NRC — Houellebecq says ‘sex tape’, KIRAC says ‘art film’
Sex film — Michel Houellebecq should have known: sex plus film spells trouble, writes Gawie Keyser.
2 April 2023.
Michel Houellebecq’s erotic antics have become world news thanks to the art collective KIRAC, which persuaded the French writer to make love to several women while the camera recorded it all. The great Houellebecq. In a ‘sex film’. A what? Exactly.
What are we talking about when we say ‘sex film’? Porn or performance art? There are other possibilities too, judging by the details of the case in which Houellebecq has so far unsuccessfully tried to prevent the footage from being distributed. KIRAC claims to have made an ‘art film’ in which the boundary between fact and fiction blurs, since it is supposedly unclear whether it really is Houellebecq having sex.
Sex on film — in English, the terms ‘blue movie’, ‘skin flick’, or simply ‘porno’ are also common. In the Houellebecq case, ‘sex film’ is the most commonly used term here. You can also say ‘erotic film’ and ‘sex tape’ or ‘sex video’, but then the meaning changes. The first refers to artistically justified, invariably controversial attempts to depict eroticism in narrative form, such as Adrian Lyne’s film 9½ Weeks (1986), starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. The second takes us into more difficult waters. It refers to privately recorded, illegally distributed footage, as happened in the mid-1990s with the sex tape of Pamela Anderson and her husband Tommy Lee.
And so this situation unfolds: Houellebecq says ‘sex tape’; KIRAC says ‘art film’; we say ‘sex film’.
Slut-shaming
The writer is in a bind, because he knows what will happen once the footage is released. When Pamela’s sex tape was first copied en masse in physical form and then appeared on the internet, slut-shaming inevitably followed, and Anderson’s career was never the same again. Houellebecq can see what is coming. He said: ‘I’ve already lost friends, from the Catholic right in France. I haven’t heard a word from them. I’m like a pariah.’
Houellebecq’s problem lies in the word itself. ‘Sex tape’ suggests porn. It seems likely that he is aware that ‘porn’ has long ceased to mean only professionally shot films featuring actors and actresses: sexual footage of ordinary people like him does particularly well in the porn industry, hence his deep concern.
On the other hand — and this might have offered the writer a way out — one could say that KIRAC has made a documentary about politics and sex, with excursions into performance art, rather than a ‘sex film’. Had Houellebecq embraced this idea, which is far from inconceivable if you read his books, we would now be having a different conversation, centred on the term ‘art film’, or perhaps ‘philosophical sex satire’.
It is funny, but also tragic, that Houellebecq got cold feet afterwards, just like the philosopher Sid Lukkassen, who previously had a similar encounter with KIRAC in connection with the film Honeypot, in which he tries to have sex with a young woman, a philosophy student. The lesson they both seem to have learned is this: anyone who has sex on camera is in a sex film. And however you look at it, history teaches us that sex plus film means trouble.