I do mean subtext, not shakingitinyourfacetext although I will admit that there can be varying levels of subtlety.
One of the most prominent example is Alien. From what I’ve read, one of the goals of the Alien makers was to make male members of the audience feel uneasy. The rape/baby/penis that burst out and kills you thing works well without being obviously about sex. If you have more to share about Alien(s), please do so even if the OP names it.
What other stories whether in books, TV, movies, animation or any other work make good use of sexual subtext? Also, if you will, please explain the subtext and how its use can be considered good.
In “Alien,” all the alien spaceship artwork/SFX (and everything else by Giger), was deliberately sexual–most of the pass-throughs are vaginal,our friend with the hole in his chest has the biggest honker in the galaxy.
Oh, yeah, in the final sequence, Sigourney Weaver’s panties are…making…some kinda…statem…excuse me!
I’ve heard rumors that Weaver wanted to do that scene completely nude, as she felt that would highlight her vulnerability more, but that the producers nixed her. If true, that makes the producers the greatest idiots in the history of film.
Batman Returns certainly laid bare the motivation these people had for dressing up like animals and prowling the rooftops. But for “food as sex” metaphors, look no further than The Age of Innocence, which was food porn with frequent money shots.
I always saw Alien as about pregnancy and childbirth and abortion (and especially the inability to procure one, i.e., being pregnant and not being able to do anything about it), not about sex per se.
I’ve never read the novel Turn of the Screw, because Henry James wrote prose like he swallowed a bag of phrases and prepositions and vomited them out onto the page. However, I love the movie **The Innocents **based closely on his novel. On the surface, it’s a fairly run of the mill 19th century ghost story, but by the end, it’s pretty clearly about female sexual repression, and a woman obsessed with the sexual awakening (and possible abuse) of a pre-teen boy. I’m convinced the only reason Mr. James got away with it was because no one was interested in deciphering subtext back then.
There is a long time film idea that Last Tango in Paris is “really” about a Gay affair but is on screen as a heterosexual affair because there’s no way they would have made the movie about Gay people at the time.
Penny Lane. “Fish and finger pie,” “keeps his fire engine clean,” “never wears a mack in the pouring rain,” “every head he’s had the pleasure to know,” etc. (OK, maybe some of those are my mind being dirty, but c’mon - “fireman with an hourglass”?)
Maybe the producers weren’t so much dumb as scared of losing an ass-load of money. As it was, Alien was already a hard “R” and a long nude sequence with Weaver could’ve pushed into “X” territory (even though the scene would not have been sexual in any way). For non-porno movies, an “X” rating was considered such box office poison that many theater chains would refuse to show it. It also meant many newspapers would not run ads for the movie. Fox had already sank a lot of money into a production that was going to be one of its major tent-pole releases for the summer of 1979 and did not want to do anything that might risk it.
I used to think the same way about “Drive My Car”, and it was a lot less funny when I figured out that they were deliberately evoking the long tradition of sexual metaphors in blues.
I had to read that one (and Daisy Miller). Yea, that’s a good description on how he writes. And yes, I think repression of…someone/something, and the possible abuse of the boy, was about all I could get from the story.
Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice has a strong sexual subtext as the old author obsesses from distance with a teenage boy and Mann uses that obsession and an outbreak of cholera to meditate on life, love and death.
