The Bad-Sex Blockbuster

F ifty years ago today, a film about deceit, bad sex, impotence, and misogyny emerged as the surprise smash of the summer box office. Written by Jules Feiffer and directed by Mike Nichols, the lacerating and brilliant Carnal Knowledge was released on June 30, 1971, and became the film everyone hated yet everyone had to see. It’s the romcom as horror movie, so bleak and brutal about human sexual politics that it touched off an obscenity case that went to the Supreme Court. Yet there’s no explicit sex in it; the film is obscene only in the sense that it’s nasty.

This is not a work for those who can’t latch on to a story unless there is someone to root for. Nor is there a point to the machinations it depicts, except to expose men at their worst. Its ties to theater are obvious, with its long takes and its monologues, yet when Feiffer pitched the idea as a play to Nichols, with whom he had worked on stage, Nichols ingeniously countered that it should be a film, albeit a film that felt like a play. Just as we do when watching a play, the audience comes to feel locked in a room with these characters. They seem right there in front of us, grubby and small, not enlarged by cinematic conventions. At many points, Carnal Knowledge (streaming on Amazon Prime) is almost too much to bear, and despite having seen it three or four times over the years, I almost couldn’t bring myself to watch it again for the purposes of writing about it here. It’s more frightening than practically any slasher flick.

“What we have here,” wrote Roger Ebert at the end of 1971, a miraculous year for cinema, “is the phenomenon of a film thriving on bad word-of-mouth. Carnal Knowledge will come up in conversation and nearly everyone present will have seen it. . . .Women will say their husbands didn’t like it. Men will say their wives ‘aren’t like that.’” Ebert pronounced the film the best of the four that Nichols had directed to that point — the first three were Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, and Catch-22 — but noted that everyone seemed enraged by it. It was called “chauvinistic.” It was too dark because “its sex lives are without joy.” It may have been a coded joke about two men who don’t relate to women because all they really want is to sleep with each other.

Ebert dismissed all of those criticisms, insisting that “Feiffer and Nichols have hit a nerve. They have approached a truth. They have been almost cruelly accurate in getting down on film what men sometimes say to each other about women — and how they say it.”

I agree. I find it slightly baffling when people talk about their cinematic “guilty pleasures” and it turns out that they’re referring to Road House or something. Why would anyone feel guilty about liking Road House? Road House is a guiltless pleasure. Carnal Knowledge, on the other hand, envelops me with guilt about being a man; as horrid as Jack Nicholson and, to a slightly lesser extent, Art Garfunkel, are in the roles of Jonathan and Sandy, I recognize what they’re up to. They’ll lie, cheat, and brutalize in pursuit of women, but not out of affection. Like many men I’ve known, they don’t even want to get to know women, any more than the hunter wants to get to know the deer. They brutishly reduce women to their constituent parts: “I woulda settled for the legs if she had just two more inches here and three more here,” Jonathan says, boasting that he sleeps with twelve new partners a year.

Not every man has such a bitter, contemptuous attitude toward women, but Jonathan typifies the man who is blinded by his need for sex and sees women as a hostile force. They either deny him the prize or unman him by demanding commitment and domestication as their price. He despises being placed in a position of perpetual need and supplication. Marriage is to him, as I suspect it was to many of his generation — the film begins in what seems to be the late 1940s and wraps up around 1970 — a feminine trap.

Carnal Knowledge begins in a world where a college student might refuse to kiss her swain on the third date in the interests of protecting her virtue and reputation. Yet in the early college scenes, Sandy’s date, Susan (Candice Bergen), consents to advance things sexually with him as a charitable act; she feels sorry for him when he confesses his lack of experience. Not really pleased by Sandy, but unable to break up with him, she tries to obtain some distance in a passive way by allowing herself to be seduced also by Jonathan, neither of them telling Sandy about their affair. A scene that consists entirely of a closeup of Susan as she laughs performatively at Sandy’s and Jonathan’s jokes hints at what’s in it for her: She likes attention, and sex is a way to get it, albeit a pleasureless one. When Jonathan tells her, “You’re something,” she reveals how hollow her actions have made her feel. “I don’t feel like something,” she replies. “I feel like nothing.”

The term “misogyny” today has become so devalued that its use typically indicates nothing except that someone has said something rude about a woman liked by progressives. But Carnal Knowledge mercilessly exposes that vice, drilling down into misogyny like no film I’ve ever watched. It would be a mistake, though, to describe it as a misogynistic work; as rotten as Jonathan is to women, Feiffer is perceptive and sensitive to what they endure. His female characters’ mistakes are understandable and human, whereas Jonathan is monstrous, and Sandy is a sort of monster’s accomplice.

In his 30s, when Jonathan becomes a successful accountant in New York City, he picks up an actress named Bobbie, played by Ann-Margaret in the performance of her life. She craves commitment, but he wants her to understand that marriage is not an option even as he allows her to move in with him. She personifies young professional women of that era, who gave up their careers for men who disliked female independence. With neither a job nor children, though, she has no purpose: “The reason I sleep all day is because I can’t stand my life,” she tells Jonathan in a long, grueling fight scene that serves as the centerpiece of the movie. What life? he asks. “Sleeping all day,” she says. When she tells him, “I don’t want a job, I want you,” he shouts back, “I’m taken by me.” Their bitter, exhausting, completely believable clash is a frank corrective to the witty one-upmanship of Virginia Woolf; this is how real couples fight — nerves exposed, crying horribly or shouting demonically. Nicholson and Nichols (the two enjoyed calling each other “Nick”) coached Ann-Margret, driving her ever deeper into the character’s despondency, and she received the film’s only Oscar nomination.

Jonathan may be a generational figure: As he is often impotent, and unusually close to Sandy, it’s possible that he is gay, something many men of that era might never have been able to admit to themselves. And in an age when a sexual relationship would quickly lead to questions about marriage, his standing rage would be a kind of reaction against the strictures of the system then in place. But I think he is a more enduring type; in the chilling slide show and monologue about his history with women late in the movie, he sounds like many men I’ve heard discussing old girlfriends, assessing them solely on what kinds of sexual favors they offered. “Here’s something I went with for a couple of months,” he says. “This slob, I went with for a year until I got so sick of her. . . . I can’t remember her name.” Carnal Knowledge may be an acid bath, but it strips a certain kind of man right down to the bone.