Can Challengers make sex hot again?

I was the sole audience member at an otherwise-empty afternoon showing of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers this week, which should have been a rare luxury but instead made me feel like a pervert. Challengers is not a sex movie — ostensibly, it is about tennis — but it is a sexy movie, so erotically charged that it has already prompted at least one public ejaculation, albeit of the verbal variety. When the credits rolled at a pre-release screening of the film last month, one audience member reportedly shrieked, “Sex is back!”, as if sex were a beloved relative, returned at last from war.

This person, of course, is also a pervert — but he’s not wrong. Sex in films has been markedly absent for the past decade or so, an unsurprising fact given the zeitgeist. In a world ruled by superhero franchises and other ripped-from-the-YA-section IP, not to mention a prudish sensibility vis-a-vis R-rated sensuality that arose roughly in tandem with the #MeToo movement, sex became a subject occasionally joked about, rarely depicted and generally sidelined in favour of various acts of CGI sorcery. Arguably, the horniest films of the 2010s featured in the Twilight saga, and even these portrayed the physical act of love as something to be nobly abstained from rather than joyfully indulged in. (Interestingly, this theme persists even after the two central characters are married, when their sole sexual encounter results in the total destruction of an entire bedroom suite and a demon foetus that the vampire husband eventually delivers via C-section with his teeth — you know, PG-13 stuff.)

Hence the excitement surrounding Challengers, which seems to suggest the presence of adults in the cultural room. The producer Amy Pascal said: “It absolutely feels like the pendulum has swung back toward filmmakers exploring adult relationships and sexuality in their projects.” It’s a development she considers welcome.

Naturally, the return of sex on the big screen does not imply its absence elsewhere. Steamy small-screen dramas such as Euphoria and Game of Thrones, as well as the more female-gazey Bridgerton and Outlander, have long trod the fine line between what is sexy and what is soft-core pornography. And then there’s the even smaller screen of the smartphone, which not only comes with a virtually limitless supply of porn but also the possibility for audience participation. Through the glass, you can command bespoke masturbation material from an OnlyFans creator, upload your own videos to an amateur site, or compete for the attention of a camgirl from the comfort of your own home.

It’s difficult to overstate how drastically the paradigm has shifted. A quarter of a century ago, back in the analogue days, porn was not simply available; you had to hunt for it in its natural habitat under someone’s older brother’s mattress. Or in the indecipherable mess of moaning, flesh-coloured something on a scrambled cable TV channel. Or in the cave-like “ADULT” enclave at the back of the local video rental spot, which in my hometown store was separated by a beaded curtain that made an unmistakable rattle every time someone entered the room — so that when you emerged clutching the complete boxed set of College Girls Gone Wild, it was under the watchful gaze of a small cadre of giggling patrons who had assembled to see who the degenerate was. (Mostly, it was nobody my friends and I knew; one time, to the horror of all involved, it was our high-school biology teacher.)

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The drastic difference between then and now may explain why Gen Z is not just uninterested in sex scenes in non-pornographic films, but in many cases repulsed by them. The most recent “Teens & Screens” report from UCLA revealed that almost half of adolescents aged 13–24 felt that “romance is overused in media” (44.3%) and that “sex is unnecessary for the plot of most TV shows and movies” (47.5%). That same survey found that just over half of the young people surveyed wanted to see more content about friendships in lieu of romance; a smaller but still significant number said they wanted explicitly asexual content.

Perhaps this was inevitable for a generation that is already known for being the least horny in documented history. If you are eschewing sex and dating, then stories about similarly prudish characters may well make you feel seen. Certainly, it explains the fixation among younger people on whether sex or romance — a.k.a. the powerful drives through which human beings continue to exist on earth — is “necessary to the plot” of the stories we tell. Last year, 40-year-old British actor Henry Cavill briefly went viral after a podcast interview in which he declared himself “not a fan” of sex scenes. “There are circumstances where a sex scene actually is beneficial to a movie, rather than just the audience, but I think sometimes they’re overused these days,” he said. “Is this really necessary or is it just people with less clothing on?”

There’s a lot to unpack here, including the notion of scenes that are beneficial to a film’s audience while somehow detracting from the film itself — as if the people watching his movies are mere voyeurs interrupting its higher purpose. (There’s also the irony of this coming from a man whose career was launched by his steamy turn on The Tudors, but that’s a conversation for another day.) Only in a world in which sexual content had become virtually synonymous with pornography could an actor have such a low opinion of the audience who consumes his work.

“This is not a movie in which sex is necessary to the plot; it is the plot.”

But perhaps Cavill can be forgiven for this failure of imagination, given that we leave virtually nothing to it anymore. If you’ve grown up surrounded by sexual content that is made for masturbation, the notion of sex as a storytelling device — let alone as art — must seem utterly alien.

Which brings us back to Challengers, and what it represents — which, with apologies to the exultant shouter of “Sex is back!”, seems not so much a return to the era of the gratuitous sex scene as a complete, concept-level overhaul of what eroticism looks like on-screen. This is not a movie in which sex is necessary to the plot; it is the plot, the context in which every glance, every utterance, every interaction between the three central characters takes place. The tennis scenes are about sex. The fights are about sex. The two young men aggressively eating churros at each other in a college dining hall? Definitely, and not particularly subtly, about sex.

This is what animates the story of Challengers, and also what makes it genius, particularly coming from a director who is no stranger to the artful and provocative depiction of sex on film. Guadagnino’s previous work, Call Me By Your Name, includes what is surely the most memorable act of man-on-peach intercourse in cinematic history, but the film itself is about desire. Challengers, on the other hand, is about sex — to the point where depicting the act itself becomes unnecessary (although one underwear-clad makeout session tiptoes up to the line). One way to describe this movie would be to say that it contains no sex scenes. Another way would be that it contains nothing but these, just thinly disguised as something else.

In this way, Guadagnino’s film feels like a cheeky rejoinder to the notion that sex and romance can be “overused” or “unnecessary” — as if these were mere dressings drizzled over the top of what it means to be human, as opposed to the essential binding agent they are. Maybe you don’t always taste these things, or maybe you can plausibly pretend as much, but nothing holds together without them. And when Gen Z complains that they just want their stories without any icky explicit sex in it, the simmering, heady eroticism of Challengers winks back. Sure, kids: here’s a nice tennis movie. Enjoy!

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