Friends with Benefits, starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, is an amusing movie that examines how discourse on sex in changing in society. Dylan (Timberlake) and Jamie (Kunis) meet each other as Jamie is the headhunter who is trying to convince Dylan to take a new job opportunity. They quickly hit it off, but they have both met soon after breaking up with their own significant other. As the title suggests, these break-ups make them reluctant to get in a relationship soon after, so they decide to have sex as friends. They may an agreement that it is nothing more, and that they will stay friends afterwards. Soon Jamie wants to date again, so they stop hooking up but remain friends. However, her foray into the dating world goes poorly and as a friend Dylan invited her to his house. There, they hook up again but the relationship between them quickly gets rocky. Soon, in classic rom-com fashion, aided with advice of his sick father, Dylan reaches back out to Jamie and they get back together, this time romantically.
The reason this film was chosen for this week and what separates it from a typical rom-com is the insight into a new “discourse”, as Foucault would say, that is emerging about sex. This comes through perhaps most clearly the first time when Dylan and Jamie decide to have sex without the stress of a relationship, merely as friends. Their business-like approach to it is amusing, but that is because it breaks many of our norms about sex. They say it will just be like playing tennis, a fun physical activity with two people. They can be perfectly honest about how they want each other to act in bed, as Jamie tells Dylan when he is doing something wrong. They don’t worry about hurting each other’s feelings and in the end they both have a better time because of it. This point gets reinforced when Dylan tries to hook up with another girl who just acts extremely odd, growling at him and smelling his armpit.
Another person who helps emphasize this point is Tommy Bollinger (Woody Harrelson). Dylan’s openly gay co-worker, Tommy does not beat around the bush when asking if anyone is gay and informing Dylan where the best places to pick up men are. Again, his blunt and straightforward approach is funny because we are not used to that kind of open discussion and joking mannerisms about sexual orientation.
In the first two parts of his The History of Sexuality, Foucault examines how discourse on sex has changed over the years. Foucault argues that sex used to not be such a subject of intense analysis. But in an attempt to repress sexuality, the bourgeoisie have intensified the discussion of sex but directed that discourse in ways that they wished it to be directed. Now sex is a matter of public knowledge and thought. Sex can no longer be something we could approach with amusement and genuine passion, but now had to be analyzed and controlled. Thus boys and girls are closely monitored in schools, and sexual deviants are studied.
This is partially why the casual approach to sex in the movie breaks norms, getting translated into humor. Dylan and Jamie try to think of sex as just an object of pleasure, like playing tennis, and as Foucault would argue this was the view of sex in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They can talk freely about sexual preferences, without feeling that taboo on sex that Foucault identifies. When Dylan and Jamie are merely friends with benefits they have to constantly struggle against society’s view of them, as society does not believe that to really be the case or views them as immature, referencing that they were acting they would be in college.
Indeed the thesis of the film comes back around to the fact that Dylan and Jamie always should have been a relationship, since they get along so well. However, it does nothing to deny it’s earlier points of how their sexual openness was a benefit for them and strengthened their relationship. Part of what makes their relationship seems so emotionally stable is the fact that they are almost always bluntly honest with each other in situations where we do not always see such honesty. But obviously the film comes to the conclusion that such sex without a relationship does not really work, that emotional ties do come even to two people who try to prevent such ties from occurring. Dylan and Jamie cannot remain just friends with benefits, they do get in a relationship. Perhaps, however, they can still approach sex like two people in a relationship playing a game of tennis.
