A few weeks ago I saw the new Ang Lee film Lust, Caution. I gave it some thought, and invariably ended up linking it to anime. Lust, Caution is a slickly produced thriller with a fairly conventional plot, and most of the media attention has been on the extended sex scenes. It has to be stressed that this is a fairly “classy” film, and the sex is both relevant to the plot and vital to understanding the relationship between the protagonists.

It makes sense that films should be able to clearly represent what is a pretty important part of the whole human experience – there have been classic examples like Last Tango in Paris, and in the case of the more recent Shortbus the sex scenes were actually real! In A History of Violence I felt that the scenes showing the protagonists changing love life with his wife were by far the best scenes in the film. And, for the David Cronenberg fans, yes my favourite of his films is Crash (that’s the 1996 film not the recent Oscar winner, non Cronenbegettoes). I think it’s fair to say that if there’s a trend in cinema it’s towards less censorship – in short, we’re in the latter stages of a progression away from more mannered “clean” films.

I don’t know if the same can be said for anime, which is after all home to several kinds of implicit filthiness. For all the attention given to the ultraviolence in Elfen Lied what really surprised me was the way the entire story ended up swinging on a choice between romantic love (crazy naked killer girl) and a quiet life of cozy old incest! It isn’t so much the charming hentai subculture that conserns me – it’s that regular anime is steeped a peculiar sexuality. I don’t necessarily mean explicitness, it’s more the general flood of fetishism (schoolgirls ahoy).

But that approach to sexuality is, at the end of the day, an indirect one. This set of conventions gives the anime writers some fairly unique ground upon which to tread. Fetishism in particular is fascinating and, in a medium of moving drawings, a rather appropriate area for discussion. Presumably though that would require a “real” sexuality as counterpoint. In other words with the freedom to create explicit material, anime might well offer a distinctive contribution to sexually aware drama.

Of course the problem here is that I’m asking for a degree of, well, maturity in sexual representations. And no, I am not optimistic. Sex is a primary site for extremely rubbish art. Novels are pretty free vehicles for expression and, as countless rubbish and unrubbish authors remind, sex is all too often portrayed in spectacularly crass ways. If anime embraces explicit sex scenes, we can expect to see some very very crap stuff abound. In fact, it seems that a medium free from hang-ups can be a recipe for disaster.

By replacing all that innuendo and implicit fetishism with the explicit the writer can be forced from evocative representations towards the difficult issue of realistic and dramatically effective “real” presentation of sex. For example, the clichéd Hollywood style sex scenes are probably less effective, less telling, tools for the writers than the subtle hinting utilised in earlier (censored) films. When a medium embraces explicit scenes it can damage its distinctive identity, and move towards a clumsy (and universal) bluntness.

There’s two facets to this progression in Western cinema. You get the opportunity for bold and explicit art. You also get some unsatisfying new conventions which all too often take the place of well-written sex scenes.

Not, of course, that the sexual references and material in anime are exactly a goldmine of subtle nuances and eloquent discussion. The thing with anime though is that, as a very loose school of animation, our interest in it is massively defined by the appeals of its conventions. With the clear convergence in Western art towards a very up front sexualism, it’s nice to have a different approach.

This places me in an odd situation. I’d still like to see a censor-baiting, sexually aware, intelligent piece of drama in the anime canon (if there is one already, I haven’t heard of it). But I’m worried that I’m missing the point of my own interest in anime. After all, i came to anime for what it is, not what it could be. I’m not watching just because it’s the prime market for contemporary animation. I’m watching for the existing conventions.

The kind of work I was imagining earlier would (*dramatic pause*) fuck with those conventions a great deal. There is an established way of approaching sex in anime. It’s not ideal, but it’s OK. Somehow I find myself wishing to protect anime, to keep it apart from the West. This despite the fact that I’m massively in favour of the Western move towards sexually explicit drama. It’s not that anime writers wouldn’t have something distinctive to offer, it’s more a resistance to artistic convergence. I don’t want world art to be monolithic, with a convergence of standards for censorship and representations, I’d prefer a segregated diversity. Exactly why is something I think I’ll tackle in another entry.