| |||||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics  Health & BodyMedia Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Health & Body stories, go to the
Health & Body home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Health & Body Urge Urge: Naked World Urge: Naked World Complete archives for Health & Body - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Why does porn have to be so dumb?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Feb. 22, 2000 | The Fox network in particular has become snuff TV, an uninterpreted newsreel of citizens getting mauled by animals, busted by "Cops," crashing their cars, and most recently, marrying a multimillionaire. Art isn't imitating life now so much as entertainment is imitating pornography. Porn was already ahead of the reality curve: It knew the narrative wasn't the point, and it understood long before the Internet made it clear how much sexual voyeurism drives our infotainment consumption.
Virginia Vitzthum Virginia Vitzthum's column appears every other Tuesday in the Urge edition of Health & Body + Archives
Movie stars and crossover celebrities like Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. are or were famous because of their sexual desirability. So the endless details in non-porn magazines and chat shows about their homes, clothes, workout regimens and political views are pure sublimation. Hmmm, would people rather read about Pamela and Tommy Lee's new boat in People magazine or watch them have sex on it? Although porn led the retreat from narrative, the real world brought porn the rest of the way home. Until recently, most XXX movies still hung the loops of pounding and squirting on a flimsy story. But the explosion of "reality TV," the availability of small, versatile cameras, and the success of home movies like Pamela and Tommy Lee's spawned hours of meaningless hardcore imagery. "Gonzo" filmmaking is now the hottest trend in porn, according to Adult Video News (AVN), the Variety of the porn industry. AVN defines gonzo films as "Porno Vérité, in which the actors acknowledge the presence of the camera." Auteurs like Buttman, Seymore Butts, and Ed Powers of the "Dirty Debutantes" series just point a camera at pros, amateurs or both, creating an odd hybrid of "Star Search," and a "Wild Kingdom," episode on human rutting. Powers puts porn "virgins," girls who've never been filmed, in a chair and asks them, "How old were you when you first had sex?" After they reply "16" or "14," he follows up with, "Don't you think that was awfully young? How many men have you been with since?" Then he puts a camera on a tripod and humps them in his black socks and wire-rimmed glasses. Powers lecturing, then despoiling the young beauties makes "Dirty Debutantes" a repulsive sort of morality tale. Buttman, on the other hand, is absolutely narrative-free. In my back-of-the-video-store spree for this column, I selected "Buttman and Rocco's Brazilian Butt Fest," for the scenery potential. Alarmingly, distended anuses outnumbered palm trees. The titular obsession borders on the proctological. "Spread your cheeks wider," and "Oh my God, what an ass," are pretty much all Buttman says while the porn stars fuck and suck in his hotel room in Rio. When people refer to something sexual as "just not that interesting," I generally suspect they're distancing themselves from their discomfort. I hadn't seen much porn before, though, and I couldn't believe watching people have sex could actually be boring until I hit what felt like hour 17 of Buttman. Before I gave up and started reading a newspaper, I drifted in and out of horniness, lulled by the testicles slapping ceaselessly against the bottoms and the seagull cries of girls perpetually on the edge of orgasm. Buttman's movie lacks even the narrative of real sex. With eight or 10 people pounding away all the time, the camera catches so many ejaculations that they can't be considered climaxes in the story sense. As with the "Dirty Debutantes," the young, beautiful and willing girls in Brazil were opaque as characters. I kept looking, naively perhaps, for a motivation besides money. But without roles written for them, the girls answer questions monosyllabically, preferring to silently show off their athleticism and penetrability.
| ||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
Next page |