I went to see Fleshpot on 42nd St. (Milligan, 1973) the other night, a sexually explicit film about a prostitute in New York in the 70s. Turns out, there are no known surviving copies of the original hard-core version of this film. Instead, I viewed Girls on 42nd St., where explicit sex is crudely sliced out.
The sex scenes may have redeemed this movie. Without them, it is ‘interesting’ at best: trite plot (prostitute dreams of real love), shallow, undeveloped characters, mediocre acting, capricious and ludicrous ending (finally giving herself over to love, a cab hits and kills her new lover about one minute later in the film—and she denies knowing him, a very Christ-figure allusion, only he’s Jewish …)
This is a movie about sex. It is not a documentary on prostitution, or a love story, or a story of overcoming obstacles, or growth or transformation or friendship. It is about sex. Without the sex, it’s not much of a movie.
I was disappointed. Like some forbidden fruit, I was almost longing to see a movie with explicit sex scenes. Watching people fuck in front of the camera, in and of itself, is not novel. America produces an endless, readily available stream of pornography. This is great for the occasional you know… but divorced from the complexity of real human relationships, porn is banal, serving one purpose.
A part of me would rather not have explicit sex in movies. Our psyches are so saturated with images from the cinema that it might be said that we see much of our world and our lives refracted through the filmmaker’s lens. An area of life not portrayed and projected, where our only images are memory and imagination offers a reprieve from the constant barrage of mass culture. Entering a wilderness, we venture out and make our own films-of-the-mind with other living, breathing, flesh and blood people, unsullied by artistic direction.
But it’s too late for that. We are awash with pornography. The adolescent sexual awakening through the pages of tattered Playboys or the underwear section of the Sear’s catalogue is a historical curiosity. The internet is a department store of porn, choice galore: gay, straight, bi, group, S&M, kink, hardcore, softcore, fetish, twinks, sluts, hunks, housewives, sorority girls, cheerleaders… something for everyone.
The problem is it’s all about fantasy. I want to fuck or be fucked in mad abandon. I want to seduce an innocent. I want to be seduced and dominated. I want to humiliate a beautiful woman. I want to be tied up. I want to have the perfect, sweet, romantic encounter. I want to be smacked around. I want to have every orifice filled at the same time. I want to be a cum slut. I want to have a random encounter, the risking getting caught a surge of adrenaline punctuating my orgasm. I want to be watched. I want to watch. I want, I want, I want. Films are cast with idealized, hunks, dolls, twinks, daddy’s, sluts, virgins, all with perfect teeth, big cocks, big boobs, pretty pussies, all knowing their parts exactly. A supermarket of fantasy. Watersports? Aisle 12, on the left.
Human relationships are gratuitous in porn. In real flesh and blood encounters, our fantasies are often compromised. His cock is too small or too big. Cute, but has a bit of a gut. Looks perfect, but is too docile in the sack or he’s sweet, but a bit clumsy, perfunctory or too rough in bed. I love him, if only he shared my foot fetish. Why won’t he let me pee on him? Some people work with this complexity and hew out of reality something satisfying, unique, hot. Others continue forever in pursuit of an idealized fantasy. And sometimes people realize their fantasy, only to become bored. With porn, we project our fantasies onto it and it, in turn, projects back perfectly in an endless solipsistic loop. This rarely works, at least for long, with real people.
From the bric-a-brac of each other’s fantasies we negotiate the intersections of our nakedness creating a complex topography of emotions and relationships. Should this be left to the pornographers?
Consider how something as mundane as eating can be richly portrayed in film, reaching out, provoking emotional recognition. Think of the adolescent picking at his food, or an angry father or husband, jaw set, chewing mechanically in silence, or lovers sharing food or the awkwardness of pretending to like something distasteful or the maternal concern of a second helping on the unhappy child’s plate or the seductive tease of food slipped slowly, suggestively into the mouth or the violent rending of a dish. Meals express complexities of relationships, personalities and situations. How characters get through a meal tells a lot of story. We could film actors approaching the table, establish the mood and relationships, watch them sit down to eat and then—cut! —watch them pick their teeth or get up from the table. But much would be lost. Why can sex be so carelessly elided?
In America, the portrayal of explicit sex in a film— deemed prurient, tasteless and lacking artistic value—is essentially prohibited by social pressures. This doesn’t mean sex is a private matter here. It’s everywhere. Sex sells. It drives not only a multi-billion dollar porn industry, but it sells clothes, cars, clubs, vacations, alcohol, gym memberships, perfumes, shoes, talk shows, magazines, therapy, pharmaceuticals… you name it. A confessional nation, we talk about it endlessly. The one thing we won’t do, it seems, is portray it honestly as one of the ways in which, throughout our lives, we reach out to others and build real, sometimes glorious, sometimes difficult, sometimes horrible human relationships.
Maybe eventually someone will rise to the challenge.
