Politics & Power Quote by Shelley Long

There is a sly impatience baked into Shelley Long's "Imagine" - a single-word eye roll aimed at an entertainment culture that treats marital desire as either impossible or boring. Long is poking at the story engine Hollywood relies on: sex is exciting only when it's illicit, precarious, or drenched in consequence. Take away the danger and you're left, supposedly, with nothing worth filming.

The setup matters: "two people - a famous American iconic couple". She's not talking about anonymous spouses; she's talking about symbols, the kind of public-facing marriage that gets packaged into myth. When she says they "actually like each other sexually, in marriage", the "actually" does a lot of work. It's a corrective to the cynical default assumption that long-term partnership equals erotic decline, that domesticity sterilizes desire. The subtext is partly feminist, too: women in particular are often written as either the virtuous wife or the thrilling transgression, rarely both.

Long's intent reads as both defense and critique. Defense of a romance that isn't built on cheating or catastrophe; critique of an audience trained to crave dysfunction as proof of passion. "Or so it seems" signals she's indicting perception as much as reality - we have been coached to find health uncinematic. "Imagine" lands like a dare: what if the truly radical plot twist is mutual attraction that survives commitment? In a medium addicted to the chase, stable intimacy becomes the most subversive thing on screen.