Sex and the cinema girl: Karina Longworth dives into ’80s and ’90s erotic films, revealing herself
In the last days of Twitter, one thing is constant: there’s barely a week that goes by before someone stirs the sex scenes in movies discourse pot. It is a confusing time, augmented by both the normalization and proliferation of internet pornography, meaningful progress on conversations about sex, gender, identity and power, and a Hollywood film industry that has seemingly eliminated sexuality from a cinematic ecosystem that primarily courts comic book fans and children. Perhaps to understand the present we have to summon the past. And there’s no better person to do that than Karina Longworth. But, the “You Must Remember This” host, who has guided listeners through Hollywood’s first century for over eight years, is more than just a soothsayer of cinema’s history.
Most articles about Longworth and her podcast start with something ethereal. They ruminate on the film historian’s uncanny ability to access Hollywood’s past, its specters, the things that haunt the industry, leaving orb like traces on our current entertainment landscape. Longworth has come to be known for her cinematic clairvoyance, or at least her ability to channel this on the podcast, her voice often described as dreamy. For almost a decade, she has excavated the stories of the film industry’s first century, from the Manson murders to Joan Crawford, and deconstructed, demystified and reflected on the sociocultural contexts of both their time and ours. And her season on “Song of the South” examined how a film as racist as it is has stayed, even subconsciously, within the American pop cultural lexicon through re-releases and theme park rides.
For the past two seasons, however, Longworth has been considering the era of when sex and sexuality were so saturated in mainstream popular culture that strings of films like “Fatal Attraction,” “Pretty Woman” and “Showgirls” could convey a shifting, excited, anxious, unpredictable and uncertain feeling about sex, power and capital in the country. If something feels slightly different about the “Erotic ’80s” and “Erotic ’90s” seasons compared to previous entries of “You Must Remember This,” it is perhaps because our collective temporal proximity isn’t as distant as it has been to, say, stories about the Hollywood Blacklist or Kenneth Anger’s deranged mythologies of early Hollywood.
“Erotic ’80s” starts at the birth of the ratings system and the brief heyday of porno chic (think the zeitgeist’s love affair “Deep Throat”) and goes on to interrogate the working conditions on “9 ½ Weeks” and the conservative politics and sexual anxieties of “Fatal Attraction” and “Dirty Dancing,” and dovetails into the new world of the home video market, the proliferation of sex tapes and Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape.”
“Erotic ’90s” mirrors the previous season’s opener with discussions on the climate of feminist politics and the failure of the NC-17 rating to make space within the marketplace for sexually explicit, but sophisticated adult (as in not for children, but not pornography either) ventures. It also goes into the changing attitudes about sex work on film in “Pretty Woman” and its implication in “Indecent Proposal” and ends midseason with analyses on the work of unbelievably successful Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter of hits like “Flashdance” “Basic Instinct” and finale capper “Showgirls.”
“I think growing up without a mom and being raised by a single father shaped everything about me … I would never be a normal person.”
And over the course of the series, Longworth, who appears to value a lack of intense scrutiny of herself, has allowed herself to make the show, if not diaristic or prone to solipsism, then at least more personal. Rather than just remaining the velvety voice of the show, she’s doled out tiny nuggets hinting at the significance her subjects have to her.
“If [these seasons are] mostly about the last two decades of the 20th, then [they are] also about the first two decades of my life,” Longworth says at the beginning of “Erotic ’80s.” And while the podcaster has referenced in the past to who she is off mic, like recounting her experience seeing “Song of the South” in theaters with her mother during a release, Longworth finds a way to be franker about her life and experiences through the material, all the while preserving an aspect of her privacy. She gets closer and closer to a level of unprecedented vulnerability for the show, which has been fascinating to listen to over the years, and despite her own disinclination towards fame, she does not find it difficult to do this.
You Must Remember This podcast title card (Courtesy of You Must Remember This podcast)“I really can’t envision what the experience of listening to it is,” she tells me over Zoom, surrounded by movie posters in her office. “And so I have no self-consciousness about what I do on the podcast because it’s just so unfathomable to me that people listen to it. I know it’s not true. I see the download numbers. I know we sell a lot of ads. People are listening to the podcast. But when I’m writing it and when I’m performing it, I just don’t think about that at all. I just really approach it like no one’s listening.”
Even though there’s a temptation to illustrate what she does using the kind of woo-woo language people are reflexively drawn to, due, in no small part, to the show’s old radio atmosphere, Longworth’s project has an amusing contradiction about it. It is a show about untangling and making more tangible the (once?) larger-than-life myths that Hollywood rolled out on a conveyor belt. And the podcast’s style is woven together in what sounds somewhat like the fugue state one lands in at a cocktail party deep into the night, where there is and is not an audience. Where there exists a liminal plane, where the difference between incantation and recitation is hazy.
I asked her early on in the conversation about going to see movies with her mother (“[I remember] her taking me to see every Disney animated re-release, probably from the time I was two,” she says), and she responded that her mother died when she was 11 and that her father was also dead. I perked up knowing I was speaking to another movie-obsessed person of dead parent experience (my father died when I was 14), and I think she smirked, too.
“I think growing up without a mom and being raised by a single father shaped everything about me. I don’t know if it’s the grief so much as it was like having a chip on my shoulder and feeling like I was unlike everybody else,” she said. I knew exactly what she was talking about. “And feeling almost like the rules that everybody else was playing by couldn’t apply to me because I would never be a normal person like them. Maybe to some extent movies were an escape from all the things that I felt excluded from.”
A bloodied Glenn Close is tended to by Michael Douglas in a scene from the film “Fatal Attraction,” 1987 (Paramount/Getty Images)
It makes her analyses of the movies this season feel particularly incisive, such as when she describes “Fatal Attraction” through the imagined economic precarity of the white middle-class family man during Reagan. “Dan clearly doesn’t have enough of a margin to pay Alex off to go away; he can barely afford to keep his current family in the lifestyle to which they aspire […],” she says on the podcast. “A progressive read of ‘Fatal Attraction’ could see it as gesturing to men who, deep down, felt cheated by Reaganomics.” In such breakdowns, the film historian is brilliant in her ability to rhetorically diagram both the critical and emotional components of these movies’ relationship to the family writ large in society.
“I’m kind of proud of myself that I’m sexually liberated and that I wasn’t afraid.”
As these cultural artifacts reflect and refract a precarity of social mores and the evolving (and paradoxical notion) of family values, Longworth is the best sleeper agent, perhaps an outsider looking in. At least that is what I detect and why I have long been attracted to her work and writing.
“I think there’s still a lot of things that I feel really alienated from in terms of family and that experience that other people have had,” she says. “To some extent I guess I can access those experiences through movies, but I feel like watching movies has made me a better observer of human nature. And so it’s more the other way around. It’s less that life has taught me how to watch movies, and it’s more that movies have taught me how to interpret life.”
It is not only that these films were released during her lifetime that makes these seasons significant, but that they telegraphed particular things about sex, death, sexuality, gender and power. She remembers seeing “Sliver,” the 1993 erotic thriller film with Sharon Stone and William Baldwin, in the theater as an adolescent, and, during this period, the culture was suffused with mixed messages about these subjects it was depicting, especially as it related to how people were socialized differently and how those gendered expectations could take a toll. Drew Barrymore and Alicia Silverstone, who are the subject of an episode pertaining to “Poison Ivy” and “The Crush,” were both objects of the media’s obsessive gaze and infantilization, and, as Longworth says on the podcast, “The industry has historically relied on making actresses feel as though their only route to power lies in their looks, while constantly telling them that they can’t accrue more power, or don’t deserve the power that they have, because they don’t look good enough.”
Longworth tells me, “I didn’t really have anybody giving me any kind of guidance. But if I was to give myself guidance, I don’t really know what I tell myself because I think I approach things in the way that I wish more people would approach things, which was that I was just really excited to become sexual, and I was probably too sexually aggressive for 16-year-old boys to handle. I think I didn’t really understand that it’s preferred in straight culture for women to be a little bit more demure.
“I guess I could have given 13-year-old through 21-year-old me some kind of road map that would have made me sort of more successful and have less pain,” she continues. “But I don’t know that I would want to do that because I’m kind of proud of myself that I’m sexually liberated and that I wasn’t afraid, until people made me feel afraid and made me feel shame.”
The great miracle of “You Must Remember This” is not only its ability to make the past a necessary element to understanding the present, even beyond the confines of the entertainment industry in its sharp ability to examine the political and economic contexts of a given moment, but Longworth’s skill in bringing the gods down to earth. We need an, as she calls it, interpreter.
Demi Moore riding public transportation while dressed in formal wear in a scene from the film “Indecent Proposal,” 1993 (Paramount Pictures/Getty Images)
The trajectory of “Erotic ’90s” is heavily shaped by a kind of backlash to the feminist politics of the ’80s, characterized by “Indecent Proposal,” “The Last Seduction” and “Disclosure,” the latter two of which fall into movies about, as Longworth terms them, fear of the female boss: “Both [movies] seemed to reflect a trend described by Tad Friend in the Feb 1994 of Esquire [ . . .] as ‘do me feminism.’ More than once he invokes Lorena Bobbitt . . . The implication is, if we let women have control, aren’t we running the risk that they will cut off our pansies and throw them in a field? Both [movies] could be considered dramatizations of that fear, to very different ends.”
“In 2023, mainstream Hollywood film does not reflect the depth and variety of the discourse around sexuality.”
It’s useful, as Longworth posits, to have cultural artifacts that articulate these real fears, rational or otherwise, that a portion of the culture has. What films will be written about in the future that convey the current gender, sexual and queer panic that is pervading our increasingly unhinged and divided political and cultural discourse? As Hollywood continues to neuter itself, will movies like “No Hard Feelings” or “Deep Water” make the cut, or will they get sidelined by the IP-saturated marketplace where sex barely exists in Marvel movies? One wonders if Hollywood still have the kinds of Greek gods whose libidinal histories shaped whole cultures, or if we just have action figures with smooth, nothing nether regions now.
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“I think it’s fair to say that in 2023, mainstream Hollywood film does not reflect the depth and variety of the discourse around sexuality, and I think that largely has to do with the ever-increasing corporatization of the film industry,” she tells me. “If ‘Erotic ’80s’ and ‘Erotic ’90s’ speak to anything going on today, it does so by attempting to understand the last two decades when sex really was on the table as a subject for mainstream, commercial cinema. I write about the past and do my best to convey what it was like to be alive in a long-ago moment, and largely feel like it’s up to the listener to make the connections about what they recognize and how it relates to the time they live in.”
Perhaps it’s Longworth’s calling to live somewhere between the realm of the deities we worship and the real world. “I know that when I’ve taken really long breaks from doing a podcast, I get depressed. Maybe if I had other projects I was working on, I wouldn’t feel that way. I think I just need to kind of always have a project that I’m working on, and I have these visions of retiring. But [then] I know that I’m always going to want to do something.” As she plays seer to Hollywood’s blithe and berserk spirits, Karina Longworth is allowing herself to become more mortal.
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