Cormac McCarthy Ruined My Sex Life by Patrick Wensink
“watching fish scour for food off the glass walls of a tank”
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Congratulations! If you are a high school guidance counselor or health teacher, you can pretty much retire now. All the hours spent discussing the dangers of teen pregnancy, handing out condoms and worrying about your students’ future are over. Just show these impressionable young gents and ladies The Counselor.
Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay certainly made me abstinent.
The film is loaded with eroticism. It kicks off with an awkward scene where Penelope Cruz essentially awards Michael Fassbender the Nobel Prize for oral sex. But that is just the start of this odd endeavor. The tipping point comes about another hour into the show when Cameron Diaz’s carnal desires are quenched by a Ferrari. Specifically, the car’s windshield.
It was at this point where I found my phone and started shopping for a plastic bubble to live inside. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter McCarthy’s depiction of erotic automotive acrobatics made me never want to come into contact with another human being again for fear we might sleep together.
I couldn’t really figure out why, initially. It took a few days of uncomfortable mental replays to unravel how this scene gave me a lifetime’s supply of cooties. I mean, many people find Cameron Diaz attractive. Ferraris are pretty cool. Nine times out of ten, sex is fun. So, what was the problem? The issue, I realized, was McCarthy.
The Pulitzer-winning author of The Road is a master of two things: writing books about hardscrabble men during desperate moments and penning sentences so perfectly jarring they embed themselves in your gut. “Depicting sexy fun time” is not, however, something the 80-year-old literary titan need add to his resume.
This becomes abundantly clear midway through The Counselor when Fassbender and Javier Bardem are discussing their love lives. Bardem, normally a pretty handsome dude, has wildly spiked hair and dresses like it is 1988 and he manages boy bands. He reluctantly tells Fassbender about the wildest night he and his girlfriend (Cameron Diaz… with a massive tattoo of cheetah spots) ever spent.
“We pulled the Ferarri onto a golf course for some privacy,” Bardem says, because, you know, millionaires don’t need hotel rooms to get frisky. Diaz slips off her underwear and exits the neon yellow car. Sporting a look of vague passion or, perhaps, just craving a club sandwich, she crawls up the car’s hood and proceeds to lift the hem of her dress to her waist.
Now, right about here, my guidance counseling and health teaching friends, is probably where you get skeptical of my plan. Understandable. But take a deep breath and trust a guy who never wants to have sex again after watching this film.
Bardem, it should be noted, is still sitting in the passenger seat when Diaz positions herself over top of him on the windshield and performs an Olympic-quality split. For the next 30 seconds—or maybe an hour, it felt like at least an hour—Diaz, for lack of a better word, humps the windshield until she is satisfied. Bardem, still recounting the incident to Fassbender, begins to compare it to watching fish scour for food off the glass walls of a tank.
To which I tipped my hat as the unsexiest moment in Hollywood fed my libido to an incinerator.
I found myself embarrassed for Diaz, confused by the mechanics of the entire ordeal, and highly reluctant to ever purchase an Italian sports car. Worse, the idea of anything erotic outside the movie theater walls sounded as appealing as eating molded bread.
The most awkward part was not the onscreen “lovemaking,” but the offscreen work. McCarthy is a senior citizen and throughout Diaz’s gyrations, I pictured ol’ Cormac sitting behind his Olivetti typewriter, dreaming this up. A switch clicked in my loins, telling me that if this is what eighty years of sex does to a man’s brain, you can keep it. I quit. After The Counselor, I left my sex drive at the same charming retirement community where I sent my belief in Santa and Scottish lake monsters.
Mister McCarthy, I would like to thank you on behalf of the world’s sex ed teachers. And, probably, my wife.
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Patrick Wensink is the bestselling author of Broken Piano for President and three other books. His nonfiction appears in New York Times, Esquire, Salon, Oxford American and others. The New Yorker once wrote one whole sentence about him, after which he choked on whatever he was eating at the time. www.patrickwensink.com