Dark’s and Black’s movies are vile. They are meant to be. And the truth is that in-your-face vileness is part of the schizoid direction porn’s been moving in all decade. For just as adult entertainment has become more “mainstream” — meaning more widely available, more acceptable, more lucrative, more chic: Boogie Nights — it has become also more “extreme,” and not just on the Bizarro margins. In nearly all hetero porn now there is a new emphasis on anal sex, painful penetrations, degrading tableaux, and the (at least) psychological abuse of women. In certain respects, this extremism may simply be porn’s tracing Hollywood entertainment’s own arc: It’s hardly news that TV and legit film have also gotten more violent and explicit and raw in the last decade. So maybe. And yet there’s something else.
The psychodynamics of porn seem always to have involved a certain real degree of shame, self-loathing, perception of “sin,” etc. This has held both on the performing end — “I’m a nasty girl,” “I’m a little fuckhole” — and on the consumption end — recall, or get someone to tell you about, the embarrassment of being seen at the ticket window of an adult theater, or the haunted faces of trenchcoated men in Times Square, Boston’s Combat Zone, SF’s Tenderloin. We note, though, that the faces of today’s fans at the Adult CES seem different, the affect more complex. An observer gets the odd sense that the average fan here feels slightly ashamed of being slightly ashamed of his enthusiasm for porn, since the performers and directors now appear to have abandoned shame in favor of the steely-eyed exultation that always attends success in the great US market. Wherever else it is, porn is no longer in the shadows and slums. As Max’s scarlet-clad crewman put it, “In a way, it’s kind of a drag. Now everybody’s watching it. We used to be rebels. Now we’re fucking businessmen.” †
The thing to recognize is that the adult industry’s new respectability creates a paradox. The more acceptable in modern culture it becomes, the farther porn will have to go in order to preserve the sense of unacceptability that’s so essential to its appeal. As should be evident, the industry’s already gone pretty far; and with reenacted child abuse and barely disguised gang rapes now selling briskly, it is not hard to see where porn is eventually going to have to go in order to retain its edge of disrepute. Whether or not it ever actually gets there, it’s clear that the real horizon late-’90s porn is heading toward is the Snuff Film. It’s also clear — w/ all moral and cultural issues totally aside — that this is an extremely dangerous direction for the adult-film industry to have to keep moving in. It seems only a matter of time before another conservative pol sees in mainstream porn an outrage sufficient to hang his public ambitions on. The AVA, after all, is not the only powerful lobby with an interest in social norms. At this point, anyway, porn’s own internal contradictions (e.g., constantly offending mainstream values —> the billions of $ that attend mainstream popularity) look to be the industry’s most dangerous enemy. (back to text)
24 (Here yr. corresps.’ suspicion that the AVNA statuettes are bought in bulk, possibly hot, feels somehow confirmed.) (back to text)
25…and of the ubiquitous smolder that’s so much a part of ’90s commercial culture. Mr. H. Hecuba, for instance, during one of the marathon screenings of Award-nominated videos referenced above in FN 3, pointed out that the relation between a Calvin Klein ad and a hard-core adult film is essentially the same as the relation between a funny joke and an explanation of what’s funny about that joke. (back to text)
26 Hecuba and Filth, being both familiar with Max and financially independent of him, elect to remain in the suite under the beady and seemingly lidless eye of the Production Asst. (who, by the way, is not wearing a fire-colored MAXWORLD jumpsuit but has evidently been promised one if he completes his probationary employment period in good standing). (back to text)
27 = fellatio? = very energetic French kissing? (back to text)
28 (so to speak) (back to text)
29 Yes, this is it: What’s so unbelievable is not the extent or relentlessness of porn people’s egotism (Jasmin St. Claire’s way of greeting a journalist is to offer him a personally autographed photo; Tom Byron, who is 36 and has precisely one attribute, affects the air of a Mafia don at the Sands’ bar’s nightly porn parties, extending his hand knuckles-up as if for obeisance, etc. etc.). It’s the obtuseness of it. Take, for just one other instance, the 29-year-old Mr. Scotty Schwartz, with whom through the good offices of Harold Hecuba your correspondents had a working supper that ended up being a whole Russian novel in itself. Young Mr. Schwartz, maybe 5'0" in low gravity and platform shoes, is a former Hollywood child star whose performances in Richard Pryor’s The Toy and Darren McGavin’s A Christmas Story were the zenith of a career the abrupt decline of which led — through a flux of circumstances too tortuous to even take notes on — to an acquaintance with the ubiquitous Ron Jeremy and an entrée to the insular social nexus of adult video. Either desperate or deranged or both, Scotty Schwartz evidently decided that the “controversy” of his appearance in a hard-core film would jump-start his legit career (kind of like a rehab or arrest, is Scotty’s analogy; he repeatedly gnashes his teeth over the fact that his old rival Corey Feldman’s career survived a rehab). And the adult industry, only too happy to cash in on the novelty of Scotty’s mainstream celebrity (recall 1994’s John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut, after all), starred Schwartz in Wicked Pictures’ 1996 Scotty’s X-Rated Adventure, a production beset by near-crippling anxiety and epic waits for wood, all of which psychic travails Scotty recounts in a detail that inspires pure empathic horror in yr. male corresps. (FYI, Mr. Bobbitt’s porn debut, too, was marred by serious wood issues — impotence apparently being the Achilles’ heel of nearly all nonprofessional woodmen [the term performance anxiety must take on a whole new hideous resonance in the magnesium glare of a working porn shoot] — but Bobbitt finally submitted to a penile injection of prostaglandin [known in the industry as “instant wood”], whereas Schwartz bravely/cravenly chose to limp through S.’s X-R.A. without medical assistance.)…
The thrust of the whole long story being that Schwartz, though (understandably) no longer a hard-core performer, has abandoned mainstream ambitions for the adult vortex and is now a budding Gonzo-genre director, and is even this week guiding something called Scotty’s Behind the Anal Door at the C.E.S. (which presumably Max Hardcore doesn’t know about) through a hectic series of Tush ’n’ Bush shoots.
Anyway, the point is that yr. corresps. were on Thursday night lured to this supper meeting by Hecuba’s reports that S. Schwartz had become sort of the unofficial mascot of the adult industry, and knew absolutely everybody, and was a near-manic chatterbox: We figured that he’d be a good source of background and context and gossip. H.H. had already prepared us for Schwartz’s personal manner (which is ticcy and breathless and neurally irritating in the same way a musical note held much too long is neurally irritating), but what Hecuba neglected to mention was that Scotty Schwartz is also totally incapable of talking about anything other than himself. Two courses and half an hour are spent on Scotty’s mainstream résumé and the fucking-over he got from fate’s fickle finger (alliteration and anatomically mixed metaphor Schwartz’s) and the comparative injustice of the arcs of his and C. Feldman’s careers, then another 20 minutes on Schwartz’s budding and allegedly platonic relationship with a born-again Christian girl he met on the Internet (during which whole initial 50 minutes one of yr. corresps. kept having to put his napkin in his mouth). Nor did Schwartz seem able or disposed to tell any story of which he himself was not the hero. Here — as close to verbatim as stupefaction permitted — is Scotty’s tale of his introduction to Mr. Russ Hampshire, head of VCA Inc. and what Scotty terms “a very very big fish: like this if you know what I’m saying to you here” in the adult industry: