In 20^th century and contemporary film and television, the experience of orgasm is almost invariably depicted by images of waterfalls and fireworks. The classic example is probably the scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) in which a romantic dialogue between the two main characters, played by Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, is cross-cut with images of multicoloured fireworks. Many recent productions present analogous images. In The Notebook (2004) by Nick Cassavetes, the two lovers fall into one another’s arms in a pouring rain; and massive waterfalls frame crucial romantic encounters in several popular movies, such as Roger Donaldson’s Cocktail (1988), Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). They allude to sexual climax, which thus appears as an explosive or overflowing event that falls upon us like natural upheavals and mechanical eruptions.

This echoes the literary and art historical portrayals of orgasm as ‘ecstasy’ or ‘ex-stasis’ in its various registers – aesthetic, religious-spiritual and existential. The images of overflow and explosion provide a naturalistic interpretation of the core idea of stepping outside oneself and transcending one’s limits that has fascinated Western culture since antiquity.