The Tedium of Sexuality and Emoting in Narrative Art

I was watching a series on one of the streaming services which it seemed would be amusing, in an absurd and fantastic way, and which proved to be amusing, when something happened.  Certain of the characters began to display feelings for each other, by which I mean romantic and sexual feelings.  The times being what they are, the characters are gay, or are in the process of "discovering" they're gay, or bisexual, or whatever the appropriate description may be.  As would be the case for me even if the characters and relationships were irretrievably straight instead of gay, my amusement and interest diminished.  Now, alas, what was amusing and fantastic in the show will become secondary, no matter what effort is made to make the romance or sexuality exotic or, I suppose I must say it, inclusive; or, as I suppose I might say it more accurately, didactic in the manner of today's creators of narratives .

There must be something which makes the creators of narrative art, but especially the film and media arts, include at least one sexual relationship in the story being told.  That relation comes to dominate the story if only by virtue of the fact it's displayed in one way or another on many occasions as the story plays out, regardless of context.  No doubt sex is of great importance to us all and very much part of our lives, but it's as a consequence very commonplace.  Now and then a sexual relationship may be uncommon, and even extraordinary, but that's the case only rarely.  It strikes me that sexuality and sexual/romantic relations are therefore not subjects of great art and shouldn't be.

Think of great films.  Which of them centered on a sexual/romantic relationship?  Which of them involved such a relationship or relationships not in passing, noting or referencing them infrequently, but primarily? Casablanca, perhaps.  Dr. Zhivago?    I don't know; there was quite a bit else going on, like the Russian Revolution.  I find it hard to think of anything else.  Gone with the Wind?  I'm not sure it's great, frankly.

Then, consider those that weren't.  2001: A Space Odyssey, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange to give Kubrick his due.  The Godfather and Godfather II; Lawrence of Arabia, Citizen Kane, The Manchurian Candidate, The French Connection, The Bridge on the River Kwai; etc., etc.

There is Psycho, however.  Perhaps it's possible for great film art to be based on the depiction of a sexual obsession or sickness.  

Sexual relationships and romance being exceedingly mundane for the most part, however, there's not much interesting which can be done with them.  They take away from the story.  How is it, then, that they're omnipresent in film and series, TV and otherwise?  Is there an expectation on the part of creators and consumers that one will intrude necessarily?  There shouldn't be, and I claim that good and memorable works of art don't involve them to any significant extent.  

I think it takes a real effort to insert sexuality in any interesting narrative, but we see those efforts being made and their results all the time.  Even when sex isn't involved the characters are given opportunities to display emotions and weaknesses.  When watching an absorbing mystery or fantasy or drama, it's difficult to care whether the characters have feelings for one another which they must express together with various insecurities and attributes which it appears the writers, directors and producers think should be pointed out for reasons unrelated to what's taking place.  What's taking place must, in fact, be interrupted while the characters emote.  Past failures and traumas are revealed and discussed while war and murder and social conflicts rage.  

Perhaps it's hoped the viewer will come to sympathize with the characters, or see themselves in them.  But the self-pity and conceit indulged in on screen is just as mundane as the sex and romance.  People don't watch to see and hear what they may see and hear everyday, everywhere.  They wish to escape from it.  I think they wish most of all not to be lectured about it.

The Allure of the '50s

An organization previously unknown to me called the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)  issued a report in 2016 on the views of Americans regarding, roughly speaking, whether American Society has changed for the better, or for the worse, since the 1950s.  According to the report, most would say it's changed for the worse.  A majority of the majority were white, Christian and Republican.  Perhaps that goes without saying.

What is it about the '50s that makes most of us, apparently, think it better than what's been the case for the last 70 years?  An argument can be made that the '50s were white, Christian and Republican, at least on the surface and as the country was portrayed in the media.  It was also for many of us Baby Boomers the time we spent as children.  There are many Boomers, after all, and some of us look back on our childhood with nostalgia.

It was a time when televisions began, and continued to, appear in the homes of the middle and upper classes, and the America portrayed in the medium was beneficent indeed.  America fought evil then, successfully.  Whether in the Old West as shown in The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke, fancifully as in Superman, through law enforcement as in The Untouchables, Dragnet and Highway Patrol, America and Americans promoted "Truth, Justice and the American Way" as stated in the introduction to Superman.

American families on TV were genial, sometimes comic, but always loving.  Their problems were reassuringly mundane, and resolved.  American women were sometimes ditzy, sometimes wise, but almost always motherly and beautiful when part of a family.  In other contexts they might be femme fatales who were beautiful but bad.  Even in that case, though, chances were excellent they had hearts of gold and had been led astray by bad men.  American men were generally brave, sometimes fatherly, sometimes rich, sometimes befuddled and comic, sometimes poor, always patriots and on the side of good unless crooks or spies in place to be bested.

Economically, times were generally good.  America had come out relatively well, economically, from the Second World War, in comparison with a great part of the world.  One can understand that many would feel content, even smug, in light of American prosperity.  Militarily, it seemed for a time at least that America was predominant.

But the Korean War didn't end nearly as well.  And the Soviet Union got the bomb, and put a satellite in space, and the communist scare began.  The '50s were the heyday of McCarthyism.  Not all was well, but the Red scare served to highlight the fact that America was good, communism bad.  So in a way the vision of goodness and the tendency towards self-righteousness were enhanced by America's problems in that time.

Nor did TV and other media uniformly portray our society as prosperous and benign.  There were stirrings of disappointment if not discontent.  The writers, musicians and poets of the Beat Generation were different from most of that time.  There were some shows, like The Twilight Zone, which raised questions about American society.  But that was late '50s, when things had begun to change, slowly.

Perhaps the Boomers who grew up watching Looney Toons, Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Howdy Doody became disillusioned in the 1960s and 1970s with the American Dream as it was dreamed by them in the '50s.  Perhaps they recognized that it was a dream.  Or, perhaps they felt that they had been betrayed somehow, by someone.  Not all was as clear as it was in the '50s, nor were they treated with the kindness and love they felt their due; they weren't entertained as they were in the past.   All the gunfights we saw on TV didn't make the Vietnam War less bloody or more understandable.  So the '50s at some point came to be mocked by the Boomers it created.  It was their parents' time; they weren't children any more.

But something happened as we grew old.  We want to be children again.  We look back beyond the '60s as we grow satisfied and content, but at the same time cautious and fearful.  Perhaps we even grow senile, in a way--culturally and politically.  Our second childhood reminds us of our first.  We find that our first was infinitely better.  Many of us find it more peculiarly American.  More particularly American in a particular way.

Whatever it was back then, those of us who were children at that time remember what we experienced as children, and for some and perhaps most of us what we experienced was what we saw on TV or as a result of efforts to mimic what we saw.  Suburbs, vacations, big cars, sports, highways, diners, drive-ins, rock and roll, country clubs, good food, money, good and evil easily distinguished and evil always vanquished.  Why can't it be like that again?

Ask those who think we've changed for the worst.  They'll tell you.  I think one of the things they'll tell you, unfortunately, is that what they see now isn't what they were shown on TV then.  More specifically, that the people they see now aren't the people they saw on TV then.