Threesomes Were The Best Mid-’90s Movie Trend

It’s a strange truth about the film industry that movie idea often come in pairs. Two volcano movies in 1997 (Volcano and Dante’s Peak); two killer meteor movies in 1998 (Deep Impact and Armageddon); two Steve Jobs movies in 2013-2015. Certain subject matter just floats to the top of the ether in Hollywood, and everybody suddenly wants to make a movie about them. Sometimes these shared subject matters are wildly random, but other times, they feel like an extension of the culture. And the culture of the 1990s was obsessed with sex. Not in the way that 2000s culture was obsessed with sex (a decade of pushing at the boundaries of what was acceptable to show and do on screen) nor in the way that 2010s culture is obsessed with sex (as a badge of authenticity, particularly in stories about marginalized people).

Sex in the ’90s (much like the lamentably forgotten MTV series that bore that name) was about self-education. We hadn’t been properly taught about the wilds of sexuality, so we were obsessed with learning about new structures and paradigms about what sex is and frankly we could discuss it. On an early episode of The Real World, the housemates debated a topic they’d seen on Oprah: does oral sex count as sex? This was a question! Condoms, open relationships, bisexuality, homosexuality, these were all things that had existed, but now we were starting to talk about them openly, and American pop culture was fascinated. This is why we went through such a boom of sex-thriller movies like Sliver and Body of Evidence. We were suddenly being open about all sorts of facets of sexuality (voyeurism! bondage!), and they were both fascinating and scary at once.

Somehow, the mid-’90s fascination with threesomes never went down the horror-thriller route. Which kind of makes sense. The popular concept of a three-way romantic relationship feels like the sexually-liberated extension of a classic Hollywood trope: the love triangle. And since love triangles  had been the purview of romantic comedies, then that’s where the threesome stories went, too. And so it was that in the span of a year — in fact almost exactly a year apart — we got the rom-coms Three of Hearts (1993) and Threesome (1994). For trendy takes on modern romance, they honestly could have turned out a whole lot worse.

Three of Hearts (released 25 years ago today) begins at the end of a lesbian romance between Kelly Lynch and Sherilyn Fenn, and in order to get her back, Lynch and her male-escort pal (William Baldwin) devise a plan for him to romance Fenn and break her heart, in order to send her back to Lynch. Like any good romantic-comedy, it hinges on a kind of duplicity that in the real world would be sociopathic, but here we are. Obviously, Baldwin falls for Fenn, who is still in love with Lynch. Despite the swirling sexualities in the film, there’s a reticence to actually go for the throuple idea that the marketing hinged upon. As curious as ’90s culture was about these kinds of things, we hadn’t really accepted fluidity yet. The rules had changed, but that just meant there were new rules to adhere to. Baldwin and Fenn take over as the film’s central romance, leaving Lynch on the sidelines. This is great news if you’re into back-lit sex scenes set to Sting songs (ugh, seriously), but not super great if you care about same-sex relationships in film. What a tease Three of Hearts turns out to be.

When it comes to mid-’90s three-way relationship movies starring a Baldwin, a Twin Peaks alum, and a gay character, Threesome is the way to go. It feels a good bit more self-conscious about its own transgressiveness — the Josh Charles character delivers an opening voiceover that essentially says, “Get ready to have your bourgeois minds blown!” — but it also is far less afraid to confront what its actually about. Gay Josh Charles ends up rooming with bro-ish Stephen Baldwin (I know!) and magnetic Lara Flynn Boyle. So many bygone eras in the same movie, from our national attempt to make the lesser Baldwins happen to the Lara Flynn Boyle moment in time to the berets-and-chokers fashion era to the last vestiges of being able to smoke in bars. Threesome is a time capsule to a place we might not want to revisit that often, but it’s amazing to think it was ever there in the first place. And when we do visit, there’s utterly adorable Josh Charles there to greet us.

Threesome is a better, more compelling film than Three of Hearts, but it’s a more frustrating one too. Charles, Boyle, and Baldwin do engage in the kind of messy, sexy, emotionally-entangled relationship that the title promises, and Charles and Boyle at least act it well enough that you get wrapped up in their feelings and everything they have at stake. There’s real friendship there, real intimacy, real attraction. Cast the Baldwin role with somebody better, and you’d probably have one of the great underrated ’90s rom-coms.

But the film chickens out when it counts. While it openly acknowledges the Charles character lusting after Baldwin and how that homoerotic energy is what makes the engine of this threesome run, it gets infuriatingly skittish when it comes to what it shows the audience. Even in the threeway sex scene, there’s no moment where Charles and Baldwin kiss, even though there’s a strategic hand-placement that is erotically momentous in its own way. But for as bold as director Andrew Fleming thinks he’s being by making a movie about a modern three-way relationship, he can’t show two guys making out, even for a moment, and that ultimately makes Threesome feel like the relic that it is.

To close out the ’90s threeway obsession, we got two movies that pivoted off of the idea in a few different ways:

• Two Girls and a Guy made a decent splash in 1997 with its faux-outrageous concept and with the promise that Robert Downey Jr. would get down with Natasha Gregson Wagner (Natalie Wood’s daughter!) and a Boogie Nights-era Heather Graham. The film is ultimately a wet noodle, and an unpleasant one at that. Almost hard to believe James Toback wrote and directed it.
• That same year, another film took an equally outrageous stab at a threeway and ended up succeeding through spectacular failure. Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith’s very ’90s attempt to process all this new information about sexuality. You’d think it would have aged horribly, and in a lot of ways it has. It’s ultimately a movie about a lesbian woman told through the bewildered eyes of a man, who is both fascinated and frightened at the same time. Ben Affleck falls in love with Joey Lauren Adams, who’s into girls, but then suddenly she’s into him, and he ends up like the dog that caught the car without any idea of what to do with this woman. To Smith’s credit, he knows he’s processing this story from a massively blinkered perspective. And when Affleck’s character proposes that the solution to his crippling insecurity (“How can I, a man, satisfy her, a bisexual with a far more interesting sexual history than mine!”) and his best friend’s toxic jealousy is for the three of them to have sex together, Smith knows that’s a disaster too. It’s in many ways the perfect endpoint to Threesome Chic in that ultimately these new sexual rules end up paling in comparison to people’s vast sexual complexities. Who knew Kevin Smith would be the one to figure that out?

So what can we possibly say we learned from our brief fascination with B-list actors engaging in sexual congress in triplicate (or at least entertaining the idea of such for a few minutes)? For one, the ’90s were an amazing time where we opened our minds up to perceive all sorts of ways we could be more sexually honest and open and free. For another, we realized we were mostly not ready for any of that yet. And for a third, people really did smoke indoors a lot. It was weird.

Where to stream Three of Hearts

Where to stream Threesome