April 10, 2014 [Under the Skin]
I'm nowhere near the front lines of the new/emerging sexual revolution, in which sex is finally only what it's always been, what it felt like (everywhere, but especially in our heads) way before we decided to make promises and seek permanence. This revolution is Darwinian in its desire to gather resources, however fleeting—but absurdist in its conclusions, wrenched free of the grip of survival and the steady hand of what Freud, that old softie, called "the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units." No, we're not building civilizations any more; we've said "goodbye to all that." But the pull of survival will not be denied, at least not at the movies, where desire is punished, and sex still = death—or some kind of erasure, or a subsuming into a substance not unlike the rubbery tar surface on which Scarlett Johansson walks backward, encouraging with her body the men who slowly sink into foggy blackness, the tar soften
