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Friday Flop: Adrian Lyne's 9&1/2 WEEKS

 Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke. Dir. Adrian Lyne, MGM, 1986


Style over sex, minus substance.

That's a glib summation/dismissal of Adrian Lyne's 1986 blockbuster erotic drama, but it's not unfair or inaccurate. I took copious notes on this movie, most relating to some way Lyne and screenwriter Zalman King failed to make the film daring, dark, perverse, bold, or even a little erotic. 

I noted, many times, that as an artifact of Hollywood's attempt to make sex-movies for an adult audience after home video made hardcore porn available to everyone, 9&1/2 WEEKS fascinates and depresses in equal measure. It's aesthetically fascinating, sociologically depressing. Lyne delivers a hyperstylized, superficial imagining of the US audience's "freaky" side and it's all pretty standard, you're-not-kinky-if-you-use-the-word-kinky kind of stuff. 

Allegedly dom/sub-themed, both the film and the fantasies it trades in define predictable. A little gaslighting, a little humiliation, a little risky public sex, an in-the-pants handjob at a fancy restaurant lifted directly from FLASHDANCE, changing only the method of pleasuring. Even Rourke's transgressions that push Basinger away - trying to involve another woman - play as the most predictable eventuality. 

Lyne wanted to make a "bold", "shocking" sex movie, I can tell, but he tried to do it in Ronald Reagan's America, an age with all the appropriate Victorian hypocrisies in play, with corporate-studio money. That he made any kind of movie at all testifies as to the power of the last hit. After FLASHDANCE, the studio had to give him license, and he delivered again when 9&1/2 WEEKS went on to gross $100M, but if I recall - my internet keeps crashing - MGM cut a few minutes out of the theatrical version, releasing a racier home video. That video proved a popular choice to play at house parties for about a year, there, and then vanished. Because it sucked. 

That's what it comes out to, what my one liner means. Lyne offers a load of tired-looking '80s style that reminded me of LEVI'S 501 jeans spots, neither a lot of nor particularly sexy sex, and just nothing to anchor it to the earth. Like FLASHDANCE, it counts on atmosphere and aesthetics to distract from the rote, trite, superficial story it tells. Unlike FLASHDANCE, I didn't buy it in the '80s and I'm not biting now. 

Sometimes, 35 years changes an unsatisying film to something at least a little better. 9&1/2 WEEKS is not one of those times. It's a bland, boring, failed attempt to shock and titillate and provoke exciting discussion. Truly. This movie may exist because guys hope its female pov will get them to talk about sex. That would align with the rest of its epic lack of imagination.

You see my dilemma. I don't like to do the one-line hot-take. (I like my hot-takes bizarre and at least 15 grafs long.) I don't see the point in investing two hours in one pithy sentence. 9&1/2 WEEKS, however, barely rates as much as I've said in expansion. With its '80s cast and pedigree, its one-time whiff of scandal, its sex-movie nature, its Mtv sensibility, and rockstar cameos (Ron Wood shows up in a party sequence), Lyne's film had all the makings of a first-class, fun Friday Nite Movie. It ends up no more than a perfect bore, a stylish & moody masterclass in tedious filmmaking. Like BATMAN&ROBIN earlier, I'm glad I had the experience, and will be glad to never have it again.

Style over sex, minus substance. 

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