Sex, Lies, and Videotape revisited

I watched Sex, Lies, and Videotape when it first came out. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen it now, but I’d watched it at least once appropriately enough on videotape during the 1990s and possibly again on TV. When I saw it listed on the electronic program guide of a free-to-air station the other day, I wondered if it had withstood the test of time and what I would get out of it now. I decided to record it on my USB recorder and find out.

The movie begins with Andie MacDowell’s character, trophy wife, Ann Bishop Mullany, talking to her psychiatrist about how she’s worried about all the trash accumulating in the world. She imagines a trashcan that keeps on producing infinite garbage. The psychiatrist tells her she should stop obsessing about things she has no control over. I’d completely forgotten this.

Although I did remember quite a lot of the dialogue. On some level it was stored in my memory banks, along with most of the storyline. We find out about Ann’s sexual difficulties, the affair her lawyer husband John Mullany, played by Peter Gallagher, is having with her sister, rebellious bartender Cynthia Bishop, played by Laura San Giacomo, and we meet James Spader’s Graham Dalton, the arty drifter with his own secrets.

I was sucked into the intensity of the drama from the beginning, but I was also distracted by the characters’ clothes. I kept on trying to work out when the movie was made based on John’s big corporate braces, Ann’s conservative baggy A-line dresses, Cynthia’s cocky hats and short skirts, Graham’s black shirt and jeans, which could fit into quite a few eras. I associated the movie with 1992, possibly the year I saw it on videotape. But when I noticed that John’s office desk had no computer on it, meaning that his secretary probably typed up his letters, I realised this movie was pre-1990. I succumbed and looked up the movie on my phone. It was from 1989.

Thirty years ago is another era, but the movie is distinctly modern.

Graham’s secret is that he uses a camcorder to film women talking about sex because he can’t be intimate with them in any other way. Ann discovers his secret when she visits his apartment and sees his videotape boxes stored neatly beside his TV. All the boxes are labelled with women’s names. Without the technological ability enabling Graham to record women talking about sex, there would be no movie.

You could future-fit the movie for a remake set now with Graham recording and watching his interviewees digitally on a computer, TV or other device. Ann could accidentally see a list of these digital files on the appropriate device and the story would still work. But retrofitting the movie to make it work in the past would be harder.

Prior to the 1980s, Graham’s recordings of his subjects would have to be on film. The first sound-on-film movies were shorts going back 1923, although I imagine film stock would have been more expensive to buy than videotape. The script would have to be rewritten too, using more elliptical language to tone down the subject matter, but that could be done without losing the heart of the story. A version of the movie set between the 1920s and 1950s could be titled something like Infidelity, Lies and Talkies.

The main problem, though, is that Graham, being a drifter, would need a massive truck to cart all of his film canisters around. He would also need a massive storage space in his apartment. Not to mention that film at the time was highly flammable and could deteriorate quickly if not kept in the right storage conditions. He could store the hundreds of film canisters in a wardrobe and I can easily imagine Ann wearing a 1920’s drop-waist dress (because she wore drop-waisted dresses in 1989), opening the wardrobe and seeing the ceiling-high stacks of film canisters labelled with women’s names and being equally horrified.

So, with some adjustments the movie could be retrofitted to as early as 1923, but basically it would be impossible to set it in Jane Austen or Shakespearean times.

This is truly a modern movie that in spite of its timeless psychological human drama could not exist without technology invented over the last one hundred years.

After the trauma of Graham’s breakup with his college girlfriend, Elizabeth, he wanted to move through life without leaving an imprint on anyone else. The irony is that he’s the trigger causing profound transformations for nearly everyone in the movie, including himself. All the characters are in a different position at the end of the drama compared to the beginning. John, the smug lawyer, is the only one who doesn’t change. Even though he loses his job at his law firm, he was destined to lose it anyway, due to his frequent absences to spend time with Cynthia.

The movie was worth seeing again for the third or fourth time. It still packs a strong emotional punch. But the image of the ever-filling infinite trashcan was what has stuck with me this time around. This is the major change from 1989. Garbage is now accumulating at a faster rate than humans can find a way to biodegrade it harmlessly. Humans are leaving an indelible imprint on this planet. Ann was right to worry.