“You’re all dying to f*ck. But you’re just too chicken sh*t to admit it.”
When Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) says this in “I Want Your Sex,” you can almost feel filmmaker Gregg Araki screaming into the abyss. Erika, a contemporary artist whose work focuses on the pleasures of sex, says this to her assistant-turned-BDSM-playmate (he’s the sub) Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) well before their sexual relationship begins, berating him for the ways in which his generation relates to sex – that is to say, for the fact that they don’t really relate to it at all.
Elliot tries to explain his peers’ hang-ups – lack of socialization, too many phones, the whole nine yards – but Erika just can’t understand. The sex she’s had over the years – the good, the bad, with women, with men, with anyone! – has made her who she is. She doesn’t understand nor does she sympathize with an entire generation’s paralyzing fear of connection.
Araki has been vocal about how this aspect of “I Want Your Sex” (which he co-wrote with Karley Sciortino) came into the film when he read an article about how Gen Z was having less sex than previous generations. Erika, then, serves as a bit of a mouthpiece for the director (although, he doesn’t condone all of her behavior – and thank god), and “I Want Your Sex” channels Araki’s frustration over that fact into a satirical take on a noir where farce and erotica make for a potent combination.
It’s fitting that Araki would use the language of erotic thrillers and specifically noir – a genre that thrived during the censorship of the Hays Code, a genre where people literally can’t have sex and often act out in violent ways because of that fact – to make the case that sex is a crucial part of learning how to connect with yourself as well as other people. He’s certainly not subtle about his references, and he starts making them right from the jump. In the film’s cold open after Elliot, covered in blood, finds Erika floating dead in her pool, we’re hit with a flashback to “9 ½ weeks earlier,” a reference to the 1986 Adrian Lyne film.
The cold open introduces the mystery that Elliot will be taking us through as he narrates his story to the cops (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville), and the flashback introduces us to Elliot before he’s taken under Erika’s wing. He’s your typical naive, horny 20-something. He has a girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX), who he sometimes has sex with – not that she enjoys it all that much – but other than that, he seems to have no real sense of himself or his sexuality. Erika changes that, introducing Elliot to a world of kink he thought only existed on the internet. But, as Elliot’s attachment to Erika grows, her aloofness and cruelty grow along with it, leading to disastrous results.
Araki plays into genre tropes with an air of looseness, breezing through visual nods to Alfred Hitchcock movies and cartoonish visuals with the lively air of someone who has no problem dropping a little bit of Looney Tunes into his psychosexual thriller. That tone matches the film’s subject matter, which warns against the ills of being too scared to try something new (a failing that no one could ever put onto Araki).
But, even with all that humor, there’s a level of understanding for that fear – an understanding of how sex can go deeply, horribly wrong. Erika doesn’t take Elliot’s misgivings about certain sexual acts seriously, and gives him constant whiplash between her affection and aloofness. But as difficult as some of that whiplash can be, through sex with Erika, Elliot begins to understand what he actually wants out of a romantic connection. The sex is great, sure – but when Elliot orgasms after imagining Erika asking him if he ever wants kids, it becomes clear that he needs something more.
This is a necessary step in Elliot’s personal development, in his journey to learn about what exactly he wants from a sexual partner. What Araki seems to fear for young people is that if they avoid sex altogether, these “aha” moments will never happen – if they refuse to engage, they might never understand that part of themselves at all.
In one scene, Erika invites Elliot to bring his best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) along for one of their trysts. Apple – who is very likely gay but afraid to admit it, but also might have a crush on Elliot – breaks under the intensity of the moment, taking Elliot’s apprehension for the scene as proof that he’s not attracted to her. Wonders, who has shown the cracks of Apple’s insecurity through an A-plus comedic sidekick performance up until this moment, lets the dam break here as Apple’s worst fears come to fruition – the fear that she is not loveable or sexy enough to matter.
There is, somehow, still a lightness to the scene – this breakdown happens while Apple has a dildo strapped to her chest (she doesn’t know enough about sex to know where that particular toy goes). And Erika, perversely, finds the reaction cute – maybe she recognizes an old bit of herself in Apple’s insecurity, or maybe she’s just cruel. More likely, it’s a little bit of both.
Not every young person in the film is struggling with their sexual identity (beyond seeing a lack of a sex life as a generational problem, Araki also clearly sees it as a heterosexual problem – Elliot’s gay coworker Zap (Mason Gooding) is happily hooking up all the time, often with multiple people at once. But the ones who are – Apple, Elliot, even Elliot’s girlfriend Minerva, to some extent – are struggling because they’re scared to be honest with themselves. In one scene, Apple bemoans that all the cool sex stuff always happens to Elliot, not her. But Apple also spends most of her time upside-down on the couch, eating popcorn, laughing at stupid TV shows. It’s hard for things to happen to you when you don’t go outside. .
In its farcical, exaggerated way, “I Want Your Sex” posits that sex can be messy, and it’s not always good. But it is an integral part of figuring out who we are, how to connect with each other, how to be honest about our desires and ourselves. Otherwise, you might wake up one day and find your dom dead in the pool – and nobody wants that.
