Pleasure Without Apology — Why Libidinal Cinema Demands Serious Attention

"It's Libidinal" is Hannah Einbinder and Jane Schoenbrun's film about adolescent desire at summer camp. The promotional interview treats its aesthetic approach as a simple matter of style: the filmmakers chose to make something affect-driven rather than plot-driven, sensory rather than narrative, and that choice gets filed under "interesting formal experiment." But the interview never actually defends why that choice deserves to sit in a year's-best conversation at all. It takes for granted that libidinal cinema—work organized around the body's response to stimuli rather than the mind's engagement with story—counts as serious cinema. It does not justify this assumption because, within experimental and art cinema, the question remains bitterly unresolved.

The unstated belief is that pleasure and attention are compatible. That a film can make you feel acutely and still demand the full focus you'd give to something formally austere or intellectually demanding. The interview presents this as axiomatic. But the critical establishment has spent decades arguing the opposite, or at least creating the conditions where libidinal work must apologize for itself.

This matters because it reveals something true about how we allocate attention in our own lives. We segregate experience into containers: work time versus leisure, serious thinking versus sensory pleasure, engagement versus relaxation. We assume that the hours that vanish easily—the ones where time becomes liquid—must be frivolous, while the hours that demand effort and feel heavy with purpose must be where real thought lives. But flow, genuine absorption, depends on matching challenge to skill and clear feedback. You can feel acutely and be fully present. Pleasure does not fracture attention. Passivity does.

The film's existence. The interview's discomfort naming why it belongs in the conversation, exposes that we have learned to distrust experiences that ask us to feel without also making us work cognitively. We have separated the sensory from the serious. The question becomes not whether a film about adolescent desire at camp deserves critical attention. Whether you allow yourself to spend time on anything that lights up your nervous system without the permission granted by intellectual difficulty. And whether that permission is something you should need at all.