In an episode of Call My Agent, the French TV series streaming on Netflix, Andréa, who is gay, winds up having angry, hot sex with a man she detests and who has bought the talent agency at which she is a partner. His acquisition is owing to her, and it’s something she quickly regrets and also has to accommodate in that without him the company would go under. Their paths have crossed at an award ceremony back in her home town, where they are both celebrated for making good and leaving the backwater. He is a slime from first sighting, with his manbun and teasing/angry manner, using a name she has changed, on and on. He wants to break her, in that this is his way in the world. In one scene he asks her to change into a dress he has bought her to seduce a client he wants to steal from another agency. She refuses to change in front of him, making clear what her limits are of compliance, but then they are both drunk and both making out with a beautiful model in a hotel room, when suddenly they go at it with each other, abandoning the woman who says, “Hey, over here” (in French) before moving off. We watch the two, former outcasts from school take each other’s faces in their hands and tear each other to pieces.
The scene made me happy because of the way it speaks about sex between humans, not just the experience but the phenomenon itself. Who has not slept with a person they loathed? Or found offensive in some way? Or felt an aversion to for reasons they couldn’t explain? It was always a shock—always, I promise you—when people slept with me, I discovered, with an undercurrent of anger or some other distaste. No one likes to learn this in the moment, but looking back at the general, incalculable weirdness of erotic expressions, it’s one of the great comic truths of our existence that desire is bigger than us and will ineluctably cause us now and then to think a donkey is a god and also to become a donkey when such a mood overtakes us.