I watched most of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande when it was on TV some months back. I wondered whether to write something about it. But I can’t write about every representation of sex that offends me. Who am I – Mary Whitehouse?
Thankfully Dame Emma Thompson, the star of that film, has now handed me an opportunity. Can I first say something about her? I can’t stick her. Is she a good actress? I don’t know. I can’t tell – it seems to me that she leaks her personality into every role. In Sense and Sensibility it seemed she was merging the character of Elinor Dashwood with the character of Emma Thompson, the famous self-righteous know-it-all celebrity, and I did not want such a merger. Actors are meant to get their own personalities out of the way, aren’t they? I can’t think of any other roles except for the sad wife in Love Actually, a film I greatly despise.
So, in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, an annoyingly named film, Emma merges her personality with that of a retired teacher who, though married, has never been sexually satisfied, and so engages a young male prostitute. She is oh so English, oh so awkward, oh so middle-class, and oh so brave for pursuing her desires despite the cultural weight of repression. Her dialogue is full of sub-Alan Bennett stuff about wondering whether she should be shopping at Waitrose – a distraction from the fact that the prostitute is about to have sex with her. The young man, by the way, is a paragon of modern sensitivity – a male tart with a heart, even a sort of gentle Jesus figure for our day. At one point she calls him a ‘sex saint’.
Maybe the film is written by Richard Curtis – I can’t be bothered to find out. Whether or not is it, Emma has been, in a sense. Meaning that her screen persona is a product of his claim to portray the English soul in a modern way. It is a bogus claim – but I am making enough enemies for one day.
It is excruciating to watch this woman being very polite between bouts of sex – but not excruciating in the edgy way the film intends. It is excruciating because one is being preached at by thickos. The message is this: sex is just sex, it’s a human need like having a good dentist – but more profound. So we should ditch the moralistic idea that sex belongs in long-term relationships, that casual sex and paid-for sex are somehow wrong.
Emma herself has now underlined this message. At a screening of the film – presumably for some ‘charity’ event – the dame explained that sex is very good for one’s health and wellbeing: ‘It should really be on the NHS. It should. It’s so good for you.’ She claimed that some of her older, lonelier friends had started to hire escorts, just like the brave lady in the film. She added: ‘We need to learn about our own response to: “What if when you’re unwell, you can’t make connections, but you need sex?”’ Therefore, she said, sex-workers should not be stigmatised: they are ‘just like accountants – sex workers are doing a job’.
She is oh so English, oh so awkward, oh so middle-class, and oh so brave for pursuing her desires despite the cultural weight of repression
OK, deep breath. And apologies if you have heard this before from me – in relation to Lily Phillips or some smutty reality show on Channel 4. Sex is quite complicated. In fact, it is two things. It is a strong human appetite – one that we notoriously share with lesser creatures, in fact. And it is also the almost-opposite of this: an act of commitment to one person, with whom one enjoys great psychological intimacy – for whom one forgoes the anarchic-appetite side of sex. We could call this sex in the full sense.
The duality is difficult and confusing. People like Dame Emma – and whoever wrote the film – who very strongly assume themselves to be very intelligent, are advised to tread a bit more carefully.
Am I saying that casual sex and paid-for sex are ‘wrong’? Not quite – but I am saying that they are different from sex in the full sense: sex accompanied by long-term psychological intimacy. Casual sex and paid-for sex are ambiguous at best; only sex in the full sense is worthy of celebration. The fault of the film, and of Dame Emma’s remarks, is that the boundary is blurred, and its message is muddled.
The film implies that it is psychologically healthy and liberating to detach sex from commitment – to treat it as a mere physical need. But on the other hand, it places a lot of emphasis on the therapeutic nature of the encounter – on the young man’s sensitivity, on the woman’s sense of gaining a sort of enlightenment as she at last tastes carnal pleasure. So it is subtly disingenuous: it implies that an emotional and even spiritual connection is part of ‘good sex’, even as it preaches liberation from boring old relationships. Our culture needs to think about sex more.
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