When a cinema mistakenly screened Gregg Araki I Want Your Sex in place of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the resulting viral outrage, an audience member yelling ‘WHAT IS THIS! PUT SPIDER-MAN ON!’, gave the film a promotional event no studio budget could have manufactured. Araki, for his part, was delighted.
The accident had a certain logic to it. I Want Your Sex opens with Olivia Wilde naked in a swimming pool and Cooper Hoffman announcing, ‘I’m a slave to this vagina.’ The contrast with Marvel’s famously chaste universe could hardly be more deliberate. ‘The way they’re so asexual is odd,’ Araki tells Dazed from his house in Los Angeles, speaking over Zoom in early August. ‘The oddest one is Shang-Chi, the way Simu Liu’s character was so hot and sexualised, but it was like he couldn’t touch anybody.’
A script more than a decade in the making
The film marks Araki’s first feature since 2014, and it has been a long time coming in every sense. He and co-writer Karley Sciortino, also his co-creator on Now Apocalypse, have been developing the script for more than a decade. An early 2015 version was nearly greenlit in an altogether more familiar configuration: a male boss, a female intern. Araki compares that draft to Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey. ‘After #MeToo, it became a male sub and female dom,’ he says. The gender reversal produced Erika Tracy, Wilde’s character, who grew, through successive drafts, progressively more autobiographical. ‘That led to Erika Tracy, who became more and more like me in every draft of the script.’
Erika is an avant-garde artist based in LA: she constructs a gigantic vagina from chewed bubblegum, broadcasts audio of her masturbation sessions through speakers, and summons her 23-year-old assistant Elliot, played by Hoffman, to her office for sex. Elliot, exasperated with his workaholic girlfriend Minerva, played by Charli xcx, lets Erika introduce him to BDSM, pig masks and pegging. The film is structured like Sunset Boulevard, working backwards from a dead body in a pool. ‘Elliot is also patterned after myself as a young person,’ Araki says, ‘wanting to be an artist but not knowing what I was going to be.’
Gregg Araki I Want Your Sex and the Gen Z question
The film’s central argument, delivered through Erika’s increasingly exasperated monologues, is that a larger percentage of Gen Z is not having sex in a way that was different for older generations. Araki is explicit that the sentiment is his own, prompted by a New York Times op-ed on the subject. Erika puts it directly to Elliot: ‘Your generation is all about FOMO, but you don’t care about missing out on the sexual prime of your life?’ Araki has a structural explanation to offer. ‘They grew up during COVID and social media; they’ve always had phones in their hand; helicopter parents protect them from anything that makes them uncomfortable; they’re always being filmed and don’t have privacy.’
Now 66, Araki is careful to distinguish sociological observation from moral prescription. ‘A lot of young journalists tell me they’re Gen Z and have sex,’ he says. ‘It’s not that nobody’s having sex.’ What interests him is the shape of discomfort, and what it costs to avoid it. ’90 per cent of sex, relationships, and falling in love is bad. It’s traumatising, confusing, and hurtful. It makes you uncomfortable. But that’s what makes the highs so high.’ The logic is almost classical: you cannot have the recognition scene without the suffering that precedes it.
Formally, the film reflects the range of Araki’s influences, which are considerably wider than his reputation for provocation might suggest. He studied Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Godard and Bergman. He describes his background as being in critical theory. Charli xcx’s bedroom scenes nod to François Truffaut’s Bed and Board; when someone compared Erika to Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Araki was delighted. ‘I love screwball comedies from the 30s. They always have a strong female protagonist and a passive man who’s dumb and manipulated by the smart woman.’ The colour palette of I Want Your Sex, bright and vibrant for almost every costume and interior, owes something to another source altogether. ‘My visual style is very influenced by the colour and composition of comics,’ he says. As a child, he collected them. He drew his own.
It is also, practically speaking, his most technically disciplined film: the first he has shot with two cameras simultaneously, reflecting what he learned during a recent period directing television. The pace, he says, is relentless by design.
A key figure of the New Queer Cinema movement, Araki arrives at this film having spent the intervening years since 2014 speaking to The New Yorker and others mainly through retrospectives, as earlier works including The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin and Smiley Face continued to find new audiences. His latest is less interested in retrospect. I Want Your Sex opens in UK and Irish cinemas on 28 August.
