Still, worth a rent. Check it out.
Anyway, in that film there's a scene with Dillinger and his girlfriend, Billie Frechette (played by Marion Cotillard). Perpetuating the idea that women can be bought, Dillinger buys Billie a fur coat and, in return, she has sex with him. How fucking romantic.
Public Enemies takes place in the 1930s, during the Great Depression era. What struck me about the Dillinger/Frechette love scene in this movie was how, well, modern it was. As far as big action movie love scenes go, this one most reminded me of the scene between Matt Damon and Franka Potente in The Bourne Identity.
For some reason, this struck me as odd.
When I got to thinking about it more, I didn't understand why I thought it was odd that a sex scene from the 1930s would seem similar to a sex scene from the 2000s.
Or maybe I just wanted to have sexy pictures in my blog this week.
The fact is, sex couldn't have possibly been very different in the 1930s or the 1860s or even the 1400s. Sex in the Stone Age was probably similar to sex Industrial Age. Sex on Mayflower was probably the same as sex on the Santa Maria. Sex on the U.S.S. Enterprise will probably be the same as sex on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.
Still, that seems fucking strange. Maybe it's just the way we view history, as something so different and detached from the way we are now. There's a Greg Giraldo bit where he compares letters written by Civil War soldiers to their loves to those written today and, while amusing, it reminds me of a fundamental flaw regarding how we view the past. We seem to see it as something intangibly other from the way we are today.
The truth is people are the same all over, regardless of culture, history, upbringing. There are differences in those cultures, of course. There are differences in how people react to certain situations or stimuli. But that doesn't make people different. Whenever I've met someone from Jamaica or England or Romania, what strikes me first and foremost isn't the cultural differences, but rather how much we're alike as people. We all worry about survival and having fun, morality and girls.
It's easier to notice the differences in people when you're viewing the culture as a whole. When you see an African tribal ritual without having met anyone individually, you notice the differences. But when you encounter individuals, you realize that we're actually all quite similar.
And if sex is about anything, it's about individuals.
Sex is a base instinct that transcends culture and time period. Thomas Jefferson had his equivalent of rose petal-covered Valentine's Day romantic sex with his wife, and he probably had his equivalent of dorm room shower quickies with Sally Hemings.
Maybe it's porn.
It can't all have to do with porn, of course, but it seems like it could be a contributing factor. There is a clear definition between almost everyone having access to porn and it being more strictly controlled and that clear definition is called the Internet.
The Internet is an incredibly new development, if you look at the scope of human history. But it's also something that has become so indoctrinated into our daily lives that, for people around my age, it gets hard to believe what we did prior to it. For those younger than me, they literally may not have a time where they didn't have the Internet.
That can skew your perspective, as history doesn't have much of a place on the Internet. The Internet is about new and now and faster and better and quicker. It's about movement. It's about moving on. The Internet views history almost as a niche market and, consequently, people growing up on the Internet will probably view history as almost inconsequential.
These kids, they'll grow up with older brothers (or maybe even fathers) who use the Internet to look at porn on at least a semi-regular basis. And porn is pretty modern. In that way, it's strange to think about that same kind of sex going on, all corsets and enormous gowns, in Victorian England.
Not to say Queen Elizabeth was doing the piledriver on the side of her royal bed, but there was probably more going on than just the missionary position.
With porn, we've modernized and naturalized sex to the degree that thinking about it in regards to history is strange and incongruous. The phrase "your grandparents still have sex," used to disgust teenagers, glosses over the fact that, when they were your age, your grandparents had the same kind of sex you do.
Or maybe it's just hard to believe anyone was fucking during the Great Depression.
(Or maybe I just wanted sexy pictures in my blog this week)
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