Get on the Bus:

Explicit Content and the Treatment of Sex in Film
When does a film cease to be art and become pornography? Is the depiction of actual sex pornographic if the images are calculated not to arouse viewers, or is what causes arousal so subjective that it is impossible to define what is pornographic? If so, is it practical to empower lawmakers to define what is or isn't pornographic on our behalf? When serious actors engage in sexual activity for artistic purposes, are they inadvertently prostituting their art? Any number of these tricky, perhaps unanswerable, questions are raised by the explicit sexual content in the upcoming fall release Shortbus.

Shortbus follows a group of New Yorkers as they explore the comic and tragic intersections between sex and love in and around a present-day underground sex salon called Shortbus. The film includes scenes of real sex between gay, lesbian, and heterosexual characters as well as masturbation and group sex scenes. The film is not meant to focus on the erotic side of sex, but use sex as a representation of other aspects of the characters and the overarching story.

In the 1996 article “Prisoners of sex? - sex in society and the media" in the Humanist, Lee Ann Morgan writes about the progressively juvenile and superficial portrayal of sex. She states that “sex may be losing its soul in direct proportion to its becoming a mass commodity.” Ten years later Morgan’s observations of mainstream media’s treatment of sex have worsened exponentially. Sex is trivialized in raunchy gross-out teen comedies, reality television, magazine spreads, and other prominent pieces of pop culture. Morgan continues by stating that “the images are powerful without an accompanying sense of respect or responsibility or proportion.” Sex sells, but only if it is exaggerated and infantile. This leads to the question, Can films like Shortbus bring the “soul” back into sex? In a Cannes Film Festival press conference, Director John Cameron Mitchell stated that he “wanted to use sex for a metaphor for things that were perhaps more universal: themes of connection and love and fear.” Imagine if sex was more commonly situated to provoke thoughtful interpretation, as opposed to provoking erections. Although Shortbus’s ability to do this relies heavily on the audiences’ capacity to accept the sex in the film as not another opportunity to overdose on our cultural obsession with sex, but to view the sex in the film as a single entity that defines and represents the characters.

Despite the artistic clarifications given for the abundance of sex in Shortbus, the film is still bound to draw in some socio-political controversy. Director John Cameron Mitchell has openly declared that his text is an act of defiance against the current political climate in America. In the introduction to the uncensored trailer on Ifilm.com, Mitchell states that Shortbus is “everything you need to get through the next two years of George Bush.” It is unclear how directly the film itself addresses Bush, terrorist fears, and other post-9/11 political issues. Yet it is evident that the auteur, Mitchell, is using his film as a symbol of subversion and liberation in a time where there is a strong presents of distrust of the current administration. At the Cannes Film Festival press conference, Mitchell declared that “We are certainly being controlled by a puritanical government in the States, a theocracy so to speak that a lot of people…don't agree with.” The extreme leftist views of the film and the filmmakers are going to cater to the expected audiences who actually go out to see it, relatively liberal individuals. The extremity of this film may not lead to much social change, or even effect any mainstream media treatment of sex, however for the intellectually open crowds who are able to see it, it will hopefully fulfill its main purpose of giving sex the proper value and respect it deserves.

John Cameron Mitchell on the goal of Shortbus: “Most people have said that by the end of the film, the sex was the last thing they think about, which is in a way our goal too, to remind people that it is just another brush stroke in the painting of life."