Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The first episode of You Must Remember This tells the story of actress Kim Novak -- a top box office draw of the late 1950s and the iconic star of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo -- and her painful struggles to assert herself from the mid-20th century through well into the 21st, in a Hollywood that repeatedly sent her the message that she was only valuable for the way she looked, while also insisting that she didn’t quite look good enough. Originally released in April 2014, this episode has been “lost” for almost as long due to copyright issues ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. In part 2 of the Eyes Wide Shut story, the movie is finally unveiled, and critics are divided on its quality and the use of digital effects to evade an NC-17 rating. Where could Hollywood eroticism go from here? We’ll wrap up the Erotic 90s story with some thoughts on Richard Gere’s two-decade journey from American Gigolo to becoming PEOPLE Magazine’s 1999 “Sexiest Man Alive,” and other ways in which time and politics combined to make that which was once transgressive harmlessly mainstream.  Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise at the Ey ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. At the peak of their careers, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman left Hollywood for two years to collaborate with legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on an erotic drama that the media speculated would pull back the curtain on maybe the most fascinating famous couple in the world. Though the meta element can’t be ignored, what Eyes Wide Shut actually ended up being is much more interesting. It’s a culmination of every theme and trope we’ve discussed across Erotic 80s and 90s, and the last film of the twentieth century headlined by American superst ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If Adrian Lyne’s Lolita became a case study of what Hollywood and America didn’t want to acknowledge about its sexualization of young girls, as the 90s came to a close, the culture was full of “acceptable” depictions of teens in heat. Two hit films from 1998 and 1999, Wild Things and Cruel Intentions adapted classic templates of adult sexual manipulation to turn teen girls into femme fatales (probably not coincidentally, both featured actresses Neve Campbell and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who were famous for playing high school students on TV ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. In the previous decade, Adrian Lyne had made two movies (Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal) that had grossed over $100 million in the US alone. With carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, he made an adaptation of the Nabokov novel about a 40-year-old pedophile’s obsession with his adolescent step-daughter – and no distributor wanted to release it. In a decade rife with the commodification and sexualization of young teens (see our previous episode on Drew Barrymore), what lines did Lyne’s Lolita cross? Adrian Lyne, Jeremy Irons and Do ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. One of the most notorious – and least seen – erotic narrative films of the 90s, Boxing Helena was the misbegotten passion project of Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David Lynch. Four years after Boxing Helena, the elder Lynch released one of his most controversial films, Lost Highway, which tackles similar themes as Boxing Helena, including male sexual fragility and the “Madonna-Whore” complex. Today, we’ll talk about how Boxing Helena became bigger as a punchline than a movie, and we’ll trace David Lynch’s career as a provocateur to try to exp ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. One of the only high-profile NC-17 releases post-Showgirls, David Cronenberg’s Crash was the kind of dark adult art film that the rating was supposedly created to support. We’ll talk about how Crash fits into Cronenberg’s filmography, why it was controversial when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 and when it was released in the US in 1997, how it played into the UK general election of 1997, how it functioned as an early warning against charismatic billionaires, and how it embodied a post-Prozac and pre-Viagara moment. David ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. At the beginning of the 90s, lesbians were a punchline for a male-gaze-oriented media, an easy target for expressing the anxiety that women might not need men after all. By the middle of the decade, women-loving-women had become the heroes of a number of neo-noir crime films, but the culture at large still rejected lesbianism when not intended to arouse men. While The Matrix has widely been reappraised as a trans allegory after the transitions of its directors the Wachowski sisters, their previous feature Bound was transparently queer, but ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharon Stone and Joe Eszterhas’s post-Basic Instinct reunion film was one of the most troubled productions of the 90s. A post-Hitchcock tale of sexual surveillance given a technological update for the 90s, after a long battle with the MPAA the sanitized, R-rated version of Sliver was rejected by critics and audiences, but the movie and the juicy gossip leaked from its production (which included a love pentagon involving both actress and screenwriter) only enhanced Sharon Stone’s aura as an old-school Hollywood star for a decade that didn’t ..read more

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Are men okay? Several films from 1993 answered that question with a resounding no. One of the highest grossing movies of its year, Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal was misunderstood as a gimmick, and its insight into toxic masculinity and male sexual insecurity got lost in a media frenzy, much of it sparked by feminists. What had changed since Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, in Hollywood and in the culture? We’ll also talk about Proposal star Demi Moore as the controversial “diva” of the moment. Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal, 1993 Adrian Lyne a ..read more