Romance, Rough Sex or Rape?

I’ve been unreasonably obsessed with the Oscars — and reliably outraged by them — since 1977, when voters passed over “Network,” “Taxi Driver” and “All the President’s Men” to award the best picture prize to “Rocky.” I attributed that lunacy to anxiety: America was reeling from the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate, and “Rocky” represented a reprieve from all that. It was uncomplicated. It was optimistic. It was, as they say, “feel good.”

Watch it now, and tell me how you feel. It’s precisely as hokey as you recall, but there’s something you may not remember, something with a darker tinge through the lens of #MeToo.

I’m referring to the end of Rocky’s first date with Adrian. He invites her into his apartment. She tells him — not once, not twice, but three times — that she’d prefer to go home. He nonetheless wears her down, then mocks her continued protests once she’s inside.

“I don’t belong here,” she says. “I don’t feel comfortable.” He’s down to his undershirt (a wife beater, no less). She still has her winter coat and hat on. When she goes for the door, he backs her into a corner, removes her eyeglasses and declares: “I want to kiss you. You don’t have to kiss me back.”

Romantic, no? It’s framed that way: Bold stallion awakens dormant passions in timid mouse. But if you wonder where some men got the idea that “no” means “maybe” and that a squirming woman just needs a thuggish tug toward her inner vamp, well, one answer is “Rocky” and a long line of movies with similar suggestions and scenes.

This year’s Oscars are on Sunday night, and it’s guaranteed that nominees, presenters and others at the ceremony will mention sexual misconduct, the #TimesUp movement and the imperative of female empowerment and equality. It will be a just and, I think, heartfelt discussion in an industry upended by Harvey Weinstein’s predations and the avalanche of secrets that followed.

But Hollywood’s complicity in sexual abuse and harassment goes well beyond the casting couch and monsters like him. It’s a function of storytelling and archetypes across decades, of sequence upon sequence in which a woman held captive is really a woman unbound and a man is showing commendable will or ingenuity by bullying or tricking a woman into sex. On the big screen, consent has long been a fuzzy, negotiable concept.

The best example is the 1940 best picture winner, “Gone With the Wind.” In one of the movie’s most extensively deconstructed passages, Rhett Butler, drunk and fed up with Scarlett O’Hara’s condescension, threatens to crush her skull with his bare hands, violently grabs her and lugs her up a staircase toward the bedroom. Cut to the next morning and the twinkle in her eyes.

Acclaimed film critic Molly Haskell, who has paid special heed to movies’ portrayal of women, told me that while she wouldn’t put a sequence like that in a movie today, it rightly belonged in “Gone With the Wind” and made sense in terms of Scarlett’s character.

It also dovetailed with the era’s sensibilities. “Movies don’t invent behavior,” said film historian and Wesleyan University professor Jeanine Basinger, whose many books include “A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930 to 1960.” “They reflect behavior. But in reflecting behavior with good clothes and beautiful stars, they begin to define it as cool.”

“I always go back to Valentino,” she told me, referring to actor Rudolph Valentino and the movies “The Sheik” (1921) and “The Son of the Sheik” (1926). “He carries her off — it is actually a rape thing — but it’s couched so romantically. He’s so beautiful and exotic and he sweeps her up on the horse.” Basinger wasn’t endorsing this scenario. She was just describing its presentation.

In books, there’s a genre called “the bodice ripper,” and, she noted, “The woman doesn’t rip her own bodice.” That’s a man’s work. And that idea informs countless movies in which, she said, “The man is supposed to desire and pursue and the woman is supposed to resist and make demands.”

That theme persisted beyond “Rocky” and the 1970s. For your consideration: “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” 1980. On her wedding night, Loretta Lynn, just a teenager, cries “no, no, no, no” as her older husband wrestles her into submission. The next morning, when he tells her to get used to it and she says that she won’t, he slaps her. It’s not pretty, but it’s a necessary rite of passage — or so the movie seems to maintain.

“Revenge of the Nerds,” 1984. Fixated on sorority women typically beyond his reach, a college nerd costumes himself so that one of them mistakes him for her boyfriend and has sex with him. When he removes his mask, she’s not appalled at his subterfuge. She’s impressed by his prowess.

Each of those episodes has a particular context and justification. None are intended as instructive. But all, I think, would be changed if being filmed today. Time passes, consciousness expands and movies look different in retrospect.

Mark Harris, author of the book “Pictures at a Revolution,” which examines the five movies from 1967 that were Oscar nominees for best picture, told me that he has repeatedly shown and discussed one of those, “The Graduate,” on college campuses. Only recently, though, have some students raised questions about whether the main character, Benjamin, “is a stalker of sorts in the way he pursues Elaine,” Harris said.

They have a legitimate point — but it’s not the movie’s. “I think the least interesting thing one can say from the vantage point of the present about any piece of pop culture is that it was not as enlightened as we are today,” Harris said. “I mean, isn’t that a given?”

Thirty-one years after the original, a remake of “Overboard” is about to be released — with the gender roles reversed.

Hollywood’s present enlightenment is clear not just in its stars’ red-carpet pronouncements but in this year’s best picture nominees, including “Lady Bird” and “The Post,” and their gallery of independent, assertive female characters. In “The Shape of Water,” for example, the heroine isn’t victimized by the swamp creature, not unless you count his failure to pay rent on that bathtub or chip in for groceries. And she’s the one who brokers their trans-species coupling.

It’s weird. It’s soggy. But it’s progress.