' ' Cinema Romantico: Getty Image PDA

Wednesday, September 08, 2021

Getty Image PDA

Embed from Getty Images

Over the weekend, social media went gaga in the wake of an image from the Venice Film Festival featuring Oscar Isaac fondling and kissing the arm of his “Scenes of a Marriage” co-star Jessica Chastain. If we tend to think of Getty Images in the same terms as, like, a USA Today chart or graph, this one was smoldering. Twitter could hardly handle it. Of course, as many social media theorists noted, this likely had as much to do with our at-present sanitized cinematic landscape, where even adult movies these days are aimed at kids, leaving us hungering for a little palpable lust, even if that lust is on the red carpet rather than in a film. (Disclaimer: Isaac and Chastain are both married to someone else. This is what they call acting.) After all, this was the same summer where, after the apparent sexlessness of “Jungle Cruise” (which I have yet to see), Twitter was asking in all faux-earnestness if The Rock even fucked. This is the prudish pop culture we have made for ourselves, though it was not always this way. That’s why even though I enjoyed the Isaac/Chastain Getty Image, I knew better than to think it unique. Indeed, Shirley Povich once cautioned his fellow sportswriters against deeming anything unique or the, quote-unquote, Best Ever because, more than likely, something just like it had already taken place. And once upon a time, in Hollywood, this sort of smolder was nothing new.

Embed from Getty Images 

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