Sex and the political thriller
Posted in Sex and the Political Thriller, The End of the Monsoon, Writing on March 1st, 2011 by admin – 1 Comment
The character of Zainab in an (imaginary) scene from The End of the Monsoon
How much is too much?
A few nights ago I watched ‘Chloe’, the latest Atom Egoyan film. It’s a thriller about a wife who suspects her husband of infidelity, and who hires a prostitute to test his fidelity. There’s a significant amount of sex in the film, most of it verbally described by the actress Amanda Seyfried. Her acting is so good, the verbal description is more disturbing than a straightforward image. Wanting to learn more about the film, I looked it up on Wikipedia. There I discovered that it belongs to a previously unknown (to me) sub-genre, the erotic thriller.
Why, in the 21st century, do we have a sub-genre for a thriller with sex as a strong plot and character device? My British publisher’s assistant editor, a young literary man recently down from Oxford or Cambridge, complained when reading the manuscript of my political thriller The End of the Monsoon that it contained too much sex. My first reaction was: read more »
