Movies

The art, history and meaning of the kiss

The 1988 Italian film “Cinema Paradiso” contains one of the most touching endings in the medium’s history. Early in the film, we see the sheer joy an Italian boy named Salvatore takes in the movies that play at his local cinema. While the audiences around him share his glee, they always boo the screen during one affecting moment in the films — the glitches that exist in the spots where the local priest ordered the kissing scenes removed.

So it’s a celebratory moment when, at the film’s end, the boy, now grown, receives a package that had been sent by the theater’s just-passed projectionist — all the kissing scenes that were cut out when he was a boy, spliced together into one heart-bursting ode to romance.

“The History of the Kiss” (Palgrave MacMillan) by Marcel Danesi serves as part anthropological study and part celebration of this mysterious, sensuous, thrilling activity that holds such power over us all.

Dark Age of the Smooch

Kissing as a romantic or sexual act was depicted in both the Bible and the Kama Sutra, while Cleopatra is cited as an early master of the art.

“History records that she enhanced her lip color with carmine (a vivid red color) and henna (a bright reddish brown),” writes Danesi, “suggesting that she might have used her lips to seduce both Caesar and Antony.”

But beyond that ancient era, Danesi notes that references to romantic kissing seem to disappear for more than a millennium, replaced by kissing as both greeting and indicator of status. He notes that there’s a lack of evidence to explain the reason for this disappearance, although “discouragement of women’s sexuality” is one potential reason.

“The act of blowing kisses originated in Mesopotamia as a means to gain favor with the gods,” he writes. “In Persia, a man of equal rank was greeted with a kiss on the lips and one of slightly lower rank with a kiss on the cheek.”

The status differences were harsher in ancient Rome, where “an individual’s social status dictated what part of the emperor’s body he or she was allowed to kiss, from the cheek down to the foot. The lower the part of the body kissed, the lower the rank of the kisser.”

The Protestant Reformation banned kissing from religious services, seeing it as “a disgusting carnal act,” but others in the Middle Ages were beginning to feel differently.

“At a certain point in time (around the late 11th and early 12th centuries), the lip kiss started surfacing in stories, legends and other forms of popular writing,” Danesi writes.

“To marry outside of family-approved unions was considered morally wrong. In early popular writings the lip kiss was portrayed as going against such moral restrictions and as an act of true love,” opening up a “new poetic tradition called courtly love.”

Between that and the emergence soon after of the theatrical form known as Commedia dell’Arte, “which satirized romantic love,” kissing-as-romance became a permanent aspect of culture, referred to by one modern anthropologist as the “soul-in-the-kiss conceit.”

This new desire for romance was best represented in “Romeo and Juliet,” a tale that “comes out of Medieval lore, representing a narrative plea for freedom of choice in matters of love.”

Such was the newfound importance of kissing to love that Italy passed a law declaring that “if the bride or the groom died before the kiss on the wedding day, every wedding gift had to be given back.”

Kissing as Rebellion

It’s here that Danesi, a professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto, makes his most intriguing claim.

He believes that the sensual power of the kiss is not biological, but has been promoted culturally since Medieval times as an “act of betrayal and carnality, as opposed to . . . an act of fidelity and spirituality.”

The kiss played a significant role in liberating women from being beholden to whichever lifemate their family picked for them, instead popularizing the notion of romantic choice.

“Kissing is not imprinted in our genes,” Danesi writes. Backing that up, it’s been estimated that about 10% of humans don’t kiss — it’s not part of their culture.

“Rather,” he says of the other 90%, “it is a product of cultural events that took courtship away from the control of the family, making it a matter of personal choice.”

From then until now, kissing not only became a prominent aspect of popular culture, but Danesi argues that pop culture itself came into existence once society embraced the connection between the lips and the heart. Art and literature were less the providence of the church thanks to the smooch.

“Because the kiss originated as a need to subvert the extant religious and patriarchal order in Medieval Europe,” he writes, “it acquired great appeal wherever it was introduced through narratives, poetry and visual art.”

Kissing became all the rage, with Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, after traveling through England in 1499, writing about kissing as an “unstoppable ‘fashion,’ ” and relaying how, “if you had once tasted how sweet and fragrant those kisses are, you would indeed wish to be a traveler . . . for your whole life.”

The growing popularity of kissing also gave birth to other familiar romantic gestures.

“Roses and chocolate,” for example, “are cultural offshoots of the kiss that derive metaphorically from its imagined sweet taste and smell.”

He also mentions that certain scholars believe the tradition of putting rings on your betrothed’s finger comes from the resemblance of a ring entering a finger to the act of intercourse.

Let’s Go to the Movies

The Middle Ages might have popularized the kiss, but Danesi believes that our modern passion for it has been largely fueled by the movies.

“What makes the kiss unforgettable on-screen is the passion, the circumstances, the buildup, the plot, the unpredictability, the awkwardness of the moment and often the anticipated eroticism,” the author writes, noting just how many film kisses have become iconic, such as those in “Gone with the Wind,” “From Here to Eternity,” and “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

Kissing was the sole subject of one of the first films ever created, Thomas Edison’s 47-second short film “The Kiss,” from 1896, which featured an impassioned lip lock between two veteran Broadway actors.

This film, which “essentially heralded the arrival of the modern world of mass-media and mass-entertainment culture,” according to Danesi, would be a cold, depressing fish by today’s standards.

“The kiss itself lasts 20 seconds (of the 47),” he writes. “The actors were of retirement age and continued talking during their smooch.”

Still, it was scandalous due to the mores of the day.

“It caused an uproar, as citizens called for police action wherever it showed, urging the authorities to charge even those attending with engagement in obscenity.”

Despite the protests, Edison, as sharp a marketer as he was an inventor, understood what he was really selling and advertised the movie with the tagline, “They get ready to kiss, begin the kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.”

Kisses could even cure typecasting. Before a smoldering kiss scene in 1921’s “The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse,” famed screen idol Rudolph Valentino, the Ryan Gosling of his day, had been generally cast as a villain. After, his kiss was a lethal weapon against the weak defenses of American women.

“With dark, intense eyes, Valentino was adored by millions of women, who apparently swooned and even fainted in the audience as he performed his kisses on-screen.”

The honor for the greatest number of kisses in one film goes to 1926’s “Don Juan,” a film that demonstrated “the growing obsession with the kiss among society at large already in the 1920s.”

The film’s star, John Barrymore, grandfather of Drew, kissed his two leading ladies 127 times and “also smooched other female characters 64 times, for a grand total of 191 kisses.”

The longest screen kiss ever goes to a more modern film, 2005’s “Kids in America” — a bit over six minutes long, it played over the film’s end credits — but only because censors of the 1940s refused Alfred Hitchcock that honor.

At the time, the “movie censorship board” deemed any kiss longer than three seconds to be off-limits. So in 1946’s “Notorious,” the director had Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman break what would have been a considerably longer kiss into segments, having “the two lovers pull back, nuzzle, speak against each other’s mouths, kiss again for three seconds and repeat the whole thing.”

The Enduring Buss

But whatever restrictions censors may have tried to place on it, there is no doubt that the kiss has been an unstoppable, essential force in modern cinema and, in turn, in popular culture.

“Of all the pipelines of the kiss conduit,” writes Danesi, “cinema is the one that has played the most crucial role in spreading its symbolism throughout society and the world.”

Whatever it is that drives us to suck face, there’s little doubt that kissing has become one of our favorite pastimes.

“It has been estimated,” Danesi writes, “that before marrying, the average American woman has kissed 79 men.” (He gives no indication of why he doesn’t share the stats there for men as well.)
Today, thanks in part to Hollywood and the arts, the kiss is perhaps our primary form of emotionally currency.

“We cannot imagine today any popular representation of romance without the kiss,” writes Danesi, “[its] having become so deeply ingrained in our view of lovemaking.”

5 of the best kisses on film

“Gone with the Wind,” 1939
“You need kissing, badly,” Clark Gable tells Vivien Leigh as he tries to convince her to forget that cold fish Ashley. But beware that comma — Leigh would later say kissing Gable wasn’t that exciting because he had bad breath.

“From Here to Eternity,” 1953
“No one ever kissed me the way you do,” Deborah Kerr says breathlessly to Burt Lancaster. And he nearly didn’t, either — the studio wanted to tone down or cut the scandalous scene, having Kerr wear more clothes or for the adulterous lovers to kiss standing up.

“Lady and the Tramp,” 1955
Another kiss that almost didn’t make the screen, as Walt Disney wanted to cut the song “Bella Notte” that mutt Tramp and purebred Lady are so distracted by that they end up sharing the same strand of spaghetti right to their lips.

“Spider-Man,” 2002
Just when you thought you’ve seen it all, this superhero film pulls out the upside-down, anonymous smooch. Kirsten Dunst rolls down Tobey Maguire’s mask just far enough for a sexy, inverted lip-lock.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” 2005
A kiss so good it broke up a marriage. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie finally break up all the sexual-tension masquerading and neck violently against the wall. Jennifer Aniston didn’t stand a chance.

Honorable mentions: Richard Gere sweeps Debra Winger off her feet in “Officer and a Gentleman,” Cary Elwes and Robin Wright getting into the mushy stuff in “The Princess Bride,” Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams ignore the rain in “The Notebook,” Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes passion in “Romeo and Juliet” and Al Pacino knew it was John Cazale in “Godfather Part II.”