Spielberg hasn’t filmed many sex scenes. The one time he really did, it didn’t go well.

This article is part of Spielberg Week, Slate’s celebration of Steven Spielberg.

If you’ve seen Munich, you probably remember the scene, even if you wish you didn’t. Near the end of Steven Spielberg’s haunted opus about the murders of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Olympics by members of the Palestinian militant group Black September, and the subsequent Mossad revenge campaign against them, the retribution’s ringleader, Avner (Eric Bana), returns to his wife, Daphna (Ayelet Zurer), clearly frayed by the years of carnage. The couple lies in bed and begins to have sex. We’ve been here before—uncharacteristically for Spielberg, the movie also has an earlier sex scene between Avner and a quite-pregnant Daphna that leaves little to the imagination. But this time is different. Now the camera pushes in on Avner and then suddenly cuts to … the closing moments of the 1972 massacre, on an airfield during a botched West German rescue attempt. With the wailing John Williams score in full force, Avner’s intense thrusting is crosscut with the murders, reaching a literal climax as Avner finishes in slow motion, his sweat soaring through the air, just after we see the few remaining hostages executed by machine gun. The camera lingers on the dead athletes, and on Avner’s long post-coital stare. Daphna covers his eyes. End of sequence.

Imagine being in a movie theater and watching this scene. I don’t have to, because 20 years ago, at 19, I was, and I still remember an audience torn between abject horror and nervous laughter. What did we just watch? Munich was unsurprisingly controversial when it was released in 2005, earning pre-release condemnation for the alleged “sin of equivalence” before it gained solid critical support and five Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. If it was not considered an outright success at the time, it has since earned a strong and deserved reappraisal. (“The Best Movie About Israel and Gaza Now Came Out 18 Years Ago,” read a New York Times Opinion headline in late 2023.) These days, it’s often ranked among Spielberg’s best movies.

Yet even fans of the film have never been quite sure what to do with its most infamous scene. For years it has been called “stupefying” and “fundamentally misguided.” It has enjoyed regular placement on lists with titles like “The 25 Most Laughable Sex Scenes in Movie History” (“Why is he so sweaty? Why?”) and “The 11 Most Excruciatingly Bad Sex Scenes in Film.” For my part, as my long-ago audience struggled to keep a straight face, I remember finding the scene effectively unsettling, like the rest of the movie, if also a bit of a mystery. Where exactly did that come from?

Not long ago, I learned the scene was once baffling to someone else, too. It was so out of character for Spielberg that it was often thought to be the brainchild of Tony Kushner, the Angels in America playwright who shared writing credit on the movie with Eric Roth. “Just the sort of thing you’d expect from the imagination of screenwriter Tony Kushner,” one critic wrote at the time. Except, I recently learned, Kushner didn’t write the scene at all—and he wondered why it was there too.

“It’s profoundly upsetting and ugly, but I think there’s a transgressive quality to it that is exactly right.”

—
Tony Kushner

“To be honest, when I first saw it, I was a little weirded out by it,” he told me. “I didn’t quite know what it meant, and I don’t think I even liked it all that much, though I loved the movie a lot when I saw it. I was shocked by seeing it put together.”

He had written a sex scene, but “it was just a scene where they’re having sex,” he said. “It’s at some point when he comes to Brooklyn. I think there’s some indication that he’s sort of partly there and partly not, but he’s lost a certain amount of himself and his soul in the work that he’s been doing. And then Steven did the crosscutting in the editing room with Michael Kahn. So I think I saw the movie right after Thanksgiving of that year. It was right before it was released. And that was the first time I’d seen this cutting back and forth.”

Kushner told me Munich is called Munich because that’s how he titled the first section of a screenplay draft, as a placeholder for adding in the 1972 events, which were always intended to open the film and which he planned to write last. (Spielberg mistook it for a suggested title.) Instead, the film now opens with the first part of the attack, in the Olympic Village, and saves the airfield killings for last. He couldn’t remember if he ultimately split up the attack, which lasted about 20 hours, or if Spielberg did. But the movie’s most controversial scene had little to do with him.

Part of the reason this was so surprising is because Spielberg, a man of many fixations, is not known for sex on screen. There are a handful of sex scenes in his movies, like the brief ones in Schindler’s List or The Color Purple, but they tend to be fleeting character bits, and often only suggestive, as in Catch Me If You Can. He seemed loath to depict sex, even when he veered into R-rated territory. Yet this apparently came from him.

“He’s a fairly gentle guy, for all that he’s made a lot of movies that have terrible violence in them,” Kushner said. “I think also he’s fairly private in a lot of ways and feels nervous about using the camera for prurient reasons. So I think he sort of stayed away from showing sex on camera. He did it in Munich, and no one ever accused him of trying to titillate in that moment.”

Indeed. I rewatched Munich in full—which I regrettably recommend, because it remains one of Spielberg’s most relentless, formally distinctive, and life-ruining movies—and then the scene in question itself more times than any human should. On one level, I can’t fully deny it is ridiculous. There is a moment where you can almost see the person off-screen drenching Bana, such is the volume and viscosity of his sweat, with Avner nearing orgasm just as Spielberg cuts to a man igniting a grenade. (One hopes the visual logic here was more than “two explosions.”) But given that the movie is about Avner’s moral descent—and his increasing, deadening awareness of it—there’s some logic to violating his most sacred place this way. Throughout Munich, even as you witness escalating acts of brutal retaliation, you’re aware you’ve only seen the beginnings of the bloodshed in Munich, and the rest is surely to come. The scene, by design, makes it that much harder to bear.

Kushner himself had a turnaround. While working on The Fabelmans, the semi-autobiographical drama he co-wrote with Spielberg, he and the director decided to rewatch the unsparing Munich together after a disagreement over whether their current project was becoming too sentimental. “I think he got a little irritated with me and said, ‘When was the last time you watched it?’ I said, ‘Not since it came out.’ And so, 20 years. And he said, ‘I haven’t watched it in years either. Let’s go on the day off and watch it.’ So we did.”

This time, when they got to the dreaded scene, he saw something different.

“I found it tremendously moving and really disturbing,” he said. “I finally understood what Steven’s after there is the idea that what Avner’s done and the world outside that he’s been an agent in has completely pervaded every inch of him, including this profoundly intimate moment of having sex with his wife, that there’s no escaping it, that it’s at every moment and it will transform every moment.”

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He added, “I remember that when the movie came out, some people were offended by it, some people felt that it was vulgar, and in some ways, it is. Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, would say that there are certain moments that we’re not allowed to look at. We shouldn’t be able to see these things, some of these moments of horror. I think in a certain sense, you can say that what happened on that airfield in Germany is like that. And Steven not only shows us this, but he shows it to us conjoined with a sex act, and a violent sex act. And it’s profoundly upsetting and ugly, but I think there’s a transgressive quality to it that is exactly right.”

On the time when they made the movie, Kushner said, “I’d been in trouble already for being critical of Israel. Steven, not so much. And making this movie at this particular moment took real courage on his part, and I was then and I am now proud of him for that. I think he understands that if you’re going to make art that means anything, you can’t lie. You have to tell the truth.”

You may or may not see the truth in this particular scene, but two decades later, I think I finally do.

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