35. Best Kisses
Queue up Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" and let's get into it.
I love onscreen kisses. I collect them. I live through them. I have rarely achieved those same cinematic heights in my mencounters1 over the years. I find that in the world of kissing, the kiss rarely meets the expectation set by the mounting tension, the long glances, the lingering hugs. Our overactive imaginations.
*narrator from Law & Order: SVU voice* In the physical justice system, mealy, bodies-only-connected-by-mouth kisses are considered especially heinous. In New York City Jersey, the dedicated detective who investigates these vicious felonies is a member of an elite squad known as the Special Kisses Unit. This is her story.2
So yeah, often, coming home from some illegally-alcoholed party in Ridgewood (New Jersey, not New York, but then later yeah, New York) after some weak little smooch sesh, I often pulled up Ben and Leslie making out on Parks & Rec and thought “now that’s the real shit,” the way you might have been proffered a bag of oregano at a party and got your ass home and into the Maui Waui.
Here we go. This list is very white and very heternormative and I acknowledge that. I am so sorry for what you may learn about me this evening.
Let’s start with a kiss that is carcinogenic and also might eradicate your taste buds permanently. Gene Kelly, the original America’s Ass3, poured his formidable thighs into tight little pants and his heart into The Pirate which flopped at the box office (which, I can’t blame the audience for not being able to suspend disbelief that Joots Garland, a woman who was birthed Frances Ethel Gumm, should be in any way allowed to play a Caribbean woman named Manuela Alva) but also into one of the horniest moments in filmic history:
Also, to bestie Nick Messina - I remember the day you brought this DVD over to watch in my parents’ living room. Love you.
Here we have our first example of Hands On The Face. Hands On The Face is, IMHO4, the most critical ingredient of a great kiss. It is the garlic of good kissing and you’re thinking “Tara, you ignorant slut5, no one should ever put garlic and kissing in the same sentence!” and I’m Italian and you have just committed an act of violence against my people. You’d better go get some evil eye jewelry and ship it Prime because ooh, the maloik that is coming your way.
This re-creation of a kiss proved far hotter than the one in the movie somehow. Is it Rachel McAdams wearing the perfect Going Out Top that we all dreamed of wearing when we were 13 watching this live sprawled across the Limited Too bedspread in our childhood bedroom? Is it Ryan Gosling giving that little “come here” finger crook in a Darfur t-shirt? Is it both of them doing their little Rocky Balboa shuffles before meeting in the middle of that stage? Is it Lindsay Lohan taking a precious second away from her Big League Chew to go “Ohmigod” to her mom or whoever is next to her? It can be these. It may be these for you. The reality is is that it’s Hands on the Face coupled with the one that has eluded me for years because I have a body built by pasta and men are afraid of my abundance, The Lift. He plucks this woman up onto his hips like nothing, and then proceeds to just let her hang out there, she could have read a magazine up there, it’s fine, Rach, go ahead, as he walks over to the podium.
If one of you men or honestly Gina Gleason, bassist from Baroness, wants to try this please call me, I can be reached at 201-56……
First of all, this scene can still make me cry for how beautiful and real it is, realizing you’re falling in love with your best friend, someone who you don’t think about in a way you don’t think about the bricks that enclose your apartment. There’s something beautiful about a love you can take for granted - when that beauty is admired by not taking it for granted. Here you have Hands On The Face6, and you have Romantic Running. I’m a big bitch like Stan Rizzo. I absolutely think doing cardio is 1. only worth it to get some strange and 2. the ultimate sacrifice in the name of love.
Oh, to be fingerbanged by Sam Rockwell against a suburban brick wall in a bigass coat. A girl can dream!!
Hands On The Face? Check. Casting a prop aside like some kind of anti-Carrot Top? Important. Check. Grabbing you by your garment but also not tearing it unless you specifically ask for that? Check. Backing up into the nearest wall? CHECK. I’m teaching you boys how to kiss today, apparently. Always back us up against a wall. This is my feminism leaking out of my ears here but, controversially, about 50.25% of us like to be reminded that we are smaller than you. The rest of us want to back you up against the wall. Let it happen.
(Rest in peace, Lynn Shelton.)
I just love this show. And this couple. You have never met another person in all your life who has watched every episode of A Million Little Things except your Aunt Paula. And now me. Hands on the face!
Here we have a woman leading the Hands On The Face brigade to which I say: Lili Reinhart if u read this im free on friday night n would like to hang out pls respond to this n hang out w me on friday night when im free.
Jimmy Stewart, famous HUAC rat, could still get it. This tall, leggy bitch. Look at the material. I mean, it’s not even his only great kiss that puts a little fear in you! Yes, professor!
Drew Barrymore is currently getting the justice she deserved for mocking Amber Heard, but she put her whole booty into The Lift. Nice work, Drew. And speaking of work, girl, the strike.
The famous foot-popping kiss! Sigh. I would still crawl on broken glass for one date with Michael Moscovitz.
I was never going to be totally satisfied with this one wild, precious life I’ve been given because I grew up watching this movie over and over and over. Not only does Heath Ledger, the most beautiful man in the world at this point in his life, deliver one Hands On The Face masterpiece:
But TWO?!?!
I have, and I’m entirely, pitifully, horrifyingly serious, thought about this kiss DURING every first kiss I have ever had. I have compared every first kiss I have ever had to 3:00 of the above video. During. The. Kiss.
Mentioned above. Hands On The Face, Anti-Gallagher prop disposal, plus then you know, forbidden coworker tryst. Please. It is the alpha. It is Barkhad Abdi saying “I am the captain now.”
The chokehold Adam Scott has on me (in theory, sadly not in practice)….phew.
These two people just be snackin’ on each other’s faces:
And again!!
Kiss me like you are trying to suck my soul out of my sinuses!!! Yes!! Good!!
I actually opened Netflix to film this clip from GLOW for you. I would like to think I have more resolve in me than to be this feral for a Marc Maron performance but oftentimes I am just a frisky little leaf on the wind!
These two….for fuck’s sake. This is a strange video - the song playing is not what actually plays in the movie during this moment - but these two had better have made out at the wrap party. It’s too good.
If you are anything like me, I hope not for your sake but maybe you are, you know what I’m naming the greatest kiss in all of television. Note that this is NOT a Hands On The Face scenario, and yet those two little kisses Nick drops on Jess at the end are seared into my noggin and will be when I am gossiping in the grave next my grandmother at Holy Cross someday.
I don’t know what Jake Johnson is possessed by, but does it come in a vitagummy? The other Big Kiss on New Girl is also potent - love an elevator moment. I once shared an elevator with Morgan Spector, did not pull the emergency brake and destroy his marriage to Rebecca Hall, and it remains the most sexually and spiritually trying moment of my life. Love an elevator moment!!
I leave you with the greatest, Hands On The Faciest kiss in all of cinema, Eastern, Western, Antarctican (March of the Penguins), all of it. John Cazale, may you recline in paradise until global warming disintegrates that, too.
I have this moment screenprinted on a custom t-shirt. I once wrote an email to my abusive ex-boyfriend telling him that he thought I was the Apollonia to his Michael, when in fact he was the Fredo to my Michael. It’s in my DNA to take this entire scene so personally.
I’d love to know your favorites. Leave them in the comments!
Love you bitches,
TG
God, I sound so slutty when really, my body count is embarrassingly low for someone who lives as close to Brooklyn as I do. I’ve never walked down a Brooklyn street without seeing someone making out with either a hot guy in a Goorin Bros. hat or a girl with impossibly chic jeans. Why can’t I be the girl with impossibly chic jeans??
Girl, I’m unemployed, I don’t know why I’m saying half of this shit. An idle mind is a stupid bits playground.
In My Horny Opinion
In my head, this phrase is said in the cadence of Taylor Swift singing “Snow on the Beach".”
I love this, it was so fun! It included some of my faves and introduced me to new ones, and it made me glad that someone is openly admitting to being obsessed with this stuff rather than worrying about if they shouldn't be admitting that at this age. Remember that visceral feeling of not being able to wait for when these romances and kisses and, later, sex scenes would absolutely definitely be how it happened for us.. ! Real life, of course, has not worked out like the movies but I hope you don't mind me sharing a particular standard I held for a long time (enemies to lovers always hits)
https://youtu.be/ZgO1aSfQEJY?si=KWPPEOCNiQbzuPGS
Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, "Somewhere in Time" - It was just so beautiful and Lordt, Christopher, THAT man was beautiful.
Dan Gauthier and Robyn Lively, "Teen Witch" - It's all about the tongue kiss for me. And, also, that dude was H-A-W-T AS FUCK back then.
Christopher Atkins and Kristy McNichol, "The Pirate Movie" - This 80s movie is utter. cheese. ball. corn. But their kiss on the beach made my little middle-school panties squishy before I understood what caused the squishiness. And, also, I had a major crush on Christopher.
Val Kilmer and Elisabeth Shue, "The Saint" - Their chemistry was so on point. In one scene, he'd kissed her so roughly (devoured, really) I'm surprised she could still say her goddamn line! I love that man's lips.
Dylan O'Brien and Holland Roden, "Teen Wolf" - I watched this show off-and-on, but the one "on" episode I watched, she was trying to calm him down (I think) and she grabbed his chin--like grabbed it so hard she scrunched up his lips--and just LAID ONE ON HIM. And at the end, where their lips slide apart was just... Yow!
Anna-Maria Sieklucka & Michele Morrone. "365 DNI" (Netflix) - HOLY. MOTHER. OF. WET PANTIES. You seriously need to watch this movie (and the sequel). It might've been Shemar Moore's favorite word on Law & Order, but after watching this movie, I now want to hear the word "baby girl" drawled in a lazy, Italian accent. Unh!
Also, the final kissing between Paul and Alicia at the end of "Clueless." Loved that one, too.