Heavy Petting
Studio: Docurama
WorkNameSort: Heavy Petting
Sex in the 1950s, as we all know, did not happen. The anodyne nostalgia that’s defined the era has deemed it a neat and tidy time of suburban sterility; Heavy Petting takes that mythology and uses it as a (fairly obvious) backdrop to reveal that, yes, people were indeed fucking like rabbits. (After all, it was also the Cocktail Generation.) Interviews with era-children like Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, David Byrne and Sandra Bernhard are frank and funny, primarily due to the innate awkwardness that many of them still (unwittingly) feel discussing such subject matter. No matter how libertine you are, if you, like Sting, were born in the ’50s, you’ve likely got a few sexual hang-ups, and Heavy Petting does a fantastic and lighthearted job at exploring them. Accompanying the main documentary is a second DVD of those hyperbolic ‘public safetyâ?� films that have proven such ripe fodder for ironic Gen-X’ers. While titles like ‘As Boys Growâ?� are just begging for mockery, it’s deeply disturbing to attempt to process the harmful, guilt-ridden messages that were imparted upon an entire generation of children. It’s even more troubling to discover just how little such scare tactics have changed in the past half-century.
This article appears in Jun 13-19, 2007.