Man, it's a hot one
Where has all the sweat gone in movies?
In case you haven’t heard:
New York City is set to hit 100 degrees this week with a heat index of up to 110 degrees. And since NYC was re-classified as a humid subtropical climate in 2020, Marilyn cooing about a “tropical heatwave” in 1954 is now an accurate reality! We really are having a tropical heatwave in a city full of steel and concrete that just traps the heat and humidity, baking all of us residents and making the air feel like your grandpa’s favorite soup. And when it’s this hot, the sweat trails down my back and into my butt crack like Sam and Frodo crossing Middle Earth to Mordor to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.
A few nights ago, TCM aired one of its more regular channel staples from the 1970s, Sidney Lumet’s classic crime flick Dog Day Afternoon (1975), starring Al Pacino and John Cazale. It is also probably the single best depiction of how a hot and humid summer day in New York City feels. Pacino is absolutely *DRENCHED* in sweat, yelling at cops in Brooklyn outside the bank he’s taken hostage in a botched robbery attempt. While you cannot deny that 70s Pacino makes this somehow look incredibly sexy, he also looks absolutely gross, and there’s no attempt by the hair and makeup department to make him look anything less than that. I like imagining some twentysomething on-set PA holding a hose and being told to spray Pacino down between takes to make sure he always looks like he’s one sweat trickle away from collapsing on the streets of Bay Ridge from a heat stroke. If you live in New York City—where central air conditioning is a luxury reserved only for commercial and government buildings not apartments—you know this is accurate and it feels good to watch a movie affirm your sweaty, miserable experience running errands around the city, even if the “errand” is (*SPOILER ALERT*) holding up a bank for the money to pay for your trans girlfriend’s gender-affirming surgery.
Earlier this month, I re-watched Bob Fosse’s masterpiece, All That Jazz (1979), which is a semi-autobiographical, death-fantasy take on his own life starring Roy Scheider as a sweaty, very tanned1 version of him. Many scenes in the film feature dancers rehearsing in shitty-looking dance studios for a new musical Scheider’s character Joe Gideon is directing/choreographing. One number in particular, “Take Off With Us,” has the dancers literally stripping down to just their skivvies2—even a few of the women are topless—their bodies glistening with sweat as they perform some of Fosse’s most erotic choreography. You can almost feel how slick their bodies are from the effort and the heat in the room. Having personally entered dance studios for a class where the previous one has clearly been effortful and thus full of sweaty bodies, I love how Fosse captures that grit and grime and probable smell. Again, it feels authentic; the effort of movement is made into a pleasing if grody aesthetic.
Other dance movies from the late 20th century certainly are sweaty. In Flashdance, Jennifer Beals’ Alex does a warm-up so intense, the sweat flies off her hair, illuminated from backlighting that makes it look weirdly angelic. At the end of her “Maniac” workout, she’s huffing and puffing, sweat pouring down her face while she chugs a Diet Pepsi3. In Dirty Dancing, sweat is not only a signifier of class but of sex. When Jennifer Grey’s sheltered, wealthy Baby walks into the dance party held by the working class staff at the Catskills resort her family is visiting, her eyes go wide at the sweaty, gyrating bodies on the dance floor, including that of dance instructors Johnny (Patrick Swayze) and Penny (Cynthia Rhodes, who also shows up in Flashdance). It stands in stark contrast to the kind of polite, prudish dancing the resort guests do after their multiple-course dinners served by the people now practically simulating sex on the dance floor. As Baby learns to dance with Johnny, she becomes more embodied in her own body and sexuality; the sweat and thus the desire becomes visible and palpable.
Of course, when I think of the pinnacle of sweaty-but-make-it-hot-onscreen, Top Gun (1986) is probably the gold standard. The homoerotic, hyper sweaty, half-naked volleyball game between Tom Cruise, Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer, et al is just beautiful. Director Tony Scott shoots their glistening bodies with the kind of lurid gaze reserved for something as chiseled as the statue of David. You want to reach out and touch their hard abdominal muscles even though they’re slicked with moisture.
Tom Cruise is also very, very sweaty in the 90s legal thriller, The Firm. This is one of several movies where Tom Cruise’s character is having basically the worst day/week/time of his entire life4 and just trying to cope. Cruise’s character, Mitch, gets recruited by a prestigious law firm in Memphis who he soon realizes is helping launder money for the mob, putting his life in danger. Mitch races around the blisteringly hot South as well as the tropical Caribbean trying to gather enough evidence to protect himself and looks absolutely miserable throughout a solid portion of the movie the way I assume anyone who was a lawyer for the mob would do if they thought they might be killed by a guy who looks like Wilford Brimley.
All of this is to say: if you asked me to name a recent movie where everyone looked very visibly sweaty onscreen, I don’t think I could. Movies no longer reflect how actual humans look (not that they ever totally did, but for a brief period in the late 20th century, there was more of an attempt lol). Everyone has veneers and perfectly wavy hair and they never get dirty or sweaty or look less than perfect at all times, which I find not only annoying but wrong dramaturgically for pretty much everything except beauty pageants. Real life humans sweat in 100-degree weather when they go outside! Or dance! Or play volleyball with their friends & coworkers (who might also be their lovers?)! We used to have movies where the realities of the environment—including the temperature—were actually reflected in the appearances of the characters whether for realism (mainly in the 1950s-70s) or a kind of erotic fantasy (1980s)5 where bodily effort equated to sexual desire/appeal.
And not to keep bringing up sex (except that I do mean to keep bringing it up), but a big reason why there’s no more visible sweat—which is to say, bodily effort—in movies is because movies are also possibly the most sexless they’ve been in decades. In what I now consider one of the foundational movie critiques of our times, “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny,” writer RS Benedict dissects this preoccupation with perfectly sculpted bodies and appearance yet the utter lack of sexual desire radiating from the screen:
Today’s stars are action figures, not action heroes. Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others. To have fun is to become weak, to let your team down, and to give the enemy a chance to win…A generation or two ago, it was normal for adults to engage in sports not purely as self-improvement but as an act of leisure. People danced for fun; couples socialized over tennis; kids played stickball for lack of anything else to do. Solitary exercise at the gym also had a social, rather than moral, purpose. People worked out to look hot so they could attract other hot people and fuck them. Whatever the ethos behind it, the ultimate goal was pleasure. Not so today.
Our culture is more aware of our bodies than ever and yet we are more disconnected from them. We only acknowledge them as a collection of stats from our Fitbits or Apple Watches that need to be optimized within an inch of our lives. I constantly get ads now for whole-body deodorants, something I do not remember existing when I was a kid going through puberty totally embarrassed by the growing circles of armpit sweat on my Y2k fitted tees. And I’m constantly being told by these ads that my sweaty armpits, or worse yet, my sweaty nether regions shouldn’t be seen or smelled, but also I shouldn’t be embarrassed if that happens (even though you’re still shaming me for having sweat in the first place and thus embarrassing me) and if I buy this product, I’ll look and smell perfect even on a day when the heat index is 110 degrees. The prevailing message is that sweat is something we must accept happens but also it should be eliminated as soon as possible and invisible at all times so everyone thinks you’re completely superhuman like Wonder Woman or Gwyneth Paltrow6.
And that’s why I think it feels so oddly comforting to watch these sweaty bodies onscreen, to see characters whose physicality is more connected to their inner emotional lives and desires and the external environments around them. These are bodies that look like they actually experience discomfort and pleasure. These bodies feel tangible through the screen when I watch them, arresting all my senses with their heat and moisture. They enhance the texture of the environments in the movie in a real way and put me back in touch with my own body even when I would really like to forget just how goddamn hot it is outside the dark, air-conditioned movie theater I’ve escaped into for the afternoon. The sweat on these bodies lets me know that even beautiful, muscled creatures like Patrick Swayze or Tom Cruise or Kurt Russell are still human. Their spirits are willing but their flesh is weak too; at least in the sense that they’ve all poured a lot of visible sweat into their films.
Too many movies today feel more like pharmaceutical ads where everyone looks perfect and happy because all their problems—including finding consistent air conditioning during the blazing hot summer—either don’t exist or have been solved. If a character is supposed to be dirty, or god forbid, *SWEATY*, it no longer looks like they’ve done any effort to achieve it. The dirt and sweat look more like they’re just another step of a mindless “Get Ready With Me” routine video on social media; applied to the fully made-up glamourous face and body like you would a serum or lotion. Everyone is supposed to look pretty first and everything else that makes you interesting and human second. And that’s the thing: sweating is not pretty (no matter how hard the 1980s tried to make you believe that). Sweating is proof of a life lived, a body working, an emotion being felt. It’s not that I need everyone to look like 70s Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon—and most of us will never manage to look as good as 70s Al Pacino in anything—but it would be nice to see, if not feel, some real human effort onscreen again.
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According to Richard Dreyfuss, the reason Scheider was perpetually tan/went tanning is because he’d been very sickly as a child and spent a year in bed. He also reportedly got so tan on the set of Jaws 2, they had to do a lot of color-correction in post-production.
Something I am on the verge of doing in my own apartment because did I mention the heat index is almost 110?
Pepsi really did kind of win the Pepsi vs. Coke wars in the 80s and early 90s…at least culturally. Remember how Pepsi Free (lol remember Pepsi Free?) was what Marty orders in Back to the Future (1985) at the soda fountain? And Kieran Culkin’s Fuller downs Pepsi during the chaotic pizza scene in Home Alone (1990)?
See also: Eyes Wide Shut (1999), War of the Worlds (2005), Vanilla Sky (2001), and Minority Report (2002)
This is also in part because of the fitness craze of the 1980s. Reaganism ushered in Yuppies who had the money for gym memberships and sought to perfect their bodies to match their wealth. This is why action heroes like Schwarzenegger were mega-popular and set male body trends.
I do know that Gwyneth sweats since, per her instagram, she does have her own personal red light sauna on her Montecito property that she uses regularly, but her sweating is still mostly about optimizing her health.
as far as I'm concerned, those whole body deodorant commercials come straight from the devil itself