‘Erotic Thrillers’ in the Tech-obsessed 1990s
When the 1s met the 0s and the film noir sexy collided with the erotic stupid . . . and ruined my home-delivered pizzas
While the “video nasty” was our analog-rental de rigueur in the ’80s, it was the titillation of the psuedo-Giallo and faux film noir plotting of the “erotic thriller” that was our fashionable, digital-rental in the ’90s. Their bastardized, low-budget “after dark” soft-core variants aired on U.S. pay cable television starring Tawny Kitaen, Jewel Shepard, Nicollette Sheridan, Shannon Tweed, or Shannon Whirry seduced by — or seducing — ne’er-do-well successful surgeons, kinked detectives, and hunky-handyman drifters on Cinemax and Showtime. Call those ’90s eroticisms — with some derivative of “Killer,” “Naked,” “Night,” “Obsession,” or “Stranger” in the title — what you will: a sexed-up ’50s film-noir thriller, an ersatz behind-the-green-curtain “Big Box” video-rental porn, or a less graphic, non-psychosexual update of an Italian Giallo from the ’70s — but the genre captured the creative pens of Hollywood and the contractual clauses of A-List talent agents.
The first leading man of modern-day Hollywood to answer the call for Hollywood’s new take on the likes of Double Indemnity (1944) was Michael Douglas: the star of Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Disclosure (1994).
In today’s #metoo movement: Ms. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) would be on the phone to the insurance company to report the nebbish Walter Neff for indulging his foot fetish while on a sales call, commenting on her “honey of an anklet.” Today, Mr. Neff would be fired, slandered on social media, and reduced to alcoholism as he slithered on rock bottom until his eventual self-demise — but not before he got a job alongside Armie Hammer selling timeshares¹ in the Cayman Islands.
Poor, Walter. It’s not like he confessed fantasies about consuming human flesh: all he did was comment on a piece of jewelry.
Back then, in a #metoo-less movement— and not forgetting Double Indemnity is a James M. Cain novella-based film: An innocent, off-the-cuff comment about a woman’s anklet triggers a femme fatale chain-of-events from which a man could never recover, as a rich, seductive housewife romances an insurance salesman into a murder/insurance fraud scheme of her husband.
One would have to watch both films back-to-back to hear Micheal Douglas salivating actor Fred MacMurray’s line, “That’s a honey of an anklet you got there, Ms. Dietrichson,” as a widowed Barbara Stanwyck gives him a hint of vagina . . . as well as to hear Fred MacMurray substituting the p-word in lieu of “anklet,” as Babs remembered the anklet, but forgot the lower-abdominal undergarments.
As I man, I’ll confess: Ain’t no men in any decade gazing at any anklets because: it ain’t never just about the anklet. The days of Ricky and Lucy Ricardo on U.S television’s I Love Lucy and Rob and Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show bunking down in nightstand-separate twins beds are long since over: bring on the WAP — and we’re not talking about a wireless access point. These are the days where it’s societal acceptable for Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion performing an F.C.C sanctioned pseudo-lesbian stripper show on a U.S national television network² to mass applause and cheers, as musical tributes to the vagina rise up the charts to Grammy recognition and acclaim. Yes, in a world where U.S radio “shock jock” Howard Stern is run off terrestrial radio to a free-speech satellite radio retreat by the F.C.C for talking about lesbians: Cardi B. and ol’ Megs become feminist icons alongside J.Lo grinding metal poles³ for Pepsi profit.
Meanwhile . . . poor, Janet Jackson. It’s not like she showed her vajayjay on network television during a football game: all she did was show a little round circular protuberance, Seinfeld-style. Shouldn’t expanding the world’s vocabulary by adding “nipplegate”⁴ to the media lexicon and “wardrobe malfunction” to the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary — while creating multiple, superfluous Wikipages in one fell swoop — be a positive, resume bullet point? (That was a “honey of an areola,” by the way, Janet.)
Once upon a simpler analog time: the typewriter and the rotary phone gave you the world.
The Blue Print for the ‘Erotic Thriller’ of the ’90s
During that short-lived sex-noir genre of the early ’90s— one that crossed Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) with Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), while adding a soupçon of the Golden Age of Porn’s Deep Throat (1972) with a dash of The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), and a smidgen of Dario Argento’s ’70s Giallo-styled kinks — the son of the acting royalty that is Kirk Douglas was the crowned king of the bare-bottom courtesy of the one-two box-office hip-thrust of (the lighter fare) Fatal Attraction (1987) (and the amped-up) Basic Instinct (1992). While director Adrian Lyne and writer James Dearden’s former sex frolic was a hit, their Glenn Close’s Alexandra “Alex” Forrest was no match for Sharon’s Stone’s Catherine Tramell in the latter— courtesy of that notorious Joe Eszterhas-penned and Paul Verhoeven-directed vajayjay scene in the police interrogation room. Cat wasn’t a rabbit-boiling wrist-silting shrinking violet: Cat was a full-on Giallo-inspired bisexual-ice picker.
So, with that: The man’s pants fell and the women’s legs opened with one major studio, Joe Eszterhas-clone after another: Sea of Love (1989), Pacific Heights (1990) (more psychological, less sex; desperately needed sex), A Kiss Before Dying (1991) (a sexed-up remake of another film noir classic), Poison Ivy (1992) (Drew Barrymore seduces), Single White Female (1992) (standards-and-practices lesbian lore), Color of Night (1992) (Bruce Willis on his career downward spiral), Consenting Adults (1992) (three-time Oscar-nodded Alan J. Pakula, bombs), Traces of Red (1992) (Lorraine Bracco femme fatales to a “Worst Actress” Razzie), Sliver (1993) (Sharon Stone, bombs), Body of Evidence (1993) (Madonna, bombs), Indecent Proposal (1993) (Robert Redford tries for a little, lightweight Michael Douglas upwind), The Last Seduction (1994), Jade (1995) (David Caruso ruins his film career), Showgirls (1995) (Eszterhas and Verhoeven return for a match made in box office-hell), and Wild Things (1998) (Denise Richards in lieu of Sharon Stone).
So, Micheal Douglas does Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. Demi Moore takes an erotic route with Indecent Proposal and Striptease (1996).
What’s the third film each picks in their sexual cinema triumvirate: Director Barry Levinson’s adaptation of Micheal Crichton’s 1994 novel about sexual misbehavior in a computer hardware manufacturing company: Disclosure.
Yes, this was our first, pseudo laptop: all 4 kilobytes of RAM of it.
No, wait . . . that was an Apple II. Our Macintosh Plus packed 1 megabyte of RAM as standard, and could be expanded to 4 MB.
The Erotic Clumsy Romances the Cyber Stupid
Hollywood’s fascination with the erotic was only matched by their kid-in-a-Radio Shack candy store tomfoolery when they warned us the Internet — with a single keystroke — could do anything: Tinseltown warned of a world where hacks were as easy as a car service or food delivery app-touch away in our today. Our new digital world would be an interconnected, web-server world where the introverted, the shut-in, the malcontent bookworm, and the bullied brainiac would lord over the extroverts. The freaks n’ geeks would easily telecommute over phone lines as they cyberpunked the cool and the beautiful who once made their lives a living hell; they would trick them to blindly open their hearts and souls on cyberchats to a new, digital lover as they digitally-ordered pizzas while mere analog fools were still engaging in physical sex and calling-in their pepperoni pies.
Maybe a world of cyber-masturbation to Angela Bennett and phone-app delivered pizzas isn’t such a bad idea? No pesky humans: just you and a computer and some KY Jelly and extra pepperoni and double mushrooms. It sounds so warm and inviting.
Anyway . . . oh, those good ol’ analog days when a thumb drive was not yet a twinkle in our Commodore 64-eye. It was an epoch-prediction that computer discs would become the linchpin of our existence. It was a time when CD-ROMs were lucrative. A time when scientific formulas that could save the world (water as fuel, miracle cancer vaccines) could be stored on a pair of 3 1/2-inch floppies ripe for theft (in the older films: 8-inch and 5 1/4-inch). A new, digital world where malevolent hackers were out to erase identities and steal lives, manufacture rap sheets, alter job records, or commit murder by infiltrating airline software and crashing planes. Those who understood Basic HTML navigating clunky, grinding mainframes would master your life. Your domain would belong to the tech savvy.
Taking over the world . . . one screeching dial-up at at time.
Oh, the cyber stupidity . . . as Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron’s tale of a world where the new drug dealers were black market “virtual reality” smugglers in Strange Days (1995). Where Christopher Walken’s scientist in Brainstorm (1980) designs a dream-recorder that could playback said dreams in another’s head, creating comas and heart attacks. The VHS rental favorite Circuitry Man (1990) predicting a world where the new cocaine is smuggled computer chips we stick into our skulls to get high. Mind control with CRT monitors . . . complete with poor pixel resolution . . . and bye, bye Las Vegas.
And the tech got a whole lot dumber with Disclosure.
So, amid the sexually-charged power struggles with Demi Moore’s Meredith Johnson, Michael Douglas’s Tom Sanders pines for a lucrative career promotion as the President of the CD-ROM division — today: he’d be out of job, since you’d be hard-pressed these days to find a laptop with a drive — in lieu of his less-prestigious production line manager gig at DigiCom.
So, is Tom Sanders screwed? Thanks to ’90s computer technology: he’s not.
He has DigiCom’s new “Virtual Reality Database” at his disposal to strike a blow against the pre-#metoo movement destruction of his life: DigiCom is about to give us a world where we need keyboards not; monitors are passe, for touch screen and wireless technology never was. Now, we simply slip on a wired visor and a pair of gloves to enter a digital cathedral of vaulted ceilings and virtual-lit transepts; a digital diocese with narthex after narthex of chambered file rooms rife with VR-cabinets that open with the glance of an eye and, if you’re lost amid the bits and bytes, you can call on an “Angel” to help you glide through the binary codes to save your ass and burn your foes.
Welcome to computer technology and corporate espionage circa 1994: A digital realm where tech giant DigiCom got so much so wrong and so much of what they developed is out out-of-date. There are those clunky, thick-and-heavy-as-a-brick mobile phones. The awkward navigation of an in-house e-mail application bogged down with jumbo-sized icons, a spinning “E” screen saver, and giant-forever-unfolding envelopes every time you open an email. Oh, and the inability of a cutting-edge tech company that developed a VR-cathedral file cabinet to trace anonymous emails — mails with espionage Intel that can jeopardize the company’s merger.
Oh, DigiCom. Just leave me and my IMSAI 8080 alone so I can play a game with Joshua and impress the girls.
How can a company so “cutting edge” develop VR-cathedrals, yet not improve on the design of giant CRT monitors? All this from a tech giant with engineers that decided ditching a WYSIWYG click-and-drag mouse-interface for a visor and gloves to retrieve files made perfect sense.
No thanks, DigiCom: Doug Engelbart’s mouse over Tom Sanders’s cathedrals for the win: I’ll just stick to the ol’ Windows Explorer directory tree, thank you.
The list of cyberstupidity movies where AOL and Yahoo chatrooms, Angelfire and Geocities websites — replete with looping Beavis and Butthead gifs — have all the insights to harvest secret files stored on Sony mini-discs amid the metaverse and virtual reality speculations. The obsessions with “mainframes” and “systems” having all the information one needs to take down mortal enemies, as well as the whole world, goes on and on in the tech ’90s: Antitrust, Brainscan, Chain Reaction, Copycat, Dark City, the keystroking-terrorist nonsense in Die Hard, Face/Off, Ghost in the Shell, Independence Day (taking out aliens with tech-incompatible laptops and software), Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, The Lawnmower Man (two of them), The Matrix franchise, Sneakers, Swordfish, Timecop, The 13th Floor, and Virtuosity. Then there’s the Mission: Impossible movies with agents perpetually hacking embassies and government mainframes — where Tom Cruise hangs by wires in silo-deep “clean rooms” — around the world, undetected.
From 997 A.D in Wood-fired Ovens . . . to the End of the World
Imagine if Sandra Bullock had to go through all of Michael Douglas’s VR-catherdal hokum in her cyber-stupid romp, The Net (1995), to order a pizza⁵ when that HMTL-world she mastered became an ancient history future . . . and she became addicted to shooting food porn on her iPhone.
Back in 1996, John Carpenter developed the super weapon “Sword of Damocles” in the continuing adventures of Snake Plissken in Escape from L.A. By 2013 — a mere six years ago — the U.S possessed a satellite system capable of targeting the world’s electronic devices, rending them useless and sending human’s back to the stone age because Snake Plissken rippin’ out the analog tape reels of a K-Mart Kraco cassette in the year 1997 of the John Carpenter-mission-critical variety just ain’t the same as a satellite system named after biblical idiom that translates as “something bad is likely to happen.”
Yes. Something bad has happened: Robots are delivering my pizzas.
So, a “Sword of Damocles” to wise up us tech drunk humans isn’t such a bad idea. Maybe, then, I’ll finally get a decent, human-home delivered pizza. Eh, I’ll call DiGiorno’s. Wait, those are made on a robotic, conveyor belt production line.
A.I-made-and-delivered pizzas: mankind is doomed.
So, yeah, I’m all for a global reboot to 997 A.D if it means getting a decent pizza.
END
[1]: “Armie Hammer Is Working as a Timeshare Salesman in the Caymans, After All,” Variety, Elizabeth Wagmeister and Sasha Urban, July 13, 2022
[2]: “Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’ Grammys Performance Drew FCC Complaints,” The Wrap, Tim Baysinger, March 16, 2021
[3]: “Over 1,300 complaints were sent to the FCC about Shakira and J.Lo’s Super Bowl halftime show,” CNN.com, Alaa Elassar, February 26, 2020
[4]: “Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl ‘Nipplegate’ happened 20 years ago. People are still mad,” CNN.com, Lisa Respers France, February 1, 2024. Also see Wikipedia, here and here.
[5]: “How ‘The Net’ Ordered Pizza Online Before It Was a Reality — An Oral History of Pizza.Net,” Collider, Liz Shannon Miller, July 25, 2020
My concerns with humans mixing with the rise of A.I continues with this previous essay on the matter that— once again — comes from a cinema perspective:
