Mmm … no. The erotic interludes can occur before, during and after the romance. I’ve no idea why you think romance precludes eroticism, or that erotic activities don’t occur prior to, or most often, while the couple is falling in love, but there are a LOT of stories structured that way.
You’re talking about the summer blockbuster fare. There are still a lot of romance movies made, they’re CHEAP to make if set in the present day. Reese Witherspoon has done a lot of them, and so has Mark Ruffalo (he’s been sort of the go-to guy for romantic comedies for a while). I’m just thinking that the first movie to crank things up a lot in the erotic department and still keep the relationships first and foremost, with comedy elements intact, might be the winner. But I don’t know.
Yeah, but they don’t WANT porn, which tends not to focus on a romantic relationship. They want romances.
So would erotic romances be like soft-core porn with good plotting and acting?
I mean, book romances can be explicit AND have character development and a plot, but doing the same with movies seems difficult. Too explicit, and it’s like porn, not explicit enough, then how different is it from rom-coms?
I’ve got to get new glasses. I keep seeing this thread topic as So Where Are the Ethnic Romance Movies?
You’re right about romance, but they have a far wider audience than erotic romance. Plenty of women will go to a romantic comedy where the sex is understated and in the background, but once it becomes the main event, they will stay away. You can take your boyfriend to a Reese Witherspoon romance; but most women would be embarrassed to be watching erotic and explicit sex with them. (A woman might want to fantasize about being treated rough, but they run away from it if it came true.)
And there’s precedent: Secretary was a critically acclaimed film on the subject (the male character was even named Grey). It did OK at the box office with a small budget, but not enough to get Hollywood interested in making it into a trend.
My wife loved 50 Shades of Grey, and enjoyed giggling about it with her friends. I asked her if she planned to see the movie. NO WAY.
I think part of it is the way that narrative in film is gendered. 99% of films use men to drive the plot forward, and women are the object of the “male gaze” (which is a more complex and less wacky concept than it sounds at first.) Basically, men make plot and women make visual pleasure by being looked at by the protagonist, the camera, the director and ultimately the viewer.
It’s really rare to find a truly female driven movie as is. Even most of the ones that spring to mind, if you think about it, are often about the female characters reacting rather than instigating. Making is really identify with female characters on their own, and not through the vehicle of a male character, is something cinema is not good at.
So erotic romance may be difficult, because it relies so heavily on the audience identifying with the female. Even women who dream of being ravaged may get disgusted and turned off if they instead end up feeling like they are identifying with the ravaged.
I’m saying they want both - they want the erotic novels for the imagination fodder, and the porn for the visual stimulation. And they can get both, nowadays, but couldn’t before. That’s why the woman’s share of porn consumption is going steadily up, as I understand it. They/we can compartmentalize their entertainment and can separate the two feeds, as it were.
There’s also likely a generational thing there - I mean, could you imagine, say, any 50s TV stars co-starring with an open former pornstarlet, like in GoT? Nowadays, I don’t think most younger people care as much.
Which I personally am cool with, because that Sibel Kikelli is a goddess…
Fifty Shades of Gray was a FAD. Captial F. Capital A. Capital D. It sold a lot of copies, but many women who read it realized how terrible the whole thing was and how they didn’t really want that much bondage in their romance books. But those copies were still sold. What happened to them? They’re being donated to libraries by the truckful. Oh, and speaking of libraries, how many of those 70 million copies were purchased by libraries? The answer is, a lot.
According to the ALA there are about 16,000 public libraries in the U.S. If each of them bought 50 copies, a ludicrously high number, then they bought… 1% of the total.
And?
And 1% is not a lot.
That’s a general statement about blockbusters. Library sales can be a hefty percentage of a small literary novel, and that’s wonderful. But overall library sales are essentially negligible on any bestseller, let alone the few megablockbusters.
The Monroe County System currently has somewhere around 120 copies in all editions for its 33 branches, or 4 each. If that’s the norm then total nationwide library sales are around 64,000 copies. For any ordinary book that would be a lot, but that’s less than 1/10 of a per cent of the total. Of course, some of the copies have probably been chucked now that the peak of the interest is over, but no matter how you massage the numbers libraries are simply not a factor in overall sales.
I also don’t agree that it represented a fad that’s over. There are dozens of pages online with long lists of books to read if you liked Fifty Shades. To me it looks like the early years of paranormal romance. That stayed hot for over a decade, although some people are saying that it’s been trampled into the ground by repetition. Erotic romance has many good years in it, especially if the movie turns out to be a hit.
Let me try to rephrase what I mean. When you’ve got a sex scene, one of two things is true. Either you have both parties sufficiently interested in each other that they’re willing to have sex, in which case you’re already past the part where they became interested… Or you have at least one party who is not sufficiently interested to be willing, in which case it’s rape, which most people aren’t interested in. There are ways around this, of course, but it’s a lot harder than producing separate works of erotica and romance.
I suspect we may be working from slightly different definitions of “romance” and “porn”. Yours is the more commonly accepted definition. To me, a romance is a story about a sexual relationship that focuses on the relationship between the partners involved – the whole of it, not just the sex. Porn is a story about a sexual relationship that focuses only on the sex, most often, only on the sex acts engaged in by the partners involved.
That’s why romances work better in written format – the author has much more flexibility in describing the feelings and thoughts of the characters compared to a filmmaker.
(Actually, filmmakers have the option of using voiceover or exposition to describe the characters’ feelings, but have been convinced in film school that they should never do that, which is why in so many movies we have characters mooning into the distance while music plays in the background, so we can try to figure out what kind of emotion they’re supposed to be feeling. Someone should tell them how stupid this looks, some day. Oh, I just did. Cat’s outta the bag!)
Compare the novel “Story of O” with the 1986 movie based on it, and you’ll see the difference. The book is a constant narrative about O’s feelings and observations, it is all about her relationship to Sir Stephen, her reactions to what is done to her and how she feels about herself. The movie TRIES to convey this, but without the omnipresent narration in the book, it gets perilously close to being porn.
I think the rise of erotic romances is women just getting more comfortable with bringing the actual sex into the sexual relationship. Decades ago, romances were famous for almost completely glossing over the sex in a sexual relationship. I think it IS a generational thing as you say, younger women are not nearly as inhibited about depictions of sex as older women are.
The thing about “50 Shades of Grey” is, the sex is front and center, it’s a central part of the relationship between Christian and Ana, though hardly the only part. Christian is a kinky billionaire, used to getting his way with women via a contract and incredilby lavish gift-giving. Ana is a spunky recent college grad from a middle class household, raised to bargain effectively in her sexual relationships, playing well outside her league in the company of a billionaire, but being so bright and spunky and full of joie de vivre, she is able to hold her own with Christian. The whole series is about how the two of them devise a relationship around their sexual attraction to one another. She loves to submit to his domineering ways in the bedroom, outside it, she has boundaries, conditions, etc. The whole book is about that tension … it is a classic romance, with the sex as the basis of the relationship, instead of her being captured by a pirate or any of the creaky old plot devices that romance novels usually entail.
Erotic romances will simply be romances in which the sexual relationship is very much a part of the whole story of the relationship, as it should be. We might actually see a genre of films that both sexes can enjoy, instead of men watching porn and women watching romantic comedies, if things work out right. But that will entail filmmmakers learning to use voiceover effectively. We shall see.
I would say most don’t care at all.
Yes, she is. Most importantly, she handles her role well. There are a lot of gorgeous porn stars who have never learned to act, and cannot act. We may see the rise of women who will do HARD CORE SEX SCENES and who can also act competently in other sorts of scenes as well. I am thinking of “Blue Is The Warmest Color” here. The lesbian sex scenes are truly raunchy and intense and hardcore, but the actresses are excellent in other scenes as well (the movie is basically an erotic romance).
Meanwhile, the kinky porn movie studio Kink, Inc., is starting to put storylines into some of its porn. Could we be on the brink of a
MORONIC CONVERGENCE???
only time will tell …
I hear the sound of someone whistling past the graveyard. Which of these things is not like the other?
Hula Hoop
Frisbee
Pet Rocks
BDSM erotica
When the Fifty Shades movie sinks like a Pet Rock, I’ll resurrect this thread. Bondage literature is over. People don’t really care for it past that first taste.
Lars Von Trier latest was a hit between arthouse-going hipsters not that long ago? And there was that male stripper film with Matthew MacConaughey and Channing Tatum a while back that I guess counts.
Nothing super-successful or managing to make it into the mainstream, but they are there. We can get another Basic Instinct any moment now.
I think you’ve already answered your own question. We won’t get erotic romance movies, because we already have sexed-up miniseries that women can watch in the privacy of their own homes. Possibly the sex will continue to get ramped up in much the same way that the violence has.
I think it very likely that the movie version of “Fifty Shades of Gray” will be a bomb, it’s going to be DAMNED difficult for it to succeed. That will not in any way negate the success of the book or make its impact on our culture any less powerful.