As anyone who binge-watched Netflix’s new superhero-noir series can tell you, it’s remarkably frank about sexuality: There are a half-dozen sex scenes, and they’re as vivid as they are realistic. Jessica Jones’s creators and performers told us that those scenes grew out of the show’s takes on gender, power, and superhero-genre tropes — and that they were much more enjoyable to watch than to film.
Read no further if you don’t want Jessica Jones spoilers.
“People go, ‘Wow, this must be fun.’ Well, they don’t realize you do it all day. It takes, like, half a day to film it,” said Mike Colter, who plays Jessica’s love interest, a fellow superstrong loner named Luke Cage. Most of the show’s sex scenes are between him and Krysten Ritter’s Jessica, and they’re pronouncedly athletic. The first one begins with the two of them in missionary position and ends with Jessica playing power bottom by getting Luke to take her from behind. Even for the eye-poppingly muscular Colter, the scene was physically draining.
“My chest and my arms were burning, there were points in my back — I was like, ‘Another take?’ Literally, I was trembling,” Colter recalled. He took solace in the leadership of episode director S.J. Clarkson, known for her work on Dexter and Heroes. “She’s the sex-scene director to have if you want to do sex scenes, because she knows exactly where to put the hands and what to do with the hands and what to do with the head. She’s just technically sound on it.”
Technical precision was also the preferred approach for David Petrarca, who directed the episode in which we see Luke and Jessica go at it three times. “The problem is, people bring their own kind of shame about sex to the table” when you shoot sex scenes, he said. “If you project that into the environment, you charge the atmosphere. So the best way is to make it as pedestrian as humanly possible.”
That said, one of the moments he directed wasn’t pedestrian by non-superhuman standards: Jessica is on top of Luke, riding him so hard that they shatter the bed’s bottom legs. The bed was a custom-built rig with breakable legs, which were held together with a pin. On command, a trigger would pull the pin and drop the bed. But even while filming that scene of sexual frenzy, the on-set atmosphere was one of artistic distance.
“That’s a technical shot! That’s me trying to get an Edward Hopper–esque image of the lonely woman in the window!” Petrarca recalled. “You work through the mechanics: Sheet’s gonna go here, your arm’s here, maybe he rolls this way to the left.”
Very few Jews have any agenda with regard to interracial sex. They work hard, they look after their families, they hang out with their own kind, they do the best they can in life. A tiny number of elite Jews, however, want to make the West more tolerant, more cosmopolitan, and less racist and they think it is a mitzva to show things like glamorous black-white sex and positive portrayals of trannies and homosexuals.
Portrayals of Jewish-Gentile hookups, however, are sure to raise the hackles of traditional Jewry (for whom inter-marriage is a scandal).
Racial Theme of New Yorker Cover Sparks Furor
February 09, 1993|From Associated Press
NEW YORK — A painting of a black woman and a Hasidic Jew embracing and kissing on the cover of the New Yorker magazine drew criticism Monday from leaders on both sides of a racially divided community.
The artist, Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman, and New Yorker editor Tina Brown said the Valentine’s Day cover advocates replacing conflict with love.
Spiegelman, in an accompanying commentary, acknowledged that his image is a dream that is “knowingly naive” and that the problems besetting Jews and blacks in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section “cannot be kissed away.”
“But once a year, perhaps, it’s permissible, even if just for a moment, to close one’s eyes, see beyond the tragic complexities of modern life, and imagine that it might really be true that ‘All you need is love,’ ” he wrote.
Tensions between the community’s blacks and ultra-Orthodox Jews erupted in August, 1991, with two deaths and days of racially fueled violence. Conflict continues, with alleged bias attacks from both sides.
The cover of the Feb. 15 issue, which appeared on newsstands Monday, may do more harm than good, said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a black activist.
“I think that instead of healing anything, there will be anger emanating because of this,” Daughtry said.
Daughtry and Rabbi Joseph Spielman, chairman of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, both called the painting “unfortunate.”
“Rather than healing, this just makes everything ludicrous,” Spielman said, pointing out that Hasidim may not even kiss their wives or show them physical affection in public.
Spiegelman said the negative reactions from both groups made him sad. But he added, by telephone from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., it ultimately may have a positive effect.
“If it unites both communities against me, at least we’ve gotten them united,” he said.
Brown, who took over as editor last year, defended the cover.
“Art Spiegelman’s beautiful image, representing as it does his dreamlike vision of comity and love, speaks for itself,” she said.
Daughtry said he doubted that the magazine would have used a cover showing a black man kissing a Hasidic woman. Spiegelman said he considered such a picture and conceded racial stereotypes affected the final version.
American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:
* In recent decades, the leading Jewish organizations have invoked the Holocaust to argue that anti-Semitism is a distinctively virulent and murderous form of hatred. But in the first postwar decades their emphasis — powerfully reinforced by contemporary scholarly opinion — was on the common psychological roots of all forms of prejudice. Their research, educational, and political action programs consistently minimized differences between different targets of discrimination. If prejudice and discrimination were all of a set piece, they reasoned that they could serve the cause of Jewish self-defense as well by attacking prejudice and discrimination against blacks as by tackling anti-Semitism directly.
* …there was never much of a black-Jewish alliance on the communal or organizational level. There were a great many individual Jews who over the years had worked on behalf of blacks, but, with some exceptions, they were leftist and liberal activists who had little connection to the Jewish community. This was certainly true of the Jewish lawyers and student volunteers who worked with the black movement in the South in the 1960s…During the McCarthy era, Jewish organizations repeatedly pointed out that it was a fallacy to infer from the fact that a great many (perhaps even a majority of) Communists were Jews that a great many, let alone a majority of, Jews were Communists. The logic was impeccable with respect to alleged Jewish pro-Communism, and equally impeccable with respect to alleged Jewish civil rights activism.
