Four critics discuss erotic thrillers, prosthetic penises, Euphoria, and the state of desire onscreen.

Is the cinematic sex scene on the decline? Paul Verhoeven thinks so. In an interview with Variety late last year, the eighty-three-year-old director of kinky classics like “Basic Instinct” (1992) diagnosed a “general shift towards Puritanism” in the movies, not to mention in the culture at large. (If this is the case, Verhoeven is surely not to blame; his latest film, “Benedetta,” set in a seventeenth-century Italian convent, features a copious amount of nun-on-nun love.) Others agree. John Cameron Mitchell, whose 2006 movie “Shortbus” revelled in depictions of unsimulated sex, recently decried “a certain sex panic in the air”; in Playboy, the writer Kate Hagen reports that the percentage of feature-length films depicting sex is at its lowest point since the nineteen-sixties.

Or maybe sex has simply migrated from the big screen to the small. Television shows like “Euphoria” have a way of making the world look like one big erogenous zone, though often power is as much of a concern as pleasure. Have reports of the death of the sex scene been greatly exaggerated? And, considering that just about any kind of erotic behavior can be viewed with a click, what do we still want from a sex scene, anyway? I asked three fellow-critics to help me puzzle it out.

—Alexandra Schwartz

Aye, aye.

They sound like D.A.R.E. the 80s anti-drug activist organization that got fired up again… over Euphoria.

Doreen St. Fox: When I hear this argument, that there are not enough sex scenes in modern cinema, what I’m really hearing are complaints—rightfully—about the decline of the so-called mid-budget adult drama. It seems like it’s almost a backdoor way of making the observation that most of cinema is now Marvel-adjacent, superheroes, etc. So I wonder if it’s not even necessarily about the absence of the sex scene but about the absence of the general environment in which the sex scene would be warranted.

She’s right but it’s more than that too.

It’s everyone forgetting Dave Chappelle is a comedian and Ashlee Marie Preston is a thug criminal.

It’s AARP and everyone not getting the joke.

It’s artist Cy Twombly, an artist who was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928 and moved to Italy in the 1950s, is in many ways very French.

But then forgetting he’s really an American and his art is all sex, depression, malaise, and societal collapse.

The Guardian: Twombly’s poetic classicism is mirrored in the Louvre by such masterpieces as Nicholas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae. And it is not just Twombly’s love of the classics that connects him with French high culture but his intellectualism and fascination with the nature of language. 20th-century French thinkers such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes analysed the structures of “signification”, and from his early works onwards Twombly too sought the very essence of human culture as he explored parallels between the marks painters make and the rudiments of written language. He is the Levi-Strauss of graffiti art, revealing profound and mysterious connections between the impulse to scrawl and the instinct to paint.

So it is fitting that France is staging the first Cy Twombly retrospective since his death. On the top floor of the Centre Pompidou, the helmeted Greek heroes have returned. Gore, love and revenge stain the walls. At the heart of this sensitive compilation of Twombly’s paintings, not to mention his sculptures and Polaroid photographs, are paintings that sink themselves into the frenzy and rage of Homer’s Iliad. This founding masterpiece of ancient Greek literature purportedly tells the story of the Trojan war but in reality concentrates on a single tragic episode when the massive sulk of the Greek warrior Achilles drives his companion Patroclus to put on Achilles’ armour and get himself killed. Achilles takes epic revenge, slaughtering the Trojan Hector.

Here they all are – not as portraits, but as marks. Twombly’s 1962 work The Vengeance of Achilles is a three metre tall drawing that resembles a huge Ku Klux Clan hood with its spiked top drenched in bloody red. Or is the shape an aggressive phallic image? If so it’s just one of many penises furiously doodled on Twombly’s canvases along with other male and female anatomical graffiti.

For Twombly, the story of Achilles and Patroclus is a sex tragedy. Homer takes it for granted these two warriors shared a bed – that’s just what Greek heroes did. Twombly makes their love a passion that blazes through eternity. In another 1962 work, Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, two gory flowers of pain are connected by a slender umbilical cord of blood. Achilles cannot let go of Paroclus: their bond is mightier than death. The ghostly rose that was Patroclus is tied forever to the pulsing heart that is Achilles.

It’s writing a think piece on Euphoria, a show that’s already done the thinking for you.

Anyone who can watch it without the creepy existential horror of addiction nearly squeezing the air of your lungs prolly thinks it’s a Spiderman spin-off upon seeing Zendaya.

No bitch she gets the joke.

Go home. Your old and drunk and no one wants you at the orgy.