This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
When you click on the film Love on Netflix, where it has spent the last week in the Top 10 of the service’s most-watched movies and shows, the very first thing you see is a woman dragging her nipple up and down a man’s erect penis as she masturbates him and he fingers her clitoris, which is pointed directly at the camera.
This isn’t implied, or done with prosthetics of any kind. The scene continues in a single take for nearly three full minutes, climaxing—heh—when he ejaculates. To clarify one more time, it is not some sort of gluey substance used to cinematically replicate the bodily function that you see. The dude cums.
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The film, from shock-art director Gaspar Noé, was actually released in 2015, when it made headlines for its screenings in 3D cinemas, where you could see the jizz come flying at your face. While, for obvious reasons, the ACTUAL SEX of it all dominated most discussion of Love, it was in the service of a fascinating erotic drama about relationships. Netflix tags it as both “steamy” and “cerebral,” which... solid LOL there.
A five-year-old movie that launches with a staring contest between you and an attractive actor’s splooge hole is trending in tandem with Netflix’s other porny obsession of the moment, the kinky soft-core 365 Days—or, as critic Nick Schager called it on The Daily Beast, “a Polish Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Y’all are really logging into your parents’ Netflix account to binge watch porn.
The film’s been the source of as much water-cooler debate as it has cold showers, owing to its controversial storyline about a woman who falls for a Mafia boss who kidnaps her, the abusive nature of some of its sex scenes, and the whole “everyone shut up so I can enjoy my explicit sex and nudity in peace” counterargument to it all. Now, the youths have entered the picture.
As Decider helpfully explained to me when I Googled a semblance of “Love...2015...trending...huh?,” the film surged in popularity after a TikTok went viral encouraging those who were titillated by 365 Days to then go watch Love and record their reactions to the aforementioned first scene.
After spending my lunch hour figuring out how to use TikTok, I found a bunch of them. They’re funny! The youths are at it again! This time, uh, prompting each other to watch full-penetration sex and bond over it. (Yes, that opening scene to Love is a middle-school slow dance compared to the horizontal mambos yet to come.)
It’s tempting to parse some sort of meaning from the fact that two of the most-watched entertainment options in the country right now could, on another website, be wanking material. Whatever it means... it’s not good.
Remember these last few weeks when people were wondering how they could productively use their couch time to educate and responsibly amplify Black art? Those lists that were everywhere, outlining which movies everyone should watch? When Netflix itself launched a Black Lives Matter collection of options?
Well, people transitioned from being woke to horny in record time. None of those films and series by Black creators featuring essential Black storylines were still lingering in the Netflix Top 10 by the end of the week. (Mercifully, neither was The Help.) That’s depressing, and wholly unsurprising.
Is it productive to go on a tangent about how telling it is that the flames of activism that spread across the country this month are so quickly extinguished for a pivot to sex and, probably, masturbation and self-gratification?
That as the nation still burns, we’re bingeing soft-core porn, the final season of 13 Reasons Why, and, apparently, the last remaining non-problematic Tina Fey project? (Baby Mama: New to Netflix in June!)
That, before I finish typing this paragraph, there will already be a dozen emails in my inbox telling me to get a life?
No, that is not productive. So instead I leave you with this.
Should you, for any reason, desire to hide a certain film title from your Netflix history so that no one else who may be sharing that account can see that you viewed it—like, say, a movie that opens with a three-minute hand job—click on “Account” in the drop down in the top-right corner, find “Viewing Activity” and then click the “Hide” icon.”
