💬 Hung Up Asks: What Does Real Romance Look Like?

𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓬𝓾𝓵𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮

More from Hung Up this week: Margot Robbie Describing Her Brief Experience Being Ugly … How To Pronounce “SYRN” … the latest episode of the Pitt companion pod.

I entered Wuthering Heights with an open mind. I would’ve liked it if it were completely different in every way: if, say, Jacob Elordi was in another Sophia Coppola movie, Margot Robbie was in a Todd Haynes movie, and Emerald Fennell was not at all involved. Is it rude to call it Stuttering Heights? It all felt start-and-stop, uneasy, uncertain. Whenever something started to have motion, it was as if Fennell would call “cut” and make the movie reset.

Margot Robbie Describing Her Brief Experience Being Ugly

So what does real romance look like? I keep thinking about a line from Blue Moon: Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, the spurned ex-lyricist of Richard Rodgers. At Oklahoma’s opening night, Hart skulks into the afterparty waiting for a crush half his age (Margaret Qualley). “Oklahoma! would close in shame if it could hear eight bars of what’s in my heart,” he says. I’ve thought about that line every week since I saw the movie (including the week I saw Oklahoma! at Carnegie Hall.) What a line, what an image! The roaring, yeehaw-ing technicolor Oklahoma! reduced to nothing when it’s up against the loveliness of Hart’s desire.

No one I ever had a crush on in high school made me feel even a little bit like a line I loved from Terrence Malick’s adaptation of The Thin Red Line. (I went through a big Vietnam War movie phase when I was 16 … who knows.) “If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.” Let me feel the lack! Stubborn and exquisite. One time, I booked an AirBnB in Mexico City just because there was a one-sheet of Happy Together framed in the bedroom (and a little print of the Psycho poster in the master bath). Sharon Stone marrying Robert De Niro in Casino but being consoled by her lover James Woods in VO.! Kevin cooking for Black in Moonlight!

One of the sexiest scenes in American cinema, to me, is Annabella Sciorra stretching out her arms underneath Wesley Snipes in Jungle Fever, the way they make love on his drafting table. (Being an architect really is the best romantic comedy job.) The voyeuristic high angle of the camera, the brightness of the lights, his red shirt, her green blouse. Now that’s a love scene. Even the hijinks of My Best Friend’s Wedding lands in a more erotic place: Julia Roberts whimpers and shows the wedding band stuck on her unmanicured finger. Dermot Mulroney dips her finger into his mouth to pull the ring off with his tongue.

So you tell me: what’s a romantic scene or an erotic scene or something that will satisfy more than Wuthering Heights?