Read for the Very First Time

Never has it been more important to defend free expression, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience and opinion than right now — when opponents of terrorism are slagged as oppressors, and opponents of war (crimes) are attacked as bigots; when the supreme court of a supposedly constitutional democracy suppresses the voting rights of minorities and the right to bodily autonomy of half the population; when internet-sheltered thugs run hateful lynch-mob campaigns to destroy reputations and lives; when even the intelligentsia refuse to defend the right of all to share research or utter opinions that may dismay a multitude of protesters (including financiers). All of the above has happened — is happening — and I do not need to spell out the examples. But that is why I delight in a set of essays, interviews, and stories, edited by Éric Falardeau and Simon Laperrière, about a late-night television series once beamed into homes in Quebec and the National Capital Region every Saturday by Télévision Quatre Saisons: Bleu nuit: Histoire d’une cinéphilie nocturne (Midnight blue: History of a nocturnal cinephilia).

An ex-lover, a devotee of French literature from around the world (which she would translate into Finnish), often gifted me teasingly inscribed books, including this one, from 2014. When I finally, sheepishly, read it, I wondered if I was as embarrassed as Pierre Berton might have been when he admitted, in 1985, to writing Masquerade: 15 Variations on a Theme of Sexual Fantasy, a story collection centring stiletto heels, ropes, whips, and other fetishes. Yes, my Baptist self is ashamed to confess to consuming untold hours of T&A fare on weekends when I worked and lived in Ottawa for several years beginning in 1987. Yet I can say that, as a child of the now long-forgotten but not surpassed sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I believe that consenting adults were freer then than they are now. Today Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s famous line “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” strikes our freshly prudish ears as licensing rampant wantonness, endangering minors (who are already — alas — at risk within the sanctuaries of the sanctimonious, where they are often prey for those most outspokenly pious and those most flush with cash). There is a new McCarthyism afoot that seeks to quash, through raw, brutal, ham-fisted censorship, anything deemed “upsetting” for one group or another. So even as my brown face blushes a tad in allowing the confession just given, I believe works like Bleu nuit represent an important impediment to the forces of repression and suppression that are now operative in society, demanding the banning of books, the cancellation of lectures, the non-screening of documentary films, and even the defamation of artists due to purported moral (not criminal) failings.

So what do the twenty-six writers and four illustrators assembled in Bleu nuit have to say? Principally, they recall the adolescent discovery of the adult experience of sexuality and how the televised glimpses of breasts, bottoms, and only occasionally genitals served to educate their imaginations about the perils and pleasures of coupling, of copulation, of mutual ecstasy — along with the double trouble of heartbreak and health hazards, of legal problems and moral quandaries. Falardeau points out that, between 1986 and 2007, TQS programmers canvassed “the great diversity of the erotic genre,” including classics and franchises (such as Emmanuelle), literary adaptations (such as Fanny Hill), sexploitation (such as Desideria), action films (such as L’exécutrice), comedies of manners (such as Weekend with Sarah), auteur cinema (such as Last Tango in Paris), and sketches and skits (such as La maison des plaisirs), as well as other “unclassifiable curiosities.” The variety on view ran the gamut from the salacious to the romantic, from sexual obsession to carnality. It provided titillation but also, in some cases, a pedagogy of the orgasm and its psychological dimensions and sociological ramifications.

All of the Bleu nuit contributors offer sage perspectives, including the film scholar Marie-Josée Lamontagne, who reminds us, “In a society that values work ethic and self-sacrifice, hedonism is thought to be criminal.” True, true, true. Although I also remember a Chinese proverb that I read somewhere, insisting, “Food and sex are human nature.” Hedonism may be the best retort to the repressions abounding today. I’m glad I saw those blue movies all those years ago, and I’m glad to have read this book of reflection on and analysis of the possibilities of pleasure. Yep: Make love, not war!