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Why does porn have to be so dumb? | page 1, 2
Siffredi naked in action is arousing, period. And my down-there response to him in the witless Buttman and the brilliant "Romance" wasn't all that different. During the latter film, my brain didn't shut down just because my body opened up, and my lust wasn't banished just because art was in the house. I was turned on in that movie way by both the actors and their characters having sex. The audience's desire was just one of many reactions, artistic effects or tools Breillat used to explore her characters and the subject of sex. Why aren't there more layered, involving, intelligent and hot films like "Romance?" Does the lack of context in porn sex spring from the same mistrust of art that steers viewers to "Cops" and "America's Funniest Home Videos"? Or do art's contradictions and challenges interfere too much with jerking off?
Virginia Vitzthum Virginia Vitzthum's column appears every other Tuesday in the Urge edition of Health & Body + Archives
Perhaps it's character development that's distracting: Do men need the female to be a blank screen to project onto? Though this theory has its proponents, I'm not convinced that every porn masturbator wants depersonalization. Porn fans develop crushes on XXX actresses, Playboy includes bios of the Playmates, and men flock to watch and cyberchat with women in the Voyeur Dorm and similar Web sites. Men who should know better insist that the stripper they hired for the bachelor party "really liked me." I suspect the dumbness of porn springs from conscious compartmentalization born out of shame more than misogyny, though obviously the two are related. Just as the lurid tapes get their own room at the video store, so does sex get shoved into life's basement. It's "just sex" and doesn't deserve anything better than crummy production values and lame narrative scenes you're going to fast-forward through anyway. "Romance" proves the existence of sexual narratives beyond the objectification or "rape" of the actress by the director, but it also casts a very cold eye on the old in-out, as did "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Last Tango in Paris." Sex can only turn up in respectable movies, it seems, to be condemned as inferior to love and desperately sad. Sexual satisfaction or happiness has no place in a serious narrative. This leaves a huge empty middle ground between porn's simplistic release and the torment and frustration in the art-house sex movies. "Behind the Green Door" and "Eyes Wide Shut" for example, are the same story spun in different emotional directions. If sexual pleasure weren't stuck in the porn ghetto, Stanley Kubrick could have learned something from the Mitchell Brothers about sex on a stage that ripples out into the audience. Had he hinted at the liberating possibilities -- not just the creepiness -- of a masked orgy, that much-mocked scene would have been more nuanced and powerful. It's not surprising it took a French woman to make the best movie about sex in years. Despite our supposed obsession with the subject, we Americans don't get that sex is too rich and complex and embedded to keep it in the artistic junior high school of Buttman. We know gonzo porn is shallow and adolescent, but, hey, it's "true." So we just keep staring at the bouncing balls.
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