PARK CITY, Utah -- One of Hollywood's most familiar clichés is the love scene, with its soft blue light, slow, fleshy pans, and undulating bodies. In Jed Weintrob's independent film On_Line, however, big-screen love is pixelated and fractured, viewed through the lenses of Web cams. Simultaneous orgasms? They happen across town -- or across the country -- from one another.
If the Internet is offering humans new ways to conduct their sexual relations, it also may be changing the ways film directors depict sexuality. That's the case in both On_Line and in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Teknolust, two of the first films to explore the old themes of lust and desire within the framework of new technologies.
Both films premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival, which runs through Sunday in Park City, Utah.
Weintrob, who worked in the interactive entertainment industry for nearly a decade, found inspiration for his film in the real-life stories of the Internet.
On_Line follows an interconnected group of people: John is a cybersex entrepreneur who prefers strangers online to the company of real women; Ed is a young gay man who finds solace in a for-pay sex site; Jordan, an Internet fantasy girl, is in search of someone who can satisfy her sexual needs.
Even as it builds its case as a romantic comedy, On_Line is quite explicit, demonstrating how one might have sex via the Internet (and, in one very funny scene, how not to). The film uses split screens and heavily manipulated images in an attempt to put the viewer inside an Internet sex site.
"I wanted the viewers to feel like voyeurs as much as the characters do," Weintrob says. "I also wanted to show that this can be sexy. A lot of independent films that deal with nontraditional sex make it seem kind of antiseptic."
Weintrob also used the Internet to cast the film, discovering one actress by studying Jennicam-style sites. The woman auditioned via Web cam, and later e-mailed Weintrob an important part of her performance. Weintrob also linked the actors via computers when filming some of the erotic scenes, which generally feature coupling via the Internet.
"This is the new sex, or certainly the new safe sex," Weintrob says. "People are more willing to be sexually open when they don't have to touch each other. Now they can see and hear one another -- and someday they'll maybe even be able to feel each other -- without any actual human contact."
If On_Line is explicit in its exploration of newfangled sex and sexuality, Teknolust is more of a fable, with bright, comic-book colors and a playful tone.
In the film, a programmer-geneticist named Rosetta Stone combines her own DNA with a software program she has developed. The result: three Self Replicating Automatons, or "SRAs," that live online in a popular portal. Actress Tilda Swinton (of The Deep End) plays all three SRAs and their creator.
To satisfy their desire for male genetic material, these bubbly 21st-century Frankensteins venture from the virtual world into "the Jungle." There, one of the SRAs stalks and seduces men, capturing male "chromo" in the form of semen and bringing it home to share with her sisters.
"I see Teknolust as a coming-of-age story, for the SRAs and for the society," Leeson said. "We are just beginning to come to terms with technological advances and these artificial life forms. What happens when we have machines that can repair and reproduce themselves and make intelligent decisions?"
Leeson, an acclaimed interactive artist and director of the 1998 film Conceiving Ada, describes Teknolust as a comedy. While Teknolust explores classic terrain -- what Leeson calls "the essential quest for loving interaction" -- it is set against the backdrop of a thoroughly modern scientific landscape: genetics, nanotechnology and robotics.
In that way, the film is highly pertinent -- a cautionary tale for the new millennium.
"We presume we are the master of technologies, just as Rosetta presumes she's the master of these SRAs," Leeson said. "But technology itself is advancing to the point that we are in more of a symbiotic relationship. We need each other."
