Sex scenes on TV come in a set number of shapes and sizes. There are those that play sex for laughs; ludicrous shots of naked bottoms bouncing around and women caterwauling. There are those that focus on romance to the point of fantasy; all slow motion and soft lighting and tasteful angles, with Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” playing over the top. Some try hard to shock, others focus on the potential for sex to be bleak. But there is a new comedy-drama that manages to depict sex in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen done quite so well before.
Dying for Sex, on Disney Plus, opens as Molly (Michelle Williams) receives a phone call during couples counselling with her husband, Steve (Jay Duplass), that tells her she has been diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer. She’s been fighting the illness for a while, but now things are terminal. Her response to this surprises her. It makes her want to have sex. As much as possible. Her sex life with her husband is dead in the water, in part because, over the course of her treatment, Molly’s body became associated for him with suffering, not with eroticism. She leaves him, moves in with her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), and embarks on a long-overdue journey to discover what it is that actually turns her on. Specifically, she has one core goal to achieve before she dies: to have her first ever orgasm with another person. One of the reasons she’s never achieved this, and one of the things she has to reckon with in the final months of her life, is that she was sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend when she was aged just seven.
Sounds like a tonal minefield, doesn’t it? Terminal cancer plus casual sex plus childhood abuse. Against all odds, Dying for Sex pulls it off. It’s a cancer story that acknowledges both that the person with cancer is still a person with normal human desires and that, while their illness might present challenges in getting what they want out of life, they still have agency to choose and pursue what they want. It manages to bring together two elements of human experience that are often kept strictly apart—sickness and sexuality—and in a way that feels natural and unforced. In one scene, a man with whom Molly is hooking up says he’d like her to pee on him. She realises afterwards that she doesn’t know whether or not the fact that she’s doing chemo means she shouldn’t be peeing on other people. It’s all new: the sex and the stage-four cancer, and she’s navigating them concurrently.
Through sleeping with various men, Molly discovers that she enjoys dominating her partners and also that her slobby neighbour (Rob Delaney), whom she’d previously hated, enjoys being dominated. The execution of the sex scenes themselves is remarkable. It’s not just that there is frankly insane chemistry between Williams and Delaney, although that helps. Even when the sex Molly is having is the kind of sex most people are not (kicking people in the genitals, for instance), it isn’t there to shock. The show doesn’t find kink too interesting, in a sort of “look how daring and out-there sex can be, all you vanilla-heads” way. It just happens to be what Molly feels like exploring.
There are false starts, awkward shifts in the bed, breaks...
In the final sex scene, in her hospital bed with her neighbour, Molly achieves her stated goal: to have an orgasm with another person before she dies. This scene in particular is a miracle for how… un-miraculous it is. There are false starts, awkward shifts in the bed, breaks, they fall asleep for a while, try again in the morning. Nothing so cheap as a musical crescendo and Molly’s ecstatic face in closeup here. It’s just two people enjoying being with each other and working out how to do things as they go.
There is something beautiful, too, in the way that the people who love her most accept what she wants and facilitate her getting it. Nikki’s estranged partner brings a bagful of vibrators to the hospital so Molly and her neighbour have the best chance of Molly getting her orgasm. Molly’s cancer counsellor fully endorses Molly’s need to explore her sexuality alongside supporting her with the emotional realities of an impending death. The show as a whole is an antidote to sexual desire as shame.
And the sexual exploration was never an end to finding her true soulmate after 10 years in a stale marriage, someone with whom to see out the rest of her life. She and her neighbour do end up falling for each other, but when he asks to stay with her in the hospice for the final days of her life, she says no. She doesn’t want to die with him. She’d like a life with him, she says, but that’s not possible, and so she wants to die with Nikki. I cried like a baby at the end. Watch it, I implore you. Just not at work.
