Unlike traditional hard-core features, in which the sexual encounters interrupt the story like a number in a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical, the carnal interludes in Shortbus are integrated into the narrative, much as the singing and dancing are in Oklahoma! This integration goes a long way to normalizing the sex, making it seem matter-of-fact, natural, and it also normalizes watching this kind of material in the kind of public space where you don't need a roll of quarters to keep the images flowing. Mitchell sustains this sense of everyday ease even when the characters start frequenting Shortbus, a sex club with the relaxed vibe and noise level of a nice restaurant, albeit one with condoms on the menu rather than small plates.
Part cabaret, part commune, the club functions as an adults-only playground, as well as a testing ground for Utopia; in other words, it's America without the plastic, the fear and the hate. Mitchell has said that the title Shortbus refers to the smaller yellow buses sometimes used to shuttle special-needs students to school. That doesn't mean that the kids aboard his bus shouldn't receive the same breaks as those riding on the bigger buses; if James and Jamie wanted to get hitched at City Hall after a night of swinging, Mitchell would probably be happy to act as a witness. But mainstreaming into a culture that insists on turning people and sex into commodities, among its other ills, may not necessarily make for a happy ending.
Mitchell finds his happy ending in raucous music and warm caresses, in an oceanic feeling in which everyone is free to be freakily you and me. His idealism is pleasingly touching and just maybe a bit naive. It's an idealism that feels out of place next to the hot-to-trot television housewives, panting pop divas, cringingly graphic memoirs and novels in which sex is an index of late capitalism at its most bleak. Certainly it's deeply, if promisingly, at odds with an American movie mainstream that has grown progressively more prudish about sex over the last three decades, while its representations of violence have grown more obscenely violent. Hollywood says let it bleed. Mitchell would rather we get off on life.
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