Through The Lens

Good morning Consumers. This is please consume, the film newsletter that loves you more than Christopher Nolan loves dead wives.

This is what we’ve got for today 👇️

• Tom gives up his pick for erotic thriller week.

• Trailer Tuesday!

• All the latest news and notes.

Let’s get rolling…

Fair Play just hit Netflix. That gives us an amazing opportunity to touch on a genre that’s all but dead.

The Erotic Thriller.

Get ready. It’s about to get hot in here.

Blow Up (1966)

Written by Tom Fortner

Much like Caleb, I am not what you might call a frequent indulger in erotic thrillers.

In fact, I’m not really sure if I’ve ever actually seen a bona fide erotic thriller.

The film I’m talking about today doesn’t follow the same beaten path as most erotic thrillers: a detective, a seductive femme fatale, or sexual tension between the detective and the main suspect, to name a few tropes.

But it does thrill and eroticize in its own way, so I’m counting it.

Today I’m talking about Blow-Up.

Through The Lens

Actually, Blow-Up is one of my all-time favorite movies. It was one of the first films that I watched where I was really blown away by the filmmaking techniques employed by the filmmaker, Michelangelo Antonioni. The use of silence and camera movement instead of dialogue to convey information was especially shocking and formative for me.

The film is a day in the life of a popular fashion photographer, Thomas (played by David Hemmings), who has as much self-confident pride as Noel Gallagher except he’s handsome and pretty darn suave.

This isn’t an ordinary day for Thomas, however, because of a certain batch of picture he took of a couple in the park. The woman desperately wants them back for reasons that reek of an affair and then Thomas notices something when he blows the pictures up…

Erotic and Thrilling?

"As I mentioned before, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill erotic thriller. The tension in the film doesn’t come from the anticipation of sex. Rather, the sex in this film is the result of power manipulation by Thomas as a photographer.

We watch him mount a model, shouting “Go on! Go! Go! That’s it!” and other British things as he snaps away. The woman from the park removes her shirt because that’s what she thinks she has to do to get her pictures back. Thomas has a threesome with two young girls who are aspiring models. To quote Babu Bhatt talking about Jerry Seinfeld, he’s a very bad man.

Thomas gets off, in a way, through his camera. One could say it even has a phallic quality to it. It’s commands a certain submission on the part of who he photographs and allows for a sort of voyeurism as seen when he takes pictures of the couple.

To separate it further from the average erotic thriller, the tension come in a discovery made after Thomas has blown up the pictures he took in the park. I won’t spoil it here, but the information and the way it’s revealed is methodic and genius. It blew my mind and still does.

In this way, the everyday life of this photographer has been completely eradicated. The rest of the film reflects this as it becomes frantic and sweaty while Thomas tries to make his discovery aware to his publisher. However, he has now lost his control; his camera turned on him in a way.

Today’s Scene

The Iron Claw