You might not think about the sweatiest movies of all time as one of the classic pop culture debates, but it's literally discussed in the very first episode of Cheers. It's used to introduce the characters at the bar, to explain how the bar chatter works. But of course, that was 40 years ago (...I know), and there's been so much sweat since then that it seemed only fitting to revisit the topic.
The 1981 thriller Body Heat begins with William Hurt's sweaty back. Screenshot by NPR
When I set out to choose my own entry for this particular canon, I did not think only about the extraordinary volume of sweat in a movie. Had I focused on that, I might have gone for the almost comically soaked A Time to Kill, the John Grisham adaptation in which Matthew McConaughey gleams like a seal in the Mississippi heat. Or almost any boxing movie, for that matter, since sweat flying from a face when a punch lands is a standard element of a well-shot fight.
But instead of quantity, I tried to think about the purpose of sweat. After all, in any movie scene in which you are not specifically supposed to be sweaty, a fair amount of effort goes into making sure you are not sweaty. If you saw beads of perspiration on a random forehead in the middle of a random scene, your brain would likely pick it up as a gaffe, so accustomed are we all to the suppression of sweat on-screen, except as a signal.
As near as I can tell, in a literal sense, sweat is permitted on camera in the presence of any of four plot elements: sex, sports, squalor (like a prison or a miserable workplace) and sun (or other hot weather). Those are the literal translations of visible sweat the vast majority of the time.
But as we discuss in the episode, the actual meaning of sweat is usually something quite different. In my pick, Body Heat, the very first thing you see in the film is the sweaty back of Ned (William Hurt), who has just had a very ordinary liaison with a woman he isn't particularly interested in. She comments on the heat. In fact, throughout the early part of the movie, people make it clear that even for the Florida setting, it's really, really hot. Ned is miserable; you can feel it. But then he goes outside at one point, and all of a sudden, there's a breeze. Air moves. And this is when he meets Matty (Kathleen Turner), the femme fatale. This is temptation at its most heightened. Equating Matty with the breeze equates her with escape from his miserable, puny little life, even though she makes the comically on-the-nose disclosure that her normal body temperature is about 100 degrees. She runs hot. So the sweat and the heat contribute to this sense that everything is elevated and pressurized, and the eventual sex scenes are both sweaty and chilly, as when they bathe in ice water together while discussing the very normal topic of murdering her husband.
Stephen's pick, Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá Tambien, has a lot of sweaty sex, as Body Heat does, but as he explains, it's less about that sense of the world closing in and more about how it opens up with "a cloud of hormones." After all, it's a movie about two young men on a road trip with a woman they're both hot for. As Stephen says, on top of the cigarette smoke and the road grime and the fact that you can almost smell the movie through the screen, the sweat is part of the intense physicality of the movie and of the relationships among the three leads. And it lends immediacy and sensory specificity, too — as he says, "You are in that car with them, and it is 105 degrees."
But on the whole, on-screen sweat most often seems to communicate pressure of various kinds. In Do the Right Thing, which Aisha chose, she explains that sweat is part of the oppressive (in multiple ways) environment in the Brooklyn neighborhood where everything explodes over the course of a day. As Aisha said, the ambience in this film is integral to the plot: the heat only adds to the oppression that existed in the neighborhood otherwise, leading to bitter arguments, a killing by police, and an uprising that causes destruction.
Pressure, too, is at the heart of Glen's pick, Dog Day Afternoon. As he points out, the heat is in the title, and the story of an attempted bank robbery that spirals into a disastrous hostage situation is a story entirely about pressure. Perhaps nothing is more destined to end with something dramatic than a hostage situation, after all, and as Sonny (Al Pacino), his associate and the hostages all get hotter and sweatier and more miserable, the push toward that endpoint gets more urgent.
Our listeners over on Facebook provided a lot of other entries in the Canon of Sweat: Top Gun, Cool Hand Luke, The African Queen, and one of my favorite other pressure-cooker movies that's very much along the lines of something like Do the Right Thing or Dog Day Afternoon: 12 Angry Men. Perhaps one of us was right, or perhaps one of our listeners was right. But clearly, this is, and it shall remain, a hot topic. (I'm so sorry.)
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Aisha, Glen, Stephen and I talked about the sweatiest movie of all time — and we each brought a contender. Did we discuss the function of sweat in each of these films? Of course.
Rachel Martin and Kristen Meinzer returned to chat with me about the second half of the third season of Bridgerton.
Glen talked about Julio Torres' Fantasmas with Isabella Gomez Sarmiento and Ryan Mitchell.
And Aisha met up with Bob Mondello and Bedatri D. Choudhury to take on June Squibb in the action comedy Thelma.
And you should be aware! Glen is again recapping this season of House of the Dragon, so in order to keep up with all those dragons and houses, you'll want to keep a close eye on his work.
What's Making Us Happy
Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are:
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