One may argue that moral judgments against pornography are unwarranted. Yet one may still feel free to render aesthetic judgment. And it is hard to deny that this stuff is garbage. Our film, which presumably attempts to be more amusing and more literate than the rest, is nevertheless garbage at heart. The genre is basically a garbage genre. Pornography, after all, has the key purpose of sexual excitation. If it doesn’t turn you on, it is not doing what it is supposed to do.
This is not to say that this purpose is bad. But it is to say that it severely limits pornography’s artistic potential.
Thus the pornography industry gives rise to a situation in which a great many people spend their lives creating garbage for a considerably greater number of people to spend part of their lives watching. It is hard not to conclude that both groups are wasting their time.
(One must keep a sense of proportion. The same charge could be leveled against Daytime Television, for example, whereas few people have advocated banning Let’s Make A Deal. That something constitutes a social blight does not mean it ought to be prohibited by law. It need only be deplored.)
The other reservation I have about pornography, and one which has had more personal impact of late, has to do with its effects upon its creators. And here I have to distinguish between writers of pornographic novels (or film scripts, for that matter) and active performers. One could argue that those who create from a distance have their souls deadened by their work, but I’m afraid I don’t believe it. I know too many successful writers who got their start grinding out sex books, too many successful photographers who started on cheesecake and porn, to buy this line of reasoning. If a man starts writing pornography and goes on forever writing pornography, I would be more likely to believe that he had a dead soul to begin with.
I’m thinking more of the actors and actresses who make movies like this one. They remind me more than anything else of the girls who work in massage parlors, and, like those girls, represent the darker side of the New Morality.
Because they are sexual psychopaths, in the sense that Robert Lindner foresaw the coming age as the Age of the Psychopath. They do not feel anything. They engage publicly in intimacy. They perform sexual acts for distinctly nonsexual purposes.
It is commonplace to regard them as exploited by the owners of massage parlors, by the makers of films. Exploited in the way that more orthodox prostitutes are exploited by their pimps. If this were so it would be a grievous fault, to be sure, but I think their exploitation is a far more serious matter. They are exploited by themselves.
Perhaps none of this matters. It is always a mistake to look at a trend and assume it will continue in its present direction. Human affairs do run in cycles. Hegel’s view of synthesis and antithesis still holds, although his premise that all this is in aid of something is harder to accept.
One considers again the Scandinavian example. The ultimate effect of the availability of pornography appears to be a speedy saturation; the audience eventually tires of watching people fuck.
So I still do not believe that the situation calls for censorship.
It merely calls for despair.
It is now late at night, some hours after I concluded the observations above. I just read them over and find them an accurate enough exposition of my feelings, however pompously expressed. The diary is indeed a fascinating art form, and could well be a more useful vehicle for analysis than the game Freudians play.
I did wind up seeing The Devil In Miss Jones, and wonder now whether my feelings about it are as they might have been had I not prefaced seeing the movie with the foregoing reflections on pornography. It is an exceedingly well made movie. You may well have seen it by now, but I’ll summarize the plot anyway. A woman kills herself and winds up at the gate of Hell. She protests that she has led a blameless life, has never committed a sin, and that it is utterly unfair for her to be sentenced to Hell in light of her past record. The gatekeeper replies that it is indeed a shame, but that suicide is the ultimate mortal sin and there is no reprieve possible. He agrees, though, that she should at least have the opportunity to experience the pleasures of the flesh before being shuttered off to spend Eternity in the Netherworld.
With that premise established, she goes through the usual gamut. She learns to enjoy the application of a penis to her three obvious orifices. She participates in a lesbian sequence and in two threesomes, one with another woman and a man, one with two men and herself. In the former she and the other girl mutually fellate their male partner and exchange his semen in a scene disconcertingly reminiscent of what we filmed yesterday with Rasputin and Anna and Karenina; in the latter there is a lovely sandwich sequence in which she is penetrated simultaneously in anus and vagina. There is also an almost endless sequence in which she masturbates in a bathtub with a stream of water.
The film ends with her in Hell, sharing a cell with a lunatic. All she wants is for him to fuck her because she can’t get off by herself (although she was doing pretty well in the bathtub) and all he wants is for her to shut up, because if you’re very quiet, you can occasionally hear a fly buzzing around.
The film’s excellences are several. It is very well photographed, first of all. More important, it has a female lead who can really act convincingly. She talks during the sex scenes, really talks, and by God you believe that she’s into what she’s doing. She is by no means the most strikingly attractive woman ever to show her ass to the camera, and she’s a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing, but she is a convincing actress and the first one I’ve ever seen in a porn flick.
In spite of all this, and in spite of the fact that the script throughout is at worst written in English and at its best moderately intelligent, there is something very wrong with the film.
It ain’t erotic.
To be sure, this is at least in part a subjective judgment. A wholly objective judgment on a film’s erotic effect is beyond my province. Eroticism is, if not in the eye of the beholder, certainly in another organ. The mere fact that I did not respond erotically to the escapades of Miss Jones does not preclude the possibility of such a response on the part of other viewers of the film, especially in view of the fact that porno films rarely move me much anymore, and that hardly any film could have created much of a stirring in my loins given the mood I was in all day.
It’s my guess, though, that hardly anyone is going to find this film erotic, excepting of course those yoyos who get a reflexive hard-on every time somebody flashes a tit at them. And it’s almost as though the film’s intent is anti-erotic.
Consider the opening. Miss Jones gets into a bathtub and cuts her wrists. She takes a long time doing this, and the blood wells up so convincingly I was willing to believe she really did cut them. I figured they shot this scene after they shot the rest of the film, and the actress obligingly gave her all for the film by bleeding to death. It was that realistic.
And, unless you’re a necrophiliac, that doesn’t turn you on; all it turns is your stomach. Not only does it not turn you on but it turns you off to the point where it is very hard for you to get in a sexy mood in any of the sequences that follow.
The rest of the film was also anti-erotic, although I am not entirely certain why. Maybe because the film never communicated a feeling of fun. Pleasure, perhaps, but not fun. Maybe it was too artsy craftsy. Maybe it was too pretentious. I’m not exactly certain why, but I know one good defense for this film would be that it does not appeal to the prurient interest. And that, as I see it, is its chief flaw. Because a porn movie that does not appeal to the prurient interest must be adjudged a failure. That, after all, is what pornography is for; without it, its d’être has no raison.