Poly-ish Movie Reviews - Episode 52: A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

A group of aging friends decide to say goodbye to their youth with ... an orgy?  Joreth finds out if a bunch of single people can navigate group sex with respect and maturity, and does group sex make it poly or not?

 

OK, I have had this movie in my queue forever and people keep telling me about it. So I finally sat down to watch it. I'm gonna say that it's not poly but ... it's not NOT poly either.

Here's the thing, a little personal background on me: When I was in high school and college, I had ... um, friends. I had *those kinds* of friends. I remember having a couple of conversations with some guys who were flirting with me, where I tried to explain how my friends worked. I had never heard the word "polyamory" before I was 21, and I was DEFINITELY not into any kind of "open relationship". I was raised strictly white Christian middle class (there are whole articles out there about how people who aspire to a higher class tend to be quite rigid about class rules, while those who are comfortably in that higher class tend to break the rules all the time, and my parents were both blue collar and Latina trying to move up the class ladder, which means we followed the rules *exactly*, or else!).

So, in my world, there was no such thing as non-monogamy, ethical or otherwise. You met your soul mate sometime in your teen years, you got married (after college, of course), got a nice white collar job, had 2.5 kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs. Exactly as my parents did (seriously, it was me, the brain, and my sister the jock, a dog, my dad proposed to my mom at her senior prom, the only thing missing was the literal white picket fence).

Anyway, that was How Things Were Done. Except ... they weren't. So I was trying to find traditional "boyfriends" for a monogamous relationship, but how do you do that when you don't really get jealous and you can't handle your boyfriend getting jealous at you still being friends with your exes and half your social circle is made up of guys you've messed around with between boyfriends?

So, in these conversations, I very distinctly remember being asked more than once, if I have sex with my friends and I'm friends with my fuckbuddies, and my friends are actual, intimate, emotionally connected relationships, then what's the difference between them and boyfriends? I know that I had answers to those questions, but I don't really remember them now. What I know now is that I was really straying into Relationship Anarchy territory without that term having been coined yet.

So, this movie reminds me a lot of my teen years, and the kinds of friends I used to have. I would not call what my friends and I did back then "polyamory" and I'm not calling this movie "polyamorous". But I turned out to be poly because this was the kind of friend group I liked to have. Or maybe because this was the kind of friend group I liked to have, I ended up discovering that I was naturally polyamorous.

I'm going to say that this is *not* going on the poly movie list because there aren't any really poly-specific values or lessons or situations happening here, but it's definitely an example of why taxonomy needs to be taken with a grain of salt. As I've said in several reviews: taxonomy can help us to identify when something definitely is this thing, and when something definitely is not this thing, but there are always those things in between this and that.

And this movie is in between.

"A thirty-something party animal decides to throw one last crazy beach party at his father's swanky Hamptons pad. The only obstacles are convincing his reluctant friends to join in the fun, a blossoming romance and a real estate agent trying to sell the house out from under him."

This description manages to be both accurate and totally vague at the same time. Eric is a guy whose dad owns a beach house and he and his friends spend their summers there every year since high school. Eric's parties are legendary, with themes and costumes and tons of food and massive amounts of liquor and people crashing on the lawn furniture because they're too drunk to drive home, and cops being called 3 times in the same night and the neighbor loaning them a cow, and of course there's the one guy who always gets naked. I spent most of my own 30s going to parties like these.

Then Eric's dad decides to sell the house. So Eric decides to have the mother of all parties as their final hurrah. But how to top everything he's already done? Eric decides to host, not a giant bash like usual, but a small, intimate orgy, just between his closest friends who have been with him since they were kids and who actually stay in the house together every summer.

This takes a little convincing, but eventually the whole group is in, which includes 3 single women, 3 single men, and one guy who has a girlfriend who is not one of the high school buddies but