Romeo + Juliet was singlehandedly responsible for my sexual awakening and the sexual awakening of every single teenage girl in my school. Romeo + Juliet put hundreds of us through puberty; as my friend Hallie recalled when I asked her to verify the existence of this viral horn-plague, “We were like, ‘Ew boys!’ and then saw it and all instantly developed breasts.” As such, I remember it as the premier erotic media of my time.
This week, Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down premieres on Netflix. Seeing as the mere utterance of “Baz Luhrmann” immediately transports me back into my lust-addled 14-year-old brain, I thought I’d take this opportunity to revisit Romeo + Juliet as an adult woman — one who has not seen or even considered Tobey or this movie in approximately 1.5 decades — to see if it still holds up as the most rabidly sexy film on God’s Earth, or if we were all just temporarily driven insane by the toxic cocktail of suburban boredom and well-targeted marketing. Join me, won’t you?
