In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when I was discovering my sexuality, I realized I had certain proclivities that I feared might make me a bad person. Assuming I would never find outlets for my own healthy and loving self-expression, I repressed and compartmentalized as diligently as I could, resolved to not make my kinks anyone else’s problem. If I was patient, I imagined, I might eventually get to watch Adrian Lyne’s 9 ½ Weeks, which, from what I understood about it, seemed like the closest I could reasonably expect to get to paradise.

My fascination with erotic thrillers came from examining their VHS boxes on rental racks, imagining them as transmissions from a forbidden grown-up world. By the time I did get a chance to see these movies, many were fascinating, but not for the reasons I’d anticipated. 

The erotic thrillers of the ‘80s and ‘90s comprise a ridiculous genre, full of predictable tropes, shockingly backward attitudes about everything, and the conservatism, consumerism, and hypocrisy that have always been baked into Hollywood values. Most would never get made again. Many are a hell of a lot of fun.

Through the spring of 2022, Karina Longworth’s distinctively stylish creative-nonfiction cinematic-history podcast You Must Remember This released the twelve-episode series “Erotic ‘80s,” a comprehensive and kaleidoscopic treatment of the subject. If you’re interested in sex, film, 20th-century American culture, the malice and incompetence of Hollywood, or Kathleen Turner’s multidimensional representations of the Dark Feminine – and you should be – I can’t recommend it enough.

YMRT has been around since before Serial, and Longworth’s witty, well-researched, erudite style, equal parts rigorous and irreverent, is by now well established. But she’s rarely seemed to have this much fun. 

As the author of a sprawling book about Howard Hughes, she has a penchant for tracking the adventures of outsized weirdos caught up in the zeitgeist, with hedonistic American Gigolo director Paul Shrader and bumbling brat-packer Rob Lowe being standout examples here. She also excels at presenting compassionate, multi-dimensional portraits of women who were mistreated in Hollywood, their integral contributions minimized, particularly those who eventually opted out of the system in some way.

“Erotic ‘80s” takes an expansive view of its material, starting with ill-starred late-’70s “porno chic” and the subversive slapstick of 10 to set the context for what was to follow. It recognizes how ridiculous and disgusting many of these movies are, and were, and gets cerebral laughs at their expense. It also takes them seriously, as artifacts that have a lot to say about how sexual and cultural attitudes have evolved.

Given the option of watching a good movie alone or a bad movie with someone I like, I’ll usually take the latter. Longworth highlights some underappreciated gems – Ken Russell’s dizzying Crimes of Passion (one of my favorite movies), Lyne’s agitational Flashdance, and others – but she’s at her most entertaining when dissecting unintentional satires such as the Joe Eszterhas-penned Jagged Edge.

She also examines the frequent ugliness of a genre that plays at the intersection of fear, excitement, and cruelty, spotlighting the unconscionable treatment of actresses that was supposed to make some of these movies seem “real.” Even in those cases, she rarely rejects the finished products out of hand. While her position could be loosely summarized as “feminist, anti-Hollywood, and pro-film,” she’s able to hold many contradictory notions at once. (The teen comedy Porky’s is one of the few films that get well-deserved unilateral condemnation.)

Part 9 is entirely dedicated to 9½ Weeks, and it’s a good representation of the series in microcosm. It’s a multifaceted look at an out-of-control-BDSM opus that adores the film in all its surreal, overwrought absurdity while also seriously digging into the reasons why almost everyone involved in its production ended up despising it. It confirms that, while it can be an unsettling watch now, my adolescent fascination was never entirely misplaced.

Sex is where people hide things. So much gets wrapped up in it: shame, power dynamics, attachment wounds, and our most ardent and genuine romanticism from the parts of ourselves that are oblivious to irony and guardedness. The way sex is depicted in art tells us a lot about our poorly integrated collective and personal shadow material. Working through it in a spirit of intellectual and emotional honesty can help us learn to better celebrate our own and each other’s agency and pleasure. 

You Must Remember This shows there’s a lot to gain from glancing back at the decades in which Hollywood openly struggled with the transition from the Hays Code to the ratings system and how to present sex on screen, in an era that is now en route to being forgotten.

Erotic thrillers are still going strong in South Korea, the world’s current cultural powerhouse, but they’re a mostly dead genre in America, where the fun part of the sexual revolution may have well run its course, its legacy still hazy. “Erotic ‘80s” is a charming, engrossing, habit-forming series that offers some cogent observations and warnings about the inseparability of art and life, especially when people get horned up.

“Erotic ‘90s” is set to follow in the fall. I look forward to Longworth’s continued roasting of Joe Eszterhas.

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