches for multiple years already), but the other two were being produced after GoT was well established as just a pile of ashes. Also, the sexual content in GoT is more associated with when it used to be good, and so it doesn't seem likely to me that the sexual content was specifically the part of GoT that show runners would avoid while trying to ape other parts of it.

The Witcher (2019), Rings of Power (2022)

I would be interested in well made adaptations of these, but as they were looking like total failures I avoided them. Looking less GoTy would be a good start for me.

And producers cared abound broad appeal not extreme nerds like me, but AFAIK RoP was failure in all aspects including financial one. Even ACOUP takedown was not interesting, that was like kicking 6 year old on wheelchair.

So for "how does this square with the works" I would say pretty well, at least for RoP.

Rings of Power copied Game of Thrones because Bezos wanted his very own GoT hit show for the Amazon streaming service. I will lave with my kisses Melkor's scarred lame foot if I believe that Jeffy just wuvs Tolkien's writings so much his life-long dream as a superfan was to produce a show from them.

Nah, he wanted an epic success property based on fantasy novel series, and LOTR was the closest he could get. Since they couldn't literally remake the movies, they did the next best thing, and produced that mess. I'm waiting to hate-watch the second season if it ever gets delivered, because I want to see just how low they can go.

RoP doesn't have any sex scenes (just some coy hinted-at through the transparent clothing demi-nudity), thank all the Valar. Except for the Sauron/Galadriel romance, which eff you, eff the Nazgul-beast you rode in on, and eff those two idiot showrunners for that. If they'd even tried a sex scene out of that, I think my soul would have left my body like the wrathful form of Arien.

Sauron/Galadriel romance

What monstrosity is this? Can't the Tolkien estate sue? Given what Christopher Tolkien is like in protecting their world I can't believe he'd be OK with this.

Christopher is gone to be with his parents, it's his idiot (by all accounts) son Simon who is the one in charge of flogging off the family silver. Again, all this is unverified rumour, but he apparently didn't get on with his dad, Christopher and so has a chip on his shoulder about the entire legacy thing; he may not be terribly, terribly bright; and the Amazon behemoth cleverly flattered him by making him some kind of 'adviser' to the entire shebang and shoved sackloads of fivers at him and the estate, et voilà! BIPOC members of every species, the Orcs are the good guys, and Galadriel/Sauron slowburn enemies to lovers except still enemies where he goes off to sulk in Mordor (which, in this version, he didn't even create!) as an incel once she brutally refuses his advances.

Sadly, Christopher Tolkien died on Jan. 16th, 2020. The silver lining is that he never had to see Amazon's desecration of Middle Earth. RIP to JRRT's first and best editor.

The generation after Chris has been...less protective of their grandfather's literary estate.

Alas. RIP to a real one.

Rings of Power was doomed to be bad. They wanted to do a prequel, but didn't have the rights to The Silmarillion. So they could use aspects that were implied by other works but had to change details to avoid infringement.

Naturally most showrunners wanted to avoid that whole mess.

Thanks be to Eru Iluvatar they didn't get their claws on the Silmarillion. I'm seeing a lot of rumours about season two, some of which I can't believe, but just imagine if they had done so. Given that they thought they needed to invent a whole stupid-ass* origin story for mithril, they'd have decided to polish up the original. Make it sexy. Make it diverse. What was it Southpark said? Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame?

*Unbelievably stupid, dumb, ridiculous, nonsensical, crappy origin story. Mithril does not need an origin story, except if you decide to write it as magic power metal that is the life force of the Elves because it rips off the concept of yin and yang. Oh, which also requires you to invent a fourth Silmaril - look, I can't even be bothered to finish explaining this, the urge to kill is rising once more in me. No wonder Gil-galad is hard drinking in this version, I'd be hitting the booze too if I had to deliver these lines.

If you want to know why an Elf and a Balrog were fighting over a tree, it's that fourth Silmaril. And it has to be a new, fourth, Silmaril because we damn well know where the three Silmarils ended up, and none of them were in a tree. AAAH, MURDER! MURDERRRRRR! I CRAVE THE BLOOD OF THE SHOWRUNNERS!!!!!

The Silmarillion is my favorite book of all time (though I haven't read it in years now). I'm just kind of baffled now at what you just told me, I knew Rings of Power was bad but not that bad. Why did they have to bring the Silmarils into them at all? Their target audience obviously wasn't Tolkien nerds so what were they hoping to gain by bringing them up at all? The median Rings of Power fan has no idea what the two trees were, or who Feanor and Morgoth were. Meanwhile the median Silmarillion enjoyer avoids the entire series like the plague.

Why did they have to bring the Silmarils into them at all?

I have to keep one eye on the mods as I try to answer that, because a full and frank appraisal of the two Onlie Begetters will get me into trouble 😁

The selling point originally was that Jeff is a mega huge super-duper Tolkien fan, loves the books even more than he loves banging the hot chick next door, and it was his life's dream to bring a version of the legendarium to the TV screen.

The truth is that Bezos wanted to sell a ton of new Prime subscriptions via the screening service, sign up to see the must-watch shows of the year and now you have your subscription why not stick around and do some shopping?, and to do that he needed a big tentpole show. So he wanted his own Game of Thrones but unhappily they were already making House of the Dragon elsewhere. Where to next for fantasy doorstopper hits? Hey, there's that Tolkien guy and his books that got turned into movies that made a ton of money, Amazon sells massive amounts of merch from all of those. Problem solved!

Problem not solved, as they didn't have the rights to anything except the Lord of the Rings plus the Appendices, and if they tried remaking the movies, the rights holders there would come down on them like a ton of bricks. I think they wanted the Silmarillion but couldn't get the rights. They were hampered by only being able to use the material they had the rights to, so they couldn't make the changes or bring in characters mentioned in other works, so we only get very fleeting glimpses of Valinor and so forth. Instead, they took the book - and more so, the movie - characters and moved them back in time to the Second Age, then merrily pushed on with rewriting Tolkien.

They couldn't have Hobbits, for instance, so they gave us Harfoots instead. No these aren't Hobbits, don't be silly, they're the ancestors of Hobbits! and so on for their changes. Thus, they fell between two stools: they based early marketing on "gonna be so faithful to the writings, gonna tell the story of the Second Age" for the lore nerds, but they also had to do the DEI stuff, with rationales about 'writing the novel Tolkien never wrote' and 'representing the modern world'. After all, this was going to launch the streaming service globally, so they needed non-white characters for overseas audiences. They had to fix Tolkien's diversity problem.

That also meant they had a ready-made excuse when the show was downvoted to Utumno: it was being review-bombed by trolls and toxic white supremacist racist haters of strong women and non-white persons! It wasn't because of trampling on the lore or some really bad story decisions, no it was all racism, sexism, homophobia and whatever Waldreg is cooking up in that barn masquerading as a pub in Tirharad.

The fun (in a grim way) part afterwards was when the same media outlets which had been pouring praise on the show and selling the line that it was all Italian Fascists hating on it, then turned around and went "yeah, it was a bit shit". The one guy I respect on this is Eric Kain, who started out as "give it a chance, it looks good" but after a couple of episodes went "yeah, it's crap" and did entertaining reviews.

Now, to be fair, there was an element of the Italian Fascist sort amongst the criticism, and those who didn't accept that as a different medium television has to make a ton of changes to books, but it certainly was not the whole of it, nor even the majority. But say one word about anything less than awesome, and you're a far-right woman and minority hater, was the reaction.

There's so much "it gets worse." On the one hand, they slip in references to at least medium-deep lore with no show-internal explanation, so only fairly invested Tolkien fans will even recognize that a point was being made, but on the other hand, you've got major lore-breaking points shoved in your face right and left that are obvious to more casual fans. (Was that a bit of casual flirting between Galadriel and Elrond? Did I just throw up a bit in my mouth?)

Like introducing a fourth Silmaril to support the 'origin' of mithril through philosophical dualism that is completely anathema to Tolkien and his works...and never once mentioning Feanor. Or the famous motto of the Numenoreans, "The sea is always right." Or the infamous teleporting armies problem straight out of GoT S8. Or the greatest smith of the Second Age having to be handheld through the concept of "this is an alloy," and the importance of (fuck me) and I quote "coaxing" metals together instead of "forcing" them.

They actually have disguised-Sauron describe his little "alloy" tip to Celebrimbor as "a gift." That only lands if you know that Sauron is supposed to be disguised as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, BUT HE ISN'T! Who is that for?! The only thing I'm left with is that the Easter eggs hidden in the show are intended as calculated insults to fans of Tolkien's actual work. No presumption of charity can or should stand against the mountain of contrary evidence.

@FarNearEverywhere is welcome to her claim on the blood of the showrunners, but I would at least like to watch.

That's what had me banging my head off the desk; they throw in little snippets of lore that only the book nerds will get (the set-up for 'is this the Oath of the Feanorians?' in the trailers, the items in the King's tower in Númenor that have you going 'That's Dramborleg!!!!', the Bough of Return on the ships) so they've plainly done the reading, and they're trying to coax us in like laying a trail of breadcrumbs.

And then the cage comes down!

And we get Elrond "I'm nobody important, just the King's speechwriter, which is why I'm not even invited to the banquet" - what? This is the guy who has the blood of a Maia in his veins, the descendant of both the Mortal and Elvish noble houses, someone who if he wanted to cut up rough could lob in a claim for the High Kingship! Then to make up for this, they give all the best bits to him from what Celebrimbor should be doing (so no Celebrimbor and Narvi, now it's Elrond and Durin Jr.) so the greatest smith of the current generation has nothing better to do than wander around in a granny bathrobe and need to be taught about "alloys" by a scruffy Mortal.

Gil-galad at least looks like an Elf, this younger generation with their rebellious short haircuts, but his main purpose is to be pompous and anti-Dwarven.

It takes Galadriel five episodes to remember she has a husband. Maybe. If he's not dead. She has no idea, she was too busy wandering the world for centuries looking for Sauron and couldn't take six months out of that to see if her husband was alive or dead or off fathering kids in that Southland village (who is Theo's dad? we know Mom has an eye for the Elf boys, her and Arondir, the most unsexy, lacking in chemistry, bloodless 'forbidden love' grand romance you could hope to see). Against that, mangling the lore and character of Finrod is a smaller matter.

If I believe the rumours about the second season, they did give in to the loud complaints about WHERE THE ANGBAND IS ANNATAR??? and now we're going to get not one but two Saurons. One as Halbrand still mooning around, one as Annatar (of course they had to cast a British Indian actor for that part, but I don't care so long as he can act, unlike Arondir's guy. He's a RADA grad so maybe?). Possibly three if the wilder rumours are right and he turns up in a third version as pretending to be Celeborn ("honey I'm home, did you miss me?" "remind me again, who are you?").

I wonder if we will ever get to see the second season? They ploughed ahead at the end of season one with "Well it doesn't matter if you hated it, we're already filming the second season, so yah boo to you toxic trolls", but even with that, they may decide to just write it off, use it as a tax loss, and not go ahead with something that isn't looking like it will improve on the first season reception and might indeed sink the streaming service if they make it the flagship show.

No, it really wasn't. There's a million unexplored areas of Tolkien's world. You have two whole-ass Blue wizards out East, you have an entire age of Numenor doing stuff, you have adventures of Young Aragorn (feat. Young Legolas and already old gandalf).

The problem for Jeffy and his Cunning Plan to sell a shit ton of new Amazon Prime subscriptions - if you do new, original stuff, then who's gonna watch it? Those pathetic Tolkien nerds that you're already planning to paint as toxic fandom trolls when the backlash about your changes hits the fan? Pfft, who wants them?

You want the global movie audience, and what the movie audience is most familiar with are the characters Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf, the Hobbits, Sauron. So you need those for your show. But you can't remake the movies wholesale, so you do some... re-imagining. Move back in time to when Galadriel was Young Piss'n'Vinegar Glads (ignore that even in the Second Age she was married with a daughter). Shove in Meteor Man (Gandalf, we strongly hint). And Sauron. Make the mystery box thing of "is it him? or him? or them?" about Sauron's secret identity (the showrunners are part of J.J. Abrams pack of second-raters, hence the mystery box).

And thus the entire steaming mess of "we tried ripping off GoT and failed because House of the Dragon ate our lunch".

the Sauron/Galadriel romance

I never was going to see it. Now I'm especially not going to see it.

I can't comment in too much depth as I haven't seen any of them, RoP largely because in the ads it looked like it was aping GoT and I had no interest in it. My understanding is that RoP was a pretty massive failure. Being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist can end that way.

Oh damn those bloody trailers, talk about bait and switch! There's one tiny part where I was going "Are they gonna give us the Oath of the Feanorians????" but nooooo, of course not! That's the really frustrating thing - they clearly dug into the lore, because only book nerds are going to pick up on things like that and that they actually put the Bough of Return on the Númenorean ships, but then they go and give us Super Galadriel One Shots Your Puny Troll and Sauron Just Wants To Do Some Smithing, Dude, Gimme A Job In Your Forge.

Rings of power was also just bad, with a nonsensical plot, physically implausible stunts, flat characters, and lawd’ dem rangs nigga diversity wrecking suspension of disbelief.

Like I said, I never watched it, based on everything that was said about it. And you have to make a really bad Tolkien adaptation to fail to get me to watch it when I already had a Prime subscription for football. But surely we can draw some reasonable conclusions from the choices made by those who make bad television, as contrasted with those who make good movies. They intentionally benchmarked Game of Thrones, and they flopped so badly that fewer than a third of people who started it finished it. Bad decisions tend to cluster.

If you never watched it, good decision on your part. If you want to know what it was like, this parody series gets it right 😀

Also the black Elf guy can't act for toffee. I know he's a Wood Elf but that doesn't mean he has to be as wooden as a plank! Black Dwarf lady is a bit too on the nose for Sassy Black Chick, if she toned it down a bit she'd be more bearable. She went Lady Macbeth mode disturbingly fast.

The stunts. Oh my gosh. Galadriel one-shotting an Ice Troll after it's thrown the Useless Male Loser elf-soldiers around like snuff at a wake. Galadriel pretty much in everything - she's so AWESOME GIRL POWA!!! The training sequence in Númenor is very special, though.

Honestly, at this remove, I've kind of stopped being steaming mad and I'm just laughing at it all. Imma just gonna swim the width of the Atlantic home! The knife-ears took our jerbs! Galadriel horsie-riding! Celebrimbor the most useless smith in Noldor history! The dirty little psychopath Harfoots! Oh, and the Magic Hobo who is not Gandalf, we swear (wink, wink) plus the Eminem impersonator servant of Morgoth (we think)! and of course, THE SEA IS ALWAYS RIGHT!

Adar was the best character in it, so of course the one good actor promptly left after the first season and has been recast.

The training sequence in Númenor is very special, though.

That is, uh, indeed very special. I had to pause 20 seconds in just from the cringe before continuing. I'm not sure I can watch the whole thing. It looks like if someone who has never trained in combat in their life or even watched a martial arts movie decided to write what they imagined a training scene might look like. Which, to be fair, is very common in action scenes in a lot of films and TV shows, where the choreographers clearly believe that making a good fight scene is about people waving their limbs around in flashy ways, rather than making every swing, punch, kick, block, dodge, etc. a meaningful and believable progression of the back and forth to weave the narrative that constitutes a fight. It's just, you'd expect with a billion dollars to play with, they could hire at least a half-decent action choreographer/director.

HEMA armchair analysis:

The swords themselves seem comparable to a Langmesser (long knife), which is a renaissance weapon for which we actually have some primary sources. Sadly I have almost no experience with it. That said, the ones we see on screen are clearly blunt practice or rather stage weapons; steel wasters.

Now, for the fencing, Curly Blackhead takes a perfectly valid two-handed Pflug guard there...only that his sword is about half the length it should be for it to make sense, and even then he's starting out within arm's reach of Mary Sue. And then we get some overcommited thrust, wild swings - all one-handed of course, which makes more sense for such a short sword - and in between a lot of stepping back to start over instead. I'd say it's credible under the assumption that this is the very first time that guy ever picked up a sword.

As for everything that comes later, eh. No point in pretending it makes sense. Every man in that scene is a bumbling idiot who stops cold as soon as she parries, they wind-up for a half a minute each but strike without any force and are effortlessly deflected, nobody follows up with anything after first contact, and they seem to stumble and forget what they're doing all the time.

As for a bunch of newbies getting to fight an experienced fencer - it's fun with a slightly elevated risk of injury, and worthless for actual practice.

What, you misogynist, you can't suspend your disbelief that tiny Morfydd Clark (playing a character who canonically is a minimum of six feet tall* and should be played by someone like Gwendoline Christie) can beat up a pack of Númenorean teenagers in a back alley crammed with shopkeeper's stalls? 🤣

Considering how useless those teenagers are, who clearly have never held a sword in their lives, and that the famed military powerhouse of Númenor doesn't seem to have such a thing as a barracks or a training ground but has to find the nearest semi-clear space around the city in which to teach them how to fight - what about the navy, do they only skulk around on beaches shouting at the sea or what? - well, it's less unbelievable that the Awesomest General In All Of Middle-Earth could kick their puny mortal asses. She is a knife-ear, after all! We already know they're coming for the Númenoreans' jobs!

*She's described as "man-high", and taking the basis that later Númenorean heights were based on the ranga, which is around 6' 4", that's the ball park figure we're looking at here. So a good foot taller than Morfydd. Gwendoline is 6' 3".

It's not even just because I'm a raging misogynist. Like, I could suspend my disbelief while watching a fantasy series enough to believe that a slender 5' 4" woman could defeat half a dozen people at once, if she's a master warrior and they're all lowly amateurs. That's a common enough trope in martial arts and other combat-based works - usually it involves a clearly powerful and muscular badass, but the world being a fantasy world goes a long way. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did it quite well with the tiny Zhang Ziyi making fools out of dozens of men at once. But that's the kind of thing the show needs to establish first by showing us what kinds of supernatural/fantastical abilities she has to overcome these odds that would be literally impossible IRL. And even then, the show needs to meet me halfway by showing her struggling, getting bested here and there for a moment before using her greater experience, skills, abilities, etc. to turn the tables. There's some level of incompetence and intentional "waiting their turn" we can accept in these 1-on-many fights, but the show needs to make an effort in hiding it.

But even before all that, there's the fact that they seem to be starting the training by having these rookies fight this master swordswoman using real weapons. That's like bringing in Michael Jordan to teach basketball to teenagers and throwing them straight away into a one-on-one match against him. Not even where he's pointing out errors in his opponent as they play, but he's just playing to win. Sure, that'd be a fun thing to try at some point in training, most likely as a little showcase for the most confident/best trainees, but as step one? All that would accomplish is showing off just how much better Jordan is than everyone else, and no one would learn anything. Perhaps there could have been some subplot of Galadriel getting no respect as an unproven small foreigner, and using this as a way for her to earn their respect, but that didn't seem to be the setup. I'm no expert in things like combat or training, but even I know enough to tell just how unbelievable the whole scene is, right from the jump. These writers getting paid handsomely in this billion dollar production should be expected at least to do enough research to make it believable to a layman like me.

Gotta say, it's a shame that the GOT curse of its less established actors not being able to transition to proper stardom seems to be in force with Gwendolyn Christie. Someone of her stature could make for a really fun action heroine to watch, and she seemed competent enough in the combat scenes in GOT. The Star Wars sequels completely wasted the opportunity with her character. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where ROP starred her instead; that said, I never got the sense from the Jackson trilogy that Galadriel was supposed to be some badass warrior, so perhaps it wouldn't have been the best fit.

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In the media associated with ROP I saw, the racially diverse hobbits and dwarves seemed rather curious, especially compared to its absence in the Jackson trilogy. I also heard that ROP had the same problem of people teleporting across the continent that plagued the later seasons of GOT (also, apparently at one point Galadriel hops off a ship that's hundreds of miles from nearest land with the plan of just swimming back to shore? And it actually works?). Which points to a very distinct lack of understanding of what contributed to GOT's success. Part of GOT's appeal was in presenting us with a believable medieval fantasy world, which, besides the realpolitik and sudden violence the show was known for, included different peoples from different nations looking, talking, thinking in recognizably distinctive ways. Even stripped of all the costumes, the Dothraki looked different from those from Winterfell and they looked different from those from Dorne, and all that made sense because of the presumed lineage of these cultures and nations. And when people needed to travel a few hundred or thousand miles, this presented real logistical issues that would present challenges to overcome, often in interesting and entertaining ways (IIRC Arya and the Hound running into adventures traveling from King's Landing to just halfway up the continent took a whole season, and it was an absolute blast the whole time!). These aren't things you can just gloss over and expect to still be good.

I wonder if the showrunners just thought that only autistic nerds care about that nerdy shit, and what matters is their ingenious powerful narrative that this franchise is merely being used as a vehicle for delivering. And, arguably, that could have worked! Perhaps it would've pissed off the Tolkien fans, but there are more non-fans than fans, and the world of Middle Earth merely being window dressing for a good story could still have been wildly successful. Unfortunately, from what I've heard, the protagonist, a young Galadriel, ended up being just another aggressive, abrasive, overpowered girlboss whose primary flaw is that everyone else doesn't see how correct she is. Which isn't exactly conducive to a satisfying narrative.

Yeah, if the Numenoreans weren’t slacking on their swim lessons, they’d have made landfall without a hitch.

They put all their planning into ship design.

also, apparently at one point Galadriel hops off a ship that's hundreds of miles from nearest land with the plan of just swimming back to shore? And it actually works?

Well very fortunately you see, she is picked up by a raft of survivors from a shipwreck, who are then all immediately eaten by a sea monster except for her and Sauron, I mean Halbrand. But the raft of love only is necessary for long enough for Halbrand to once again save her life, then a passing Númenorean ship finds them in the middle of the wide ocean and brings them back to Númenor.

As you can see, total fidelity to the books was paramount for the adapters.

Unfortunately, from what I've heard, the protagonist, a young Galadriel, ended up being just another aggressive, abrasive, overpowered girlboss whose primary flaw is that everyone else doesn't see how correct she is.

In the confrontation between Adar and Galadriel, the psychopath genocidal torturer is not the Orc-father.

Oh man I didn't even make it past the first episode. Soooooooo Bad.

I can't offer any empirical data either, but I think the fact that you're comparing Marvel movies to 90s action movies is the key here. The former existed back then, but they've since come to dominate the field and nearly replace the latter. Comic book movies were always targeted toward a broader audience than action movies, particularly an audience that included children and families. The idea that I wouldn't have been allowed to see a Batman movie when I was a kid because of sex and nudity would have been unthinkable in the 90s. Even big 90s blockbusters like Independence Day and Jurassic Park didn't have much, if any, sex or nudity, because they were aiming bigger than a typical Schwarzenegger action movie. Despite some efforts in Hollywood to change this (most notably Joker), movies based on comic books are always going to be viewed primarily as children's films, and there's accordingly a limit to how much sex they're going to include. You're comparing them to a totally different genre.

The sexual revolution began in the mid-1960s, but if you look at population data on partner count and other indicators of promiscuity it didn’t really ‘filter down’ to the masses until well into the ‘70s. After that you had this 20 year period where sex™️ (as something distinct from both marriage and prostitution, which were the two longstanding formats) was new and interesting and a big part of the public consciousness, as reflected in media and art and so on.

Over time, people got bored of this emphasis. Casual sex went from something new and exciting that your parents never did to something your parents did a lot of when they were at Woodstock or hitchhiking to artistic communes in the ‘70s. It’s no surprise that despite increasing general social liberalization, hookup apps and so on, Generation X was actually the most promiscuous generation, because Gen X’s parents (the silent generation) were the last generation to grow up before the sexual revolution.

I know that both of my parents were substantially more promiscuous than me in their youth. And it’s not like they shared horror stories or anything. They both turned out to be broadly well-adjusted and successful people. But there’s nothing original about [soyface] SECKS now; you’re not sticking it to the man, to Dad, to God, to those prude teachers. Everyone’s telling you sex is fine, normal, boring.

When James Bond hooked up with women in the early ‘60s, hookup culture was genuinely not something that the great majority of men had access to unless they were in a handful of artistic/hedonistic circles in a few big cities (Mad Men kind of portrays this transition well). Today, sure, the average guy can’t sleep with Eva Green, but if he’s halfway attractive and has the most basic game it’s just a matter of getting drunk and taking someone home from a party or a club. James Bond still gets to be exciting, but that’s because he’s a secret agent, not because he has sex.

One thing that stuck out to me in Dune was the chasteness. The Harkonnens are sex weirdo pederasts in the books, an element that is totally excised in the movies, even though they're delightfully weird in other ways.

In the book, this gay, incestuous, obese pederast is introduced as a hand emerging from the shadows before settling on a literal globe. Making him an ethereal meaty kingpin was really cutting out a lot of his character, but I think it gets the point across.

In general, the book was pretty weird about sexuality. Paul’s relationship with Chani is offscreened to a hilarious degree. The gender essentialism of the Bene Gesserit. Everything about Alia. Weird shit for movies.

The books are totally asexual other than the gay incestuous obese pederast. No other character ever has sex for fun.

Going from memory, it seems like the fun may only be on one side. In the 1st book, Feyd-Rautha thinks he's having sex for fun, but he was being seduced and brainwashed by Margot Fenring. In the 3rd, Alia has sex for fun, but spoilers mean that it's not actually a contradiction. In the 3rd and 4th, various Duncans do have sex for fun, but they're mostly being used for one reason or another. I don't know if you count books 5 and 6, but at that point sex is a weapon, to such an extent that they've made me wonder about Frank Herbert's kinks, much more so than any other author I've read.

Yeah, discussing those spoilers: Alia having sex for fun is literally an indication of possession by a demon, Duncan in book 3 isn't really capable of doing anything for fun, FR getting manipulated into providing his seed for a Bene Gesserit plan to preserve his line after his death is some Gen. Jack Ripper "they want my vital fluids" shit. Sex is never fun, it's only ever a scheme or a duty.

And frankly, "read the first 5,000 pages and then you'll get to the part where people act normal" is damning with faint praise. The counterargument proves the accusation.

I wasn't trying to present a full counter-argument, but rather an expansion and slightly more detailed look at what you wrote a one-liner about. :-) I think the books do imply a fair amount of sex for fun, but it's all off-page and barely even talked about. Only the sketchy stuff is ever mentioned at any length, let alone depicted or made important to the plot.

For example, and again I'm going off memory here so forgive any lapses, I'm fairly sure that it's implied that Leto and Jessica have a good, healthy, fulfilling sex life, but we don't see it, and I don't recall anything more than a few mentions of how each feels about the other, very occasionally in relation to bedrooms or intimate moments. But when Jessica is talking with Thufir, she points out that it would be very easy for her to manipulate Leto, and her strong implication is that it would be during or after sex. That's what gets the focus.

And I think there was a mention that Feyd-Rautha had been spending "too much time" in the pleasure slave quarters, so as part of a punishment for something unrelated, the Baron had him kill them all with his bare hands. Any modern feminist would call F-R's sex "rape" due to the slavery involved, but I'll go out on a limb and say it was almost certainly more ethical than anything the Baron does, and more honest and less harmful than F-R's getting brainwashed by having a control word implanted in his head. But we only hear about it in the context of F-R having to kill them all.

So, once again, we have:

A Bene Gesserit indicating that she can use sex to manipulate Leto

A villain utilizing unwilling prostitutes.

You can make the "off screen" argument, but that still goes to the message of the book! The author chooses what to put in the book and what to leave out. Herbert chose to include, canonically, to remind us often that they shit in the stillsuits.

I haven't seen the Dune films, but it does sound to me like there are a lot of things missing from them that are extremely important to the text, such as Frank Herbert's weird psychosexual theories, or the entire Arabic/Islamic/Middle Eastern element - I think they steered away from the word jihad? And I remember glancing at the cast list and being shocked by, well, pretty much every casting, as well as the total absence of Middle Eastern actors. It looks to me like every single human ethnicity is in those films except for the ones that are actually appropriate. I don't know how you take a story that's about a Greek family falling in with Arabic tribespeople in order to overthrow a Persian emperor and manage to not cast a single person who looks remotely Greek, Arabic, or Persian.

Yes, I would like to have gotten more of that 60s weirdness. As for the race, I don't really mind. I think you can justify just about any casting in the context of a post racial interstellar society. Except maybe Zendaya and her weird baby-face. Not that I don't get the appeal of dudes that look like they're 25 going on 15, but it does make it hard to take them seriously.

I would have also cast more Middle Eastern actors, but at least this argues that actually Fremen are Chechens.

In the books the fremen are a variety of planetary slave populations mixed together. Some have red or sandy blond hair. Some have brown skin. Their religion is zensunni. If I recall correctly in the book Stilgar thinks they are the people who escaped bondage under Pharoah.

They're a blend of all sorts of stuff and I don't suppose map to any real life ethnicity. Other than being obvious stand ins for Arab oil states.

Oscar Isaac (Leto) was probably the most "Middle Eastern" looking cast member, but he's Guatemalan

And he's playing a character named Leto Atreides, which is practically the equivalent of tattooing "I AM GREEK" on his forehead.

IMO, Javier Bardem "passes," but now that he mentions it, it is weird that there are no obviously Middle Eastern cast members. The Fremen are all either black, Mediterranean, or mixed race (like Zendaya).

I'm not watching the films until using generative AI someone fixes that. Fremen not being a single race after spending thousands of years isolated on a planet with no caste system of their own is ludicrous.

Also Zendaya has to go. It's not that she's half black, it's that she's actually ugly. Incomprehensible casting decision.

it's that she's actually ugly

I want just register my opinion that I disagree with this.

She has a very broad and unpleasant nose.

I have no problem whatsoever with her nose.

And definitely not on " she's actually ugly. Incomprehensible casting decision." level.

(and add to that the tube sticking out of her nose overshadowing any potential problems - maybe you had problems with tube?)

I would really like to know where on the scale of 1 to 10 does "ugly" begin for you.

She's a 3 in my book. 1 would be someone with say, acid burns or other unfortunate injury. You know, where you start gently suggesting that maybe it's a good idea to wear a mask as much as possible.

Can you put a finger on why? What are the features 4/10s and above have that she lacks? Presumably there'd be at least 7 things wrong with her, and only 2 things that make her better than a burn victim.

Normally I'd agree with the other replier and shrug, but it appears that my cultural opponents, broadly, want more and higher standard conventional beauty in fiction. So I'm going to challenge them on the conventions and the standards.

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Also Zendaya has to go. It's not that she's half black, it's that she's actually ugly

Not to argue about taste, but I think she looks particularly bad in that movie and much better in interviews/photos. I didn't know who Zendaya was before right wing twitter started making la goblina memes about her, but looking her up I think a lot of it is that stillsuits aren't flattering.

True. She looks almost passable in some of her more glamorous photos. But you know, 4.5 at best.

They are a planetary population spread across most of Arrakis. In real life our planetary population has not blended into one race.

we haven't had 4000 years of easy global travel. Merely 100 years, in most parts of the planet not even that.

The fremen don't have easy global travel. They walk at night mostly to get around in the books. Sometimes ride a worm if their path happens to allow it (not blocked by rocky regions, conveniently starting and stopping in worm territory, etc.)

There's a bit in a Dune book about how they basically don't have pack animals or mechanized transport. So getting around on Dune as a fremen is walking to your destination.

To be fair, the book feels like it takes place across an area no larger than maybe Arizona at the outside. There's no indication of cultural variation.

In fairness, I think even the book's appendices and such almost tacitly imply that it might as well be Arizona's population stretched over an entire planet.

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I think it’s a reasonable decision because the word jihad has extremely strong connotations post-9/11. The West’s relationship to the Middle East is different now, the whole story would be swamped in the mind of the average viewer with the 2001-onward events in the region, “wHaT ARe ThEy tRyiNg tO SaY aBoUt IslAm???” type thinkpieces etc. (Not that Herbert wasn’t saying anything about Islam, but the context was very different.)

Not just weird but gay. I imagine that in part explains the absence

A gay pedophile, and feyd-rautha was a heterosexual rapist- heavily implying the baron to be a pedophile and feyd-rautha committing rape would have had the weirdo sexual pervert effect without being politically incorrect.

It's hard to say, given how the boundaries of "politically correct" has changed in recent years. In the recent The Little Mermaid CGI/live action remake by Disney, they edited lines from Ursula's villain song where she was manipulating the heroine Ariel into giving up her voice in exchange for legs by telling her how men like women who stay quiet and meek, since the notion that women ought to be quiet and meek is offensive. So it seems that certain views are so offensive that even villains being presented as being villainous ought not express them. Pedophilia and rape could fall in that camp.

That said, not having seen Part 2, I'd guess that wasn't a meaningful factor, if at all, in the decision. Having listened to the Dune audiobook a couple years ago after having read it a couple decades ago, I recall thinking that the sexual perversion of the Harkonnens didn't add a whole lot to the narrative. In a film with limited time, it seems reasonable to cut it, or perhaps modify it to a less distracting form.

I recall thinking that the sexual perversion of the Harkonnens didn't add a whole lot to the narrative

Yeah, the main contribution to the book of that is emphazing that you should not think that the Harkonnen are moral equivalents to the Atreides. The aesthetic choices in the movie already do that job well enough.

Ursula's not just a villain - she was (allegedly) inspired by a drag queen, she has a special relationship as an unabashedly proud and powerful fat woman, and on and on. You can't just have her say actually bad things, because the people who care way too much about the movie she's in (aka the target audience of the movie) can't and don't see her as evil, and are ideologically committed to reclaiming her.

And the baron specifically wanted to rape 15-year-old Paul, and even had a drugged up slave boy who looked similar to Paul. They definitely toned down how truly terrible the Harkonnens were in the movies (both 80's and new).

Villeneuve's interpretation of Harkonnens as quasi-alien type of evil with Gigeresque aesthetics was one of the best interpretative choices vis-a-vis the other interpretions and even the book that he made.

I've noticed that in almost all modern media. They never let someone be "just a monster" there is always some kind of attempt to humanize them. I think that is why people loved to hate Joffrey so much, and why GOT was so popular, it had true bad people in it. It is rare to see a truly evil person on the screen that isn't some kind of tragic lost cause.

While, as said below, the Harkonnens aren't humanized in any way (if anything their evil becomes of a more inhuman variety), it's always been a funny argument that GoT did not feature "good and evil but just shades of gray". Ramsay Bolton is absolutely evil to the core, Jon Snow a classic good hero character.

I wouldn't say that's true of any of the Harkonnens in the recent Dune movies, even if some of their monstrous qualities have been omitted they're not replaced by anything redeeming.

Haven't seen part 2. Glad to hear it.

One point I haven't seen here is that there imo has been a general move towards always pandering to all groups, all at once in our media, and movies are no exception. There's more indie games, sure, but all media that costs a lot of money to produce and is expected to earn lots of money is generally designed to appeal much more to an average perso than to a small niche. As a very different example, look at the casualization of most traditionally nerdy gaming franchises such as Civ.

You might wonder what this has to do with nudity. Simple, women by and large do not like explicit nudity very much, as you can see even when they consume schlocky stupid porn, they read it, they don't watch it, and sex only happens sparingly. So what happens when you want to make an action movie, but also want to get the guys girlfriend to watch it alongside him to earn double the money? The MCU. You make the guys hot but never nude, they're manly but never rude (except to people who clearly deserve it). You include just enough of love stories for the women to not get bored. You include some female heroes, but they're even more idealized than the already-unrealistic male action heroes. All of this is (and more, such as your already-mentioned example of pandering to non-western audiences) imo just the logical endpoint of a slow march of optimization towards earning maximum money with your media.

Alternative hypothesis for casualisation of video games: the target market for Civ games used to be young men with lots of free time but no money. Now a big part of the market is employed men in their 20s/30s who have lots of money but don’t want to spend tens of hours figuring out the mechanics.

It’s not that the target audience is no longer nerds, it’s that the nerds got older.

That's certainly a possibility, but it just does not at all fit with my experience both with IRL nerdy friends and online communities. The old guard just is consistently unhappy with the directions these franchises are taking, but just gets utterly swamped by newcomers who think the old games are weird and customer-unfriendly (admittedly not 100% wrong, a lot of older games had awkward UIs and missed QoL features that are normal nowadays). And while the old guard is almost exclusively socially awkward white and asian nerdy men, the newcomers are genuinely much more mixed along all axis of identity (which isn't surprising given that the whole point of the new direction is making the game more accessible to a larger group of people). And even the newcomers who agree with the old guard turn out to be ... socially awkward nerdy men.

Fair enough. I'm resting on my own experience as a nerdy man who used to have a limited number of games and play them to death, but now buys a lot more games and only plays them if they grab me. This is matching anecdote against anecdote, of course, I should really try and get some actual data. And it's quite possible that both causes of casualisation are at play.

This is what they call 'four quadrant" films, films that penetrate all major demographics. Marvel has it pretty spot on with no sex and minimal romance, and you can't argue with money.

Yeah basically this, nudity is just a tiny element of this larger development.

I think it’s a culture change. And it’s not just sex. It’s a weird thing where people no longer simply do things for fun. They have to have a purpose to do them. You don’t read because you like it, you read because it’s good for you and keep track of all the books you read because you have to hit your reading goal of X books a year. You grind all the time to make money, but it doesn’t seem that most people are doing so because they intend to actually spend it, god forbid. Instead, it’s for show. They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real. Even vacations are supposed to be learning experiences and get you to experience a new culture. Partying, relaxing on the beach, sitting around and reading a book, these things aren’t what people think a vacation should be. I’m kinda a duffer of a writer, it’s a hobby, and it seems like the entire culture around this hobby and art in general is about selling your work. I have no objection whatsoever to selling, but it’s a monofocus on publishing, on getting sales, and working on what will actually sell rather than on having fun. Even though getting your stuff out there can be literally free (a pdf and a webpage is good enough) nope, publishing is it, sell it.

To me, the entire experience of life in 2024 is an exercise in optimization. It’s not about enjoyment, fun, or doing things you enjoy doing for the sake of doing them. It’s about trying to optimize the time used to become a better person in whatever sense it is. Almost as if somehow we’ve lost the sense of doing things just because we want to do them, to have a good time doing them. And I think there are several reasons for this.

One is work culture. Everything has metrics and you’ve been judged by metrics since you were a child. Your parents sweat whether or not you’re keeping up with your peers. And sports at least after age 9 is almost all select teams. You live in a make the grade culture. And you will do your best to measure up.

Two is that leisure time is shrinking. People work 60 hours a week instead of 40. And this shrinks your available time to do anything not work or chores. With that shortage of time, every moment counts and therefore you feel pressured to show that you did not waste time.

People work 60 hours a week instead of 40.

A few of them, sure? 5.6% of workers averaged 60 hours or more last year, according to BLS. People who worked under 15 hours a week were nearly as common.

You might be in a bit of a bubble. There's a lot of variation between industries (full time mining, quarrying, and gas workers average 48.3 hours, so you know there's a lot of 60 hour stretches; my mother quit her veterinary career after a decade or so because the local "60+ hours or don't bother" jobs available were too much with a kid), and variation between companies and subsectors within an industry (I'm told the AAA game developer work ethos is something like "you can sleep when you retire"?). Perhaps you're in one of the worst of those?

They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real.

And yeah, I empathize with this. People were shocked when "The Millionaire Next Door" talked about how many people with 7-figure net worth were driving 20 year old beat-up cars, but that's a goal I started aiming for! I still remember my mom trying to explain to toddler-me that Happy Meals were too expensive right now (soon after she quit her job, my dad lost his...), and enjoying fewer luxuries now seems like a more than worthwhile price to pay for never having to do that with my own kids later. But again, is this the median American, or are we in cultural bubbles? People have spent more on restaurants than on groceries for most of the past decade. Even when my parents found stable new careers it was a treat to visit a buffet every couple weeks.

This all reads as "cultural victory of the nerds, as delivered by an evil genie" to me. I read for fun, don't like relaxing on the beach or partying, and travel for the same feeling of immersive escapism that I would have gotten out of a good book or game while shutting out as much as possible of the "real world", and have been earnestly telling everyone I want to go into academia so that my work is my hobby is my work and "work-life balance" is just for the poor suckers who sold out 8 hours of their every day doing something they hate since long before this HN grindset hustle culture took root. Now, suddenly, I'm surrounded by all these people who apparently feel compelled to pretend to be me, because it's the cool thing - and they hate every moment of it, and respond to any displays of the preceding genuine sentiment roughly in the same way as one would to a teacher's pet or the guy who honestly believes in Our Corporate Mission and excoriates the cynical coworkers who just want to collect a paycheck. At best, I get reactions that parse as "wow, you're trying harder to pretend than I ever could, I should learn from you".

Probably my favorite article on this topic is BloodKnife's everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.

And muscles—giant, pulsating, steroid-enhanced muscles—returned to screens. But the new muscle era lacks the eroticism of Eighties action cinema. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed his glutes in Terminator; Sylvester Stallone stripped for First Blood and Tango & Cash; Bloodsport shows more of Jean Claude Van Damme’s body than that of his love interest.

For the most part, though, today’s cinema hunks are nevernudes. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is strictly PG-13, as one expects from a Disney product. And even in the DC universe, there’s very little of human sexuality. Capefans’ demands for more “mature” superhero movies always mean more graphic violence, not more sex. They panicked over Dr. Manhattan’s glowing blue penis in Watchmen, and they still haven’t forgiven Joel Schumacher for putting nipples on the batsuit.

Today’s stars are action figures, not action heroes. Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others. To have fun is to become weak, to let your team down, and to give the enemy a chance to win, like Thor did when he got fat in Endgame.

The short version is that our bodies are not a thing we inhabit, the medium to experience the world. Instead we objectify ourselves. Our bodies are another Attribute To Be Maximized, dissociated from any purpose. Our art merely reflects this change in orientation.

Probably some combination of all those factors you listed. I do think there's something missing by taking away the sex scenes in movies, though, and it's not just about titillating people. The cheesy gratuitous nudity in 80s action movies made them fun in a shlocky way, adding to the sense of "ridiculous over-the-top male fantasy." Now the action movies are all dark, gritty, and joyous. The romance movies are weirdly chaste, like Twilight, as if sex isn't also part of romantic love.

here seems to be a new stratification in culture where everything is either hardcore sexual or has no sex at all. Everything is porn or innocent.

Ironically, one place you can still kinda see this is in (some) Japanese hentai movies and games. They have sex scenes, but also real story and gameplay. It's a weird mix where you sometimes have to wait surprisingly long before it shows you a sex scene. But then even mainstream anime will sometimes have blatant fan-service, too.

I think the movies "Caligula" and "Showgirls" were going for something like that in the west, but they were both infamous flops, so maybe that scared away Hollywood producers from the idea of sex in movies forever.

You basically hit on all the major parts. An erotic thriller was an actual big deal, even in 1991, especially if you were say a married middle-class man who couldn't really get away to watch porn on your own, while today, that same married middle class guy has a world of porn at his fingertips. But also yes, if you're selling to a worldwide audience, you can't upset anybody.

I will point on the celebrity thing, another thing is if you're a famous woman, you have alternatives to be sexual, where you make the money. For instance, instead of posting for Rolling Stone or whatever, Rhianna makes her own lingerie line, is one of the models for it, and so on. The actual reality is, the actual amount of nudity and sexuality among famous women is about the same as in 1993, it's just centered about celebrities who actually want to do it, as oppose to those felt they are forced to do it to get a roll.

Which explains Game of Thrones or more accurately, many cable dramas. There'll be far more sex scenes and nudity in the first season or two, because the actresses don't have the power to say no to a gratuitous nude scene. Even if you aren't well-paid by the 2nd or 3rd season, you're now plot important to a show that has a plan, so you have the leverage to say no. Also, even putting that aside, there's no need for the random nudity to bring people in at that point.

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