Terminator

What really makes for a good sex scene?

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As of last night, I’m about halfway through a 3-hour-long movie, titled Nymphomaniac, Volume 1. (There’s also a Volume 2, with more hours.)

I’m only halfway through it because I can only watch it in 25-minute increments. The movie is dark (literally, full of brown and black frames), heavy-handed, and worst of all, filled with gratuitous, very unsexy sex scenes.

I’m telling you this because, though you can’t tell it from Nymphomaniac, sex in movies can apparently be sexy.

Back in 1980, Francis Ford Coppola, best known as the director of the Godfather (volumes 1 and 2, each many hours long), was making a movie that was to feature a sex scene.

Coppola, who is a bit obsessive about making his movies good, tasked a UC Berkeley PhD student named Constance Penly with phoning up hundreds of famous and influential people to find out 1) which sex scenes were the best and 2) what those sex scenes had in common.

Would you like to know also?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

After hundreds of interviews and many hours of uncomfortable sex scene watching, Penley had her answer. The best sex scenes had two things in common:

1. The sex wasn’t supposed to happen, because of some big difference between the sexers

2. One or both of the characters were under threat of death

Penley gives the example of the sex scene in the original Terminator movie, between the characters of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. He is a rebel soldier from 45 years in the future, sent back in time. She is a woman of the present, being hunted by a cyborg assassin. Sarah and Kyle have sex, and apparently Penley thought it was hot.

(Incidentally, the Skynet future of the Terminator movies, which both Kyle Reese and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin are sent back from, was set in 2029.

That was distant back in 1984 when the Terminator came out, but it’s near to us now. And it looks like we’re right on track.

I saw a video just yesterday of an AI conference in China in which a woman was kickboxing with a humanoid robot that looked like it was trained on thousands of hours of UFC footage. For demonstration purposes, the robot was tuned to a setting of “Not Kill.”)

But back to those good sex scene criteria. What is it about these two criteria specifically?

I realized what makes a good sex scene is just like what makes a good promotional sales event — there’s a time-limited window and a real cost for not acting during it.

Is this a coincidence? Or am I reaching? I don’t think so. I think it goes back to the fundamental and age-old questions that all human minds are always asking:

Why? Why this? Why should I care? Why is it now or never?

And with that, I can finally wrap up my email and point you to the offer I have been working up to promoting. It’s a book, one I’ve written.

The reason I’m promoting it today is that it ties into the question of “why.” In fact, my book has the question of “why” running through it in different ways, from beginning to end. And not just that. It also shows you how to answer that question, implicitly and explicitly, to influence others without being heavy-handed and gratuitous about it.

Would you like to know how?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Marketing in a Terminator world or Abyss world

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A couple days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line, “Silver medal: Writing how you speak.” To which a reader named Andrew wrote in.

He said the email had landed in his promo folder, rather than his main inbox. “Maybe it’s the subject line?” Andrew wondered.

Maybe.

But I decided a while ago that I will not write with Google in mind.

You might think this is another one of those, “I’m an edgy marketer and I’m too cool to care about tactics” speeches. But I’m not that cool.

In fact, a few years ago I paid for a training by marketer Ian Stanley. It was all about how to get your emails into your prospect’s primary Gmail inbox.

I experienced first hand the endless and mindless work it takes. I decided very quickly I didn’t want to do it, especially for daily emails like this, and the ones I was writing for my biggest ecommerce clients.

In the time since, I’ve only gotten more fixed in my belief that I cannot win against Google and Apple, any more than I can win against the federal government or the WHO.

It’s like the Terminator movies, with the leftover humans trying to resist the monolithic and mechanical Skynet.

The human beings put all their grit and smarts to defeat the latest killing machine that Skynet sends back in time… and they succeed. For about five minutes. But then it starts all over again in the next round, except this time the robots are faster, smarter, and meaner.

So I don’t feel it makes sense to fight these monstrous entities or their steady flow of new terminators.

Instead, I feel the only way to win is to ignore them as much as possible. And create little communities of real live human beings.

For example, my email newsletter goes out to a small group of people all around the world. Some of these people like to read what I put out. These are the people who might seek out my content even when Google or Apple hides it. Ultimately, that’s who I write for, maybe including you.

The good news is, this is not a futile exercise. Plenty of people have proven you don’t need an audience of millions to succeed today. A few thousand or even a few hundred can be enough. Tiny communities of people… within a much larger indifferent or hostile world.

So maybe the question is which metaphor you prefer to live in.

Maybe you like the constant conflict of the Terminator movies. Maybe you like the idea of being a general in a war… of fighting for a cause… even if the chances of winning are slim.

But maybe you’re more like me. And maybe you prefer the metaphor of another James Cameron world.

​​Maybe you like to imagine yourself in The Abyss, with its floating and content jellyfish humanoids, living in a harmonious city, hidden deep down at the bottom of an indifferent or hostile ocean.

But enough philosophy. Here’s something more practical:

Last spring, I ran a free email course about writing bullets. It collected some of the best lessons I figured out by looking at the source material that A-list copywriters used to write their bullets… and then looking at the bullets themselves.

I eventually took this free email course, expanded it significantly, made it interactive, and turned it into my Copy Riddles training.

But if you like, you can now get that original free course. You’ll have to sign up for my email newsletter first by this Wednesday. If you do that, then watch out for the next email in my newsletter, and just click the link at the end of it.