Sex

The recent Golden Globe awards saw the Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy, a fictionalized account of the theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s notorious sex tape, lose out to The White Lotus. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Whether or not you thought the second series of The White Lotus was a worthy successor to the first, it was still much-discussed water-cooler television in a way that Pam & Tommy simply wasn’t. Yet perhaps there was another consideration at play. 2023 marks the grand return of Pamela Anderson — if, of course, she ever went away. She refused to cooperate with the production of the miniseries, and it’s now clear she didn’t want it to interfere with her own ambitions.

"I’ve had an extraordinary life, I must make an extraordinary film," Madonna told Variety in July, as she described her decision to helm her own biopic as a "preemptive strike" against the men who wanted to tell her story. That was last summer, when there were reports of a months-long "Madonna bootcamp" led by casting director Carmen Cuba, which included eleven-hour choreography sessions, where everyone from Florence Pugh, Alexa Demie, Bebe Rexha, Odessa Young and Sky Ferreira auditioned to play the "Material Girl." Madonna said she wanted the role to go to someone who could "convey the incredible journey that life has taken me on as an artist, a musician, a dancer...the focus of this film will always be music.

"Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three… between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP." So wrote Philip Larkin in his much-quoted poem "Annus Mirabilis." Sixty years later, while the Beatles’ Please Please Me is not entirely synonymous with matters sexual, there is still a fascination with DH Lawrence’s most famous book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It remains both a boundary-pushing erotic landmark and, now that the controversy behind it has long passed, a deeply affecting novel that is both romantic and Romantic in its reach.

The most interesting part of the new Netflix Marilyn Monroe pic Blonde, for me, is the representation of a very specific kind of Hollywood rot. We do not at first appreciate very much about the two men with whom a young Marilyn Monroe, played by Ana de Armas, begins a romantic affair. We know they are two faces in a Hollywood acting class. We know they are bookends of a sort — blandly handsome, interchangeable, good casting on the part of writer/director Andrew Dominik, who in other ways delivers a project that, in the words of a friend, “looks like a very expensive student film.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but I actually didn’t hate the ending of Game of Thrones. Sure, the showrunners fumbled some of the character arcs and made some odd decisions (King Bran? Really?). But the broad thematic arc of the series was perfect. Daenerys’s dark turn into madness and mass murder and the subsequent destruction of the Iron Throne served as a hopeful proclamation that, even in our bloody, jaded, pornified world, the true faith lives on. The show understood, on some level, that neither the ideal redistribution of power nor its unfettered aggrandizement could ever be our salvation. Martin made his name as the anti-Tolkien, but it was all a ruse. If his intentions were truly insidious, his story would “look fairer and feel fouler.