Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

LEARNING THE MECHANICS AND METAPHYSICS OF SEX

Romeo and Juliet

Little Darlings

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

The Other Side of Midnight

Coming Home

Don’t Look Now

Looking for Mr. Goodbar

All That Jazz

Body Heat

Last Tango in Paris

We needed signed permission slips from our parents for the field-trip screening of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet in 1976—all that potentially traumatizing passion, after all. 24My friends and I were dying to go; we’d read the play in our seventh-grade drama class, our teacher emoting the text for us, offering an exegesis of Queen Mab’s dream and the more arcane metaphors, but really, it was all about the poster: Two naked teenagers gazing affectionately at each other in rumpled sheets, unencumbered by any literary or historical context. And rumor had it there was (more) nudity and sex in the movie, this was Shakespeare made really hot , and that guy playing Romeo looked really cute . And he was, that tousle-haired Leonard Whiting, in his Renaissance Faire tights and blousy shirt. Olivia Hussey was a total babe as Juliet, too, all rosebud mouth and wide-set olive eyes, a river of silken black hair; at seventeen and fifteen, they were an improvement — and a controversial one — on the thirty- or fortysomething Romeos and Juliets of film versions past, the appropriately seasoned Norma Shearers and Leslie Howards, who, to our eyes, made passion look so boringly, uninterestingly adult : An old-movie, ancient-history, irrelevant kind of love.

But now, on a Saturday afternoon with my classmates at the Nuart Theatre for this educational screening of the most recent incarnation of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Leonard and Olivia, in their wide-screen, English-accented glory, are far, far beyond cute ; their beauty is unearthly, gasp-inducing, almost painful to look at. And their physical desire for each other is revelatory; we were expecting a love story, sure, but are surprised to feel the awakening of our own nascent, adolescent lust.

I have a rudimentary understanding of the biological basics of sex and reproduction, of course; when I was six or seven my mother read through the unprurient How Babies Are Made book with me, chapters sequencing in greater sophistication from flowers to chickens to dogs to humans, all illustrated with cartoony paper cutouts; I understand, in theory, about the egg-and-seed workings of fertilization, that Penis A inserts into Vagina B. By now I have been taken to the occasional movie rated R for sexual content , watched late-night TV soap operas, and cringed my eyes away from the gross sex scenes — who wants to see grown-ups behaving like that? And I am, at twelve, a veteran of playtime doctor’s appointments with pantsless and hairless neighborhood boys, of bottle-spinning kissy games and those awkward and giggly few minutes “in heaven” at lights-out rumpus room parties, everyone’s nervous breath both sweetened and soured by candy and punch, many of us secretly hoping indignant parents would snap on the lights and put a stop to all that fun. I have discovered the hand-held shower massager and the perfectly-placed Jacuzzi jet in our pool, and my own clever, dexterous fingers, although these early explorations, while successful, were blank-minded and unimaginative — I didn’t yet have a bank of visual imagery to draw on, could only rely on the instinctive, if uninspired, physiological mechanics.

But I have never really experienced, or even seen , true adolescent arousal before — and now, watching this Romeo and Juliet’s unhinged passion, I am aroused, too, to see these dewy-skinned children feeling a mutual lust, seeking out sex. They fling themselves at each other, they pant and heave and moan with longing, and my popcorn breath is quickening, too. Watching these turned-on sixteenth-century teens, I am made dizzy by a sudden flushing heat. I am both stimulated and a little embarrassed; I glance at my friend Marie — is she feeling this, too? This curious, enflaming, quivering thing?

But there is no actual sex. Spotting each other at the Capulets’ masked ball, Romeo and Juliet flirt “palm to palm,” followed by a brief touch of virginal lips: “Then have my lips the sin that they have took?” she asks. “O, trespass sweetly urged,” he says, “Give me my sin again!” If this is sin, they, and we, couldn’t care less — and how could anything these rhapsodically beautiful creatures do together be a sin? Passion ignited, they continue making out until interruption by that busybody Nurse. In the balcony scene, piqued by the danger they risk, they kiss full-mouthed and ravenously, as if to swallow each other whole. Their shared desire is consuming, and so is mine; by now I am past the initial shock of their exquisiteness and am impatiently, breathlessly awaiting something more. Oh, wouldst thou leave me so unsatisfied? For perhaps the first time I realize the story of sexual love does not end with a kiss, as all those G-rated fairy tale romances with their chaste, happy-ending pecks wanted me to believe; it only begins with one.

And finally, finally, what we have been waiting the whole movie to see, what our parents signed those permission slips for: A sleeping Romeo, lying facedown but breathtakingly peach-skin naked, draped across a sleeping Juliet, whose long hair is arranged artfully across her uncovered, surprisingly full breasts — is that a nipple? I am hoping so; I am as hungry to see Juliet’s naked flesh as I am to see Romeo’s; give me my sin again. Yesterday they secretly married, last night was the wedding night, but Zeffirelli has passed over depicting an off-text deflowering consummation in favor of this quiet morning-after scene, which is simultaneously less frightening, thanks to the absence of any penetrative explicitness, and more astonishing, more disconcertingly alluring in its intimacy; they have shared a vow, have shared a bed, are sharing breath, bodies, and hearts, are fully naked together in the full creamy light of a Verona dawn, and that experience has until now been unimaginable to me. Romeo stands, strolls to the window, and I am overwhelmed by the perfection of his unselfconscious, rear-view nudity. Juliet pulls the sheet over her breasts — audible groans of disappointment from the boys in the theatre, and I stifle mine. But there is more; while they lovingly, iambically debate whether it is the nightingale or the lark they hear outside the window — is it still benevolent night or cruel, discordant day? — Romeo returns to the bed, throws back the sheet, and throws his graceful naked body full-length upon Juliet’s, and I imagine the impact of this embrace, the pressing of my naked back into the mattress with someone’s weight, my someday breasts in someone’s mouth.

But it is so far away from me, up there on-screen; I want this, for absolute real, and I am not even sure what this means. I want to be crushed this way, by a beautiful boy and his gleaming limbs and insistent physical love, I want to be a naked-flesh body pressed against the length of another person’s love-damp heat, a lyrical fusion of both skin and soul. The scene’s innocent eroticism is safe for me to enter into, and also tantalizingly adult; it strikes a match, triggers a longing, begins a craving for an experience I do not know how, at twelve years old, to find or have or make happen. Wherefore art thou, Romeo?

I’m not alone in this; “I envy Juliet,” fifteen-year-old Ferris (Tatum O’Neal) breathes in romantic longing to her camp counselor Gary (Armand Assante, in his Euro-gorgeous, heavy-lidded heyday). In Little Darlings , Ferris is the spoiled, sheltered rich girl stuck at summer camp with scrappy, street-wise Angel (Kristy McNichol) and a cabin of bored sister-campers led by Mean Girl Dana, who takes pleasure in taunting Ferris and Angel about their sexual inexperience: Are they “women, or little girls”? 25They’re both, of course, with their coltish womanly bodies; they are in the precise, blurry moment of transition, trying to balance their confusion and fear with their needful craving, their cool self-defensive posturing with their emotional vulnerability. I am the exact same age as these girls; I am equally virginal, equally yearning and afraid. I have recently had my first grown-up date, with a cologne-drenched eighteen-year-old guy, who took me to a comedy club, encouraged me to slurp at his rum and Coke (fake ID — he was posturing, too), and, after an agonizingly stilted drive home in his Camaro, walked me to my front door and thrust his tongue in my mouth until I mumbled a dismissive Thanks, good night! and escaped into the house. For every second of that kiss I was equal parts repulsed and thrilled — I felt violated and objectified (not that I knew that word or concept), grossed-out by the sloppy invading tongue; but I also felt let down he did not press me for something more, something else, that he did not overpower me all night with his naked, insistent desire and poetic pentameter until the arrival of the lark, the herald of the morn. I was so relieved he never called me again; I was bitterly wounded to be so rejected.