Changing the Signals of Passion

By LANCE MORROW

Humphrey Bogart was a brilliant smoker. He taught generations how to hold a cigarette, how to inhale, how to squint through the smoke. But as a kisser, Bogart was an awful example. His mouth addressed a woman's lips with the quivering nibble of a horse closing in on an apple. Better to study, say, the suave carnality of Gary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious.

Everyone learned how to kiss from the movies. It is difficult to imagine what people did before Edison for instruction in the subject. They blundered through, no doubt, across centuries of bruised lips and chipped teeth, and the clumsy lunges that end with noses banging, or the woman accidentally mummphing a mouthful of beard.

With the visual aid of moving pictures, however, the lovers of the Western world could dramatically improve their technique. For the first time, it was possible for the masses to study, close up, the romantic style of the great masters. It may not have always been wise to imitate the ideal, of course. Rudolph Valentino, for example, favored a hyperbolic style, arching the woman back into a circumflex and doing semaphor with his eyebrows. He had the technique of a gifted and tormented periodontist. Nor is it always advisable for amateurs to try to reproduce the unforgettable scenes, like the one in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr tumble in the Hawaiian surf in From Here to Eternity. Those who attempt that on Cape Cod arise with abrasions on their shoulders and plankton in their sinuses.

Still, movie kisses have been one of the educational advances of the 20th century. Even the best scholars had something to learn, although in these matters academics are generally among the last to know. Early in the century, the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics published an entry on customs of kissing around the world. The author, Anthropologist Alfred E. Crawley, expatiated on the nose rubbing of the Maoris and the Sandwich Islanders, on the billing of birds and the antennal play of insects. "The kiss seems to have been unknown in ancient Egypt," the learned writer noted. "In early Greece and Assyria, it was firmly established." Then, in a gemstone of Victorian scholarship, Crawley remarked, "In abnormal forms [of kissing], some use of the tongue occurs."

The first movie kiss was recorded in a brief 1896 production called The May Irwin-John C. Rice Kiss, or simply The Kiss. Irwin and Rice, looking overstuffed and upholstered, he sporting a grand mustache, fastened onto one another for long seconds as the reel flickered on. Their kiss suggested not so much the heat of passion as a mishap involving dry ice or Krazy Glue. Still, The Kiss passed for erotica. It created a sensation and called down the eloquent wrath of a Chicago publisher named Herbert S. Stone, who wrote, "The spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was hard to bear ... Such things call for police interference."

There was none, of course. Romantic kissing was permissible sex, an intimacy that could be accomplished while fully clothed, even when dressed in tuxedo or ballgown. Kissing is, among other things, a subtle and civilized medium of expression. It is a preliminary and surrogate for sex, an enticement that is also provisional. Kissing is a promise that preserves the right of refusal. A kiss is mute, and highly articulate. It involves a brief fusion of two heads, the head being the residence of mind and soul. The mouth is simultaneously the front office of language and of hunger. The kiss is a wordless articulation of desires whose object lies in the future, and somewhat to the south.

What made the screen kiss stimulating in the old days was that the consummation was left to occur in the viewer's imagination. Consider the effect if Rhett Butler had carried Scarlett up the stairs and then the camera had followed them into her bedroom to record the next half-hour. As it was, Vivien Leigh's next-morning smile remains one of the most graphically suggestive moments in the history of movies. Usually, directors were clumsier. In Picnic, Kim Novak and William Holden knelt beside the railroad tracks and kissed as a train thundered out of the tunnel. Elsewhere the censorship of the Hays office produced kisses that culminated in horses rearing, waves crashing, flames leaping. Or the camera would cut heavenward through sunlit trees.

In the Hays office days, even married couples had to keep one foot on the floor. After the sexual revolution it became possible for William Hurt, in 1981's Body Heat, to kiss his co-star with both hands up her dress. Open-mouthed kissing, the old "French kiss," in the past 15 years or so became common not only in movies but also in television dramas. Actors did not give the subject much thought until it came out last summer that Rock Hudson had given Linda Evans a passionate kiss on Dynasty when he knew he had AIDS. No one in Hollywood talked about anything else. The screen kiss suddenly became a frightening threat. In October the Screen Actors' Guild sent a letter to 7,000 producers and agents informing them that from now on they must notify actors in advance of any scenes that require openmouthed kissing.

The institution of the movie kiss will probably survive as long as the romantic kiss itself. But actors and actresses are chastened by the knowledge that their business of make-believe can get caught up in fatal realities. The mystery of romance loses something when it is overwhelmed by anxiety about what someone has been doing with himself for the past five years.

But what is the alternative to a movie kiss? In Sleeper, Woody Allen had his characters at a futuristic cocktail party pass around a shiny metal sphere that when fondled produced a narcissistic ecstasy. In Tom Jones, Tom and the ribald Mrs. Waters consume a memorable dinner that is the moral equivalent, or the immoral equivalent, of a passionate night in bed. Perhaps in screenplays of the future, kisses will be blown on the wind like pheromones. The signals of passion might be changed: an ear might be nibbled, for example, or the nape of a neck nuzzled. Actual kissing may have to be handled by the special-effects department: an artful illusion. Producers may lie around the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, smoking cigars, reading Jane Austen and Henry James, looking for a hot love scene. --By Lance Morrow