Kasdan: Sex Tape (2014)

Sex tape scandal now feels like a thing of the past, the relic of a dial-up era in which the sex lives of celebrities were yet to proliferate and dissipate into reality television. Released a decade after the great wave of sex tapes in the early 00s, Sex Tape revolves around a couple, played by Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, who decide to make a sex tape of their own, only to accidentally upload it to their iPad cloud. That might sound like quite an explicit premise, but one of the running jokes of the film is how normal and commonplace sex tapes have become, or at least how normal and commonplace it’s become to find a camera in your bedroom, a violation that seemed quite titillating and transcendent when the first sex tapes came out, not unlike the strange thrill of the earliest webcams, but is completely banal in a wireless era in which it’s probably rarer to find a room in your house that doesn’t have easy access to a camera. In fact, the sex tape, and the way the couple make it, is so commonplace that it almost feels as if we’re watching yet another romantic comedy based on a relationship bestseller, or perhaps a relationship blog. All of which is to say that it’s a film about suburbia rather than the sublimely indiscernible and miscellaneous backdrops of the great sex tapes, not least because the tape becomes so interchangeable with the couple’s iPad cloud that the whole film comes to feel like an evocation of the cloud as it ripples across everyday suburban America, precipitating most of the drama once the sex tape’s done and dusted. In fact, it often feels as if the cloud is precipitating suburbia itself, since the couple’s iPad community is poised somewhere between their neighborhood and their network in a way that conjures up an older kind of suburban awareness that’s been decimated by the very digital propinquity that strangely brings it into being again here. Trying to recover all their synced iPads over a single night brings them into contact with everyone they’re synced with, a collection of users that includes their family and friends, but also their postman, giving the whole film a comforting, sleuthing kind of a vibe, a tour of all the places in a suburban house where an iPad might be hidden, or a cloud might be concealed. And in doing so it strangely recovers the titillating kernel of sex tapes – your access to a concealed camera – while enjoyably puncturing it at the same time, in a comedy about sex tapes that doesn’t parody so much as fondly and elegiacally offer some of the same experiences as that genre in its heyday.