Monday, December 19, 2005

Film Notes: Inside Deep Throat


A documentary that follows the pattern established by The People Vs. Larry Flint of positing the pornographer as Patrick Henry: a revolutionary front line in the battle for free expression. Of course, The People Vs. Larry Flint had the inimitable Woody Harrelson, the Will Rogers of the marijuana set, in the title role, while this movie has the 1970s pornographers themselves, in their 50s and seeming like the members of the local rotary club. Something is naturally lost in the translation, but the tone is the same; plenty of pictures of giggling, voluptuous babes performing sex acts to electric guitar renditions of the national anthem, while the narrator, Dennis Hopper, asks us all to remember a bygone era when rebellion was still fun.

But, of course, there was something to rebel against back them. One can hardly imagine a film like Deep Throat raising a stir, or even an eyebrow today. It's as if Marlon Brando's famous cinematic response to the question 'What are you rebelling against?': namely 'Whaddya got?' was answered with a shrugged, 'Not much, actually'. The culture wars are over- capital won.

This is where the documentary goes a bit wrong; it's easy to take potshots at Charles Keating and the religious right- their humorlessness sets them up as the perfect straight men. It's similarly easy to poke fun at the 1970s Second Wave of feminism: women who were conivnced that their husbands wanted to rape them and strategically fought off these assaults by making themselves insufferable. But, the film also questions the commercialization of porn and tries to establish Gerard Damiano, the director of Deep Throat as somehow above all of this- the last of a breed of true artists. It's hard to buy this if you've actually seen Deep Throat- Damiano is less an auteur than a merdeur: the film is pure crap. And this isn't from a moral standpoint- it's just a terribly shot and stupidly written film- you can be offended by Deep Throat from an amoral standpoint if you have the slightest bit of belief in film as an artistic medium.

But, it's so much less, too, because it's not even remotely erotic. Considering that sex is the emotional core of most adults' lives, there's something tragic about how porn renders it so banal- capital seems to encourage obsessive thought, but not deep thought on any subject. Porn is the factory process applied to sex, and as such, it saps the spirit a little in each film.

And so, it seems less likely that Damiano was a true creative genius on the forefront of a sexual revolution and more likely that he was just a guy who said to himself: "Hey, I know a goil that can really give head- I could make a movie of that and get stinking rich!" The government's persecution of the film made it more successful than anyone could have imagined, but let's not try to convince ourselves that Damiano was anything but a former hairdresser who shouldn't have quit his day job. So, it's hugely entertaining to hear people like Camille Paglia, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal discuss the cultural dust up over Deep Throat (and Dick Cavett is quite funny: appropriately enough, he was also in Cocksucker Blues), but it would have been priceless to hear one person say: "Well, you know, Deep Throat is aptly titled: it really does suck!"

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