The 2026 film, I Want Your Sex, is
ostensibly about sex, for the film is saturated with that leitmotif, but the narrative
is actually a critique of California culture, with European culture playing a minor
role to provide a contrast. Generally, comedy can be used by screenwriters as a
means by which audiences can accept, or at least acknowledge criticism that
would otherwise be met with ferocious denial befitting a drug addiction. In
2026, the sheer dogmatism of ideologically-soaked imposing at will, as
if with facts of reason rather than the gloss of merely subjective opinion, was
the brain-sickness of the day afflicting youth culture at least in San
Francisco and Los Angeles. Film can expose such banality to the light of day
and thus serve as a self-correcting agent for a societal or sub-societal
culture. The human mind may be vulnerable to blindness when belief and values are in the grip of
ideological idolatry.
The film’s plot centers around
Elliot being hired by Erika Tracy, a commercial artist. Her art’s theme is
sexual in nature, and it is not long before she enlists all-too-willing Elliot
in sadistic-masochistic sexual fantasies, for Elliot’s girlfriend, Minerva, is
cold as ice in bed—even going so far as to fake enjoying sex with Elliot. As
the film’s narrative unfolds, Erika and her pretentious (and violent)
assistant, Vikktor, temporarily frame Elliot for murder (of Tracy!) in order to
raise the asking prices for the art. The two come to a working-agreement
wherein both profit from business dealings with the other, and the film ends
with Elliot and Erika separately having the same dream in which they get
married and she finally reveals herself as a self-imploding demon, which may
refer to the true nature of the culture being critiqued by the film.
Erika, Vikktor, and the film’s
gay trope/slut, Zap, another of Erika’s employees, are so intensely
narcissistic that even their external mannerisms come off as pretentious. Erika
even tells Elliot, “People think only about themselves.” She also tells him
that most people are idiots and cowards, so don’t worry about what they think. Arrogant
self-vaulting, as if on stilts during a flood, looks down on the pathetic
losers below. According to M. Scott Peck’s book, People of the Lie, however,
a sense of inner emptiness lies behind such pretention and narrow, selfishness
along with a callous indifference to whether other people are suffering. Erika’s
inner emptiness can be grasped in Erika’s statement to Elliot, “Sex is
everything and nothing.” She even makes
fun of her European acquaintance for having told Elliot that sex is a dance and
a language of touch, and thus of even emotional intimacy. “That’s why I hate
Europeans,” Erika says when Elliot recounts what the European woman told him in
her hotel room. But in reducing sex to impersonal S & M, which highlights
pleasure from the inflicting of pain, Erika can be critiqued on her judgment on
the European’s interpretation of sex. For according to Erika, “Sex is a drug,
like every other addiction,” so a person has to “learn how to control it or it
will control you.” Because sex is Erika’s life in terms not only of her art,
but also relationships that might otherwise be romantic, the implication is
that her life, and even her sense of self, is actually empty, encased in an
addiction to inflicting pain through impersonal, and mechanical sex. Her
admission to Elliot, “We’re both emotionally stunted and suck at communicating”
actually applies only to herself, for Elliot is the proverbial adult in the
room.
Erika’s superficial toughness
does, however, have a benefit, in that she is able to criticize the young-adult
generation that has been so coddled by parents that ideological discomfort itself
is a trigger. Anything uncomfortable is attacked even though discomfort can
spur psychological development—something the “woke” generation sorely lacks. Erika
recounts to Elliot that a young adult using social media (Tic-Tok) complained
in a comment because the person had not given consent to see a photo of two people
holding hands! The sheer
presumptuousness evinces a puerile stage of psychological development and thus
a proclivity to throw a temper-tantrum when “accosted” by the discomfort of a
hated ideological stance held by another person as if such a stance were
unlawful and incorrect. It is no wonder, Erika says, that 30 percent of
that generation play video games rather than have sex.
The film’s director and
writer, Gregg Araki, told an audience in person in 2026 that the 30 percent
line is important to the film. What he did not make explicit is that a generation
of emotionally-stunted and isolated judgmental people is not of benefit to a
society. The sheer ideological intolerance and presumption exclusively to
truth, which in the 1980s had been associated with evangelical Christians, had
come to characterize “politically-correct” children-adults in California by
2026. To such enraged intolerance, the rest of us can be said to have a duty to
reply to such primped arrogance on stilts, Deal with it. But as “woke”
as the “politically correct” were in 2026, they were actually asleep in their
presumption and abject, narrow selfishness, which pathetically defines truth
itself from such a standpoint and regards differing people as capable
only of mere opinion. How convenient. A person can be addicted to an ideology too.
