Meech On Movies: In Conversation With Raven Leilani - Sneak Watches

The author of the New York Times' Notable Book of the Year sits down to talk with me about sexy movies!

You know that thing of when you were a kid, thanks to the power of cable you were able to watch some R-rated film you KNOW you shouldn’t have been watching while your parents were in the other room (or if you were home alone because you were a latch-key kid, bonus points to you and your therapist) so you sat with your finger hovering over the “previous channel” button?

Well, thankfully someone else knows that feeling too. Raven Leilani, author of the New York Times Best-Selling novel Luster who was also Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize sat down to talk with me about erotic sneak watches.

Luster by Raven Leilani

Meecham Whitson Meriweather: I'm very nosy, and since this is a judgment-free zone (to an extent) you and I have bonded over this. In the 90s, adult supervision was hardly enforced, so if we were inquisitive enough, which clearly we were, we got to see some amazing films and TV shows we absolutely shouldn’t have (hello Skinemax) and I could be speaking for myself here, but this possibly shaped the way we write? What was the first R-rated movie you remember seeing at home?

Raven Leilani: Probably Silence of the Lambs. My mom had the VHS, so this was some years after it had come out, maybe 1998. I might’ve been seven at the time, but I remember very viscerally where the tape was. She kept it in a cabinet with Titanic, Forrest Gump, and a Simon and Garfunkel Best of cd. I still remember how it felt to open the cabinet and see the cover of that tape, Jodie Foster with that butterfly.

“Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me” SCREAM! I adore that movie, AND Anthony Hopkins. And at the movie theatre?

Unfortunately, Passion of the Christ. I was 12 or 13. I went with my mom and grandmother and I think they just thought it would be good biblical content. I grew up very religious with some constraints on secular things, but biblical adaptations were allowed and a fair portion of what I watched. The movie though was more brutal than they bargained for I’m sure, almost fetishistically so, though that sensibility tracks with a lot of Christian iconography. It was a scene in the theater. People were weeping, walking out. I don’t remember the movie so much as the extremity of the crowd response.

It’s no Prince of Egypt, but I do remember the uproar over it! My first R-rated film was Angelfist (1993) I promise there was no fisting involved! It’s actually about this woman (played by Katya Sassoon, Vidal Sassoon’s daughter!) whose sister gets abducted, and she has to infiltrate an underground kickboxing ring. Literally the most insane film, but I feel like it really made a lasting impact on me, and the actors’ looks and professions in the film mirror people I’ve dated. Did either of them have a lasting impression on you/what you looked for in a partner? 

Imagine if I said yes. At the very least, Silence of the Lambs employs a trope I’m still a sucker for in books and film. Extended interrogation, really anything predicated on a dialogue between two people separated by some intense power differential. And while I’m no longer religious, I keep trying to crack my old dogma through my own work.

You and Kimmy Schmidt both! We spoke briefly about the erotic thriller Unfaithful (2002) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, which essentially sparked this post, and we really don't get erotic thrillers like that anymore! It was sexy, and sophisticated, and also showed SoHo before it was gentrified and snatched away from extremely sexy artists like Olivier Martinez’s character Paul. What are some things that really stood out about that film for you?

Where do I start? Diane Lane’s legs. The scene of her on the Metro-North, going home post affair—everything happening on her face. The dirty sinkwater in the train bathroom. The glamor and carnality of it, and humbling bits where she’s just crying over her McDonald’s. My favorite thing though is how the movie transitions from her affair to her husband’s crime. From her secret to his. You get that change in tonality with a lot of erotic thrillers—you know, sexy-to-scary—but this one nearly feels like a change in POV. I also like that she and her husband are still relatively hot for each other, still tender, which is in Fatal Attraction too—I always think it’s a cop-out when an affair story has easy justification, like they don’t like each other anymore or someone is a jerk. 

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In your novel Luster—which is currently being adapted into a series at MAX, your main character Edie gets involved with a married man and—not to spoil it for those who haven’t read it (but also why haven’t you?) messiness ensues, which—if Nene Leakes was around she would have shouted “Close your legs to married men!” and maybe things would have worked out differently for her. What do you think are three of the best “forbidden love” tropes, and films about those tropes?

Some of my favorite films about forbidden love are about some transgression of a political or professional boundary, like Lust, Caution, The Night Porter, or The Bodyguard. A large part of this canon is of course queer, and a few I love are Carol, Disobedience, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and The Handmaiden. I think The Handmaiden has perhaps the most inventive use of bells I’ve ever seen.

Omg—I saw The Handmaiden in 2016 at Sunshine Cinema on Houston (RIP) and it was so perfectly executed. Everyone walked out with their minds blown. What is an R-rated film/erotic thriller you find yourself always going back to? One that has immeasurable rewatchability?

In The Cut. I first read the book after I fell really badly in Berlin some years ago, so the initial memory is maybe dream-like because I hit my head, but the film is that way too. Grimy. Like looking through a keyhole. Meg Ryan being a real dissipated creep, which is representation women need. Shout out to the Piano Teacher for doing that work too. Though of course the scene me and so many of my girlfriends love is Mark Ruffalo’s character showing Meg Ryan how to pick up girls. My favorite thing though is in the book and movie, a description of a person having no “sense of cock.” Thankful to Susanna Moore for that one. 

Even though I hate You’ve Got Mail, Meg really has RANGE. I think one of the most important parts in a love/lust erotic thriller is that someone has to die—in any story really, there’s just something about death that’s cathartic to a love story.  Is there any film you really loved but would tweak the ending to?

Fatal Attraction. Let Glenn Close live. Obviously, she’s nuts and extremely dangerous, but one of the sympathetic things about her character is her total insistence on the dignity of acknowledgement. On not being used and ignored. It’s very explicit how the film wants us to feel she deserves to be punished. She’s made so monstrous, your allegiance is basically forced toward Michael Douglas’s character. Though I do think the way he plays it has such pathos—he’s just, in every way, out of his depth and you do pity him. But the way she is punishable, it doesn’t feel unrelated to the social threat of a woman like that. Single, financially and sexually empowered, childless. 

I want to shout that from the rooftops. “LET GLENN CLOSE LIVE!!!” Last question, speaking of love triangles—what did you think of Challengers?

I loved it. In part because it’s a legitimate triangle---everyone is involved with everyone, but also because I love how those moments of contact are governed principally by Zendaya’s character. I love that a Black girl’s art monstrosity is at the center of the erotics of the film. Her intensity, supremacy, and premature failure feeds and ruins these boys. It’s a cool portrait of deferred artistic energy, what it destroys, what it can stoke. Films like that, about a singleminded person’s dogged pursuit of x, about having it inherently vs having to labor at it, about having the thing tortured out of you--always feel erotic because they’re stories about creation. It makes sense that the climax is just a manifestation of what was deferred for her, a beautiful game of tennis.