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"What is repellent about pornography, we are always told, is that it depicts sex unconnected from love. And what is repellent about celebrity is that it often represents fame unconnected to achievement."
-- Richard Cohen for The Washington Post
For those who are not in 'the know,' there was a big to-do about the definitive porn classic, Deep Throat, revolving around a new documentary on the making of that movie. The only reason this isn't posted privately for Monk's own amusement is that great quote - regardless of what we might always be told about pornography. There is a role for fantasy, and some of us could use it more than others.
___ ___ ___
NEW YORK -- Following the screening here last week of "Inside Deep Throat," the documentary about the making of the 1972 porn classic, some people were asked to stand, and the audience applauded them. One of them was Harry Reems, the male lead of the movie, who became a pitiful alcoholic, destitute and homeless, but who later embraced Christianity and now sells real estate in Utah. The audience applauded and so did I until it occurred to me that I had no idea what I was applauding. Was it his performance in the film or his conversion to Christianity or his success in real estate or his triumph over alcoholism, or merely that he was present and that we, like some studio audience, had been cued to clap like trained seals? Someone, please, throw us a fish.
"Deep Throat" was no ordinary porn movie. Among other things, it was made for $25,000 and grossed something like $600 million, which is not the sort of return you're going to get from your average mutual fund. It was the "Gone With the Wind" of porn, promoted heavily by a repressive federal government, which turned it into a bonanza -- the dumbest thing Richard Nixon ever did, with the possible exception of the secret bombing of Cambodia, and Watergate.
The documentary concentrates a good deal on the making of "Deep Throat" and how the Mafia eventually took over its distribution. It also briefly tells the sad tale of its female star, Linda Lovelace, who lived a miserable apres-movie life. Later, she claimed that she was bullied into doing the movie, physically threatened and brainwashed by her husband-manager, Chuck Traynor, and that every sex scene in the movie was essentially a rape. For a time, Lovelace was Exhibit A in the feminist anti-porn crusade. She died in 2002 of injuries sustained in a car accident.
Before her death, though, Lovelace returned to porn -- soft-core, it appears -- essentially repudiating her repudiation of "Deep Throat." But she was sick with cancer and flat broke and I bet that for some cash she would have eaten glass. Her recantation of her recantation means nothing. Lovelace was just like some broken-down club fighter, trying to get one more bout for milk money or rent or even a pint of vodka. It's always sad.
But Harry Reems would seem to defy the odds. His story does not end sadly but with a smile and the vivid Utah mountains in the background and the strong suggestion that the past has been buried. I wonder. After all, there he was, in the audience and at the party afterward, having been paid "handsomely," he said in an e-mail, to come to New York for the promotion of a film that once made him famous and, for a brief time, was doing so again. Maybe, he earlier told Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, he could act again.
What is repellent about pornography, we are always told, is that it depicts sex unconnected from love. And what is repellent about celebrity is that it often represents fame unconnected to achievement. People want to be famous. They do not necessarily have to be famous for something -- although that is always to be preferred -- but no matter what, they want to be famous. Fame provides meaning, supposedly, to meaningless lives. Fame is rocket fuel -- VROOM! and you're up and over the mundane -- and because this is America it will make you rich and therefore happy, or so it is almost universally believed.
I know "Deep Throat" was porn, and I know "Inside Deep Throat" is about the cultural importance of that film, but to me it's just another sad story about the lure of fame -- more boxers on the way to Palookaville, more basketball players used and discarded before they can make a buck, more actors ending their career by botching the beginning, thinking all fame is the same.
Lovelace thought she had struck it rich and so did Reems, who got $250 for the movie. They were incredibly famous, more famous maybe than the next "American Idol" or the worm-eater on some reality show or the cop who gets up at 2 in the morning in the West to briefly appear on the "Today" show in the East. Reems and Lovelace thought that Big Things would follow -- they say so in the film -- -- but what followed was ignominy and poverty, a celebrity so hollow it nearly consumed them both.
In the e-mail, Reems said his New York appearance was "probably the last time I will be in the public eye. I have no illusions of grandeur."
If so, I can applaud that.
-- Richard Cohen, "Fame and Fortune in the Flesh"
___ ___ ___
"The Talk of New York" for World of Wonder Publications:
The New York Screening of Inside Deep Throat at the Paris Theatre was a hoot. The boisterous audience included a clutch of entertainers like Bebe Neuwirth, Claire Danes, Fred Schneider, Scot Whitman John Epperson aka Lypsinka, Jason Bateman, Ron Silver joined at the hips to doppelganger Alan Dershowitz, and Gwyneth Paltrow. There were reams of scribes: Erica Jong, Tina Brown, the Page Six posse, Cintra Wilson, Emma Forest. And a gaggle of documentarians: Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans), Shari Berman (American Splendor), Todd Graff (Camp), and Barbara Kopple (My Generation).
This time, the hapless lot of directing a post-screening panel fell to Elvis Mitchell, former movie critic at the NY Times. The panel was made up of HarperCollins publisher Judith Regan, journallist Peter Boyer, criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz (who defended Harry Reems in the famous obscenity trial), and feminist professor Catherine McKinnon.
Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. "What's so funny?" she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff's hand shot up - "I can do it," he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going "me too!" (Gigi Grazer - wife of Brian - later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.
Judith Regan chimed in preposterously, maintaining that her Jenna Jameson autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, really was "a cautionary tale" rather than just an afterthought of a subtitle. She argued that all sex workers are victims of sexual abuse. Frontliner Peter Boyer went on on about rape porn and tried to raise a quorum on fisting.
Which left the task of defending Deep Throat and the porn world by extension to Alan Dershowitz, who pointed out that to say porn promoted rape was akin to saying that rap promoted. . . But then Elvis Mitchell leapt to his feet, as if about to throw a Springer-like punch, and put us all out of our misery by ending the panel abruptly.
Adjourning to the after party at 81/2, Michael Musto said, "Congratulations, you've managed to incite the exact same debate that happened 30 years ago. People said exactly the same things they said decades ago. That really takes some doing."
And after that, everyone wound up at the after-after party at The Cock. Except Catherine McKinnon.
.
"What is repellent about pornography, we are always told, is that it depicts sex unconnected from love. And what is repellent about celebrity is that it often represents fame unconnected to achievement."
-- Richard Cohen for The Washington Post
For those who are not in 'the know,' there was a big to-do about the definitive porn classic, Deep Throat, revolving around a new documentary on the making of that movie. The only reason this isn't posted privately for Monk's own amusement is that great quote - regardless of what we might always be told about pornography. There is a role for fantasy, and some of us could use it more than others.
___ ___ ___
NEW YORK -- Following the screening here last week of "Inside Deep Throat," the documentary about the making of the 1972 porn classic, some people were asked to stand, and the audience applauded them. One of them was Harry Reems, the male lead of the movie, who became a pitiful alcoholic, destitute and homeless, but who later embraced Christianity and now sells real estate in Utah. The audience applauded and so did I until it occurred to me that I had no idea what I was applauding. Was it his performance in the film or his conversion to Christianity or his success in real estate or his triumph over alcoholism, or merely that he was present and that we, like some studio audience, had been cued to clap like trained seals? Someone, please, throw us a fish.
"Deep Throat" was no ordinary porn movie. Among other things, it was made for $25,000 and grossed something like $600 million, which is not the sort of return you're going to get from your average mutual fund. It was the "Gone With the Wind" of porn, promoted heavily by a repressive federal government, which turned it into a bonanza -- the dumbest thing Richard Nixon ever did, with the possible exception of the secret bombing of Cambodia, and Watergate.
The documentary concentrates a good deal on the making of "Deep Throat" and how the Mafia eventually took over its distribution. It also briefly tells the sad tale of its female star, Linda Lovelace, who lived a miserable apres-movie life. Later, she claimed that she was bullied into doing the movie, physically threatened and brainwashed by her husband-manager, Chuck Traynor, and that every sex scene in the movie was essentially a rape. For a time, Lovelace was Exhibit A in the feminist anti-porn crusade. She died in 2002 of injuries sustained in a car accident.
Before her death, though, Lovelace returned to porn -- soft-core, it appears -- essentially repudiating her repudiation of "Deep Throat." But she was sick with cancer and flat broke and I bet that for some cash she would have eaten glass. Her recantation of her recantation means nothing. Lovelace was just like some broken-down club fighter, trying to get one more bout for milk money or rent or even a pint of vodka. It's always sad.
But Harry Reems would seem to defy the odds. His story does not end sadly but with a smile and the vivid Utah mountains in the background and the strong suggestion that the past has been buried. I wonder. After all, there he was, in the audience and at the party afterward, having been paid "handsomely," he said in an e-mail, to come to New York for the promotion of a film that once made him famous and, for a brief time, was doing so again. Maybe, he earlier told Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, he could act again.
What is repellent about pornography, we are always told, is that it depicts sex unconnected from love. And what is repellent about celebrity is that it often represents fame unconnected to achievement. People want to be famous. They do not necessarily have to be famous for something -- although that is always to be preferred -- but no matter what, they want to be famous. Fame provides meaning, supposedly, to meaningless lives. Fame is rocket fuel -- VROOM! and you're up and over the mundane -- and because this is America it will make you rich and therefore happy, or so it is almost universally believed.
I know "Deep Throat" was porn, and I know "Inside Deep Throat" is about the cultural importance of that film, but to me it's just another sad story about the lure of fame -- more boxers on the way to Palookaville, more basketball players used and discarded before they can make a buck, more actors ending their career by botching the beginning, thinking all fame is the same.
Lovelace thought she had struck it rich and so did Reems, who got $250 for the movie. They were incredibly famous, more famous maybe than the next "American Idol" or the worm-eater on some reality show or the cop who gets up at 2 in the morning in the West to briefly appear on the "Today" show in the East. Reems and Lovelace thought that Big Things would follow -- they say so in the film -- -- but what followed was ignominy and poverty, a celebrity so hollow it nearly consumed them both.
In the e-mail, Reems said his New York appearance was "probably the last time I will be in the public eye. I have no illusions of grandeur."
If so, I can applaud that.
-- Richard Cohen, "Fame and Fortune in the Flesh"
___ ___ ___
"The Talk of New York" for World of Wonder Publications:
The New York Screening of Inside Deep Throat at the Paris Theatre was a hoot. The boisterous audience included a clutch of entertainers like Bebe Neuwirth, Claire Danes, Fred Schneider, Scot Whitman John Epperson aka Lypsinka, Jason Bateman, Ron Silver joined at the hips to doppelganger Alan Dershowitz, and Gwyneth Paltrow. There were reams of scribes: Erica Jong, Tina Brown, the Page Six posse, Cintra Wilson, Emma Forest. And a gaggle of documentarians: Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans), Shari Berman (American Splendor), Todd Graff (Camp), and Barbara Kopple (My Generation).
This time, the hapless lot of directing a post-screening panel fell to Elvis Mitchell, former movie critic at the NY Times. The panel was made up of HarperCollins publisher Judith Regan, journallist Peter Boyer, criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz (who defended Harry Reems in the famous obscenity trial), and feminist professor Catherine McKinnon.
Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. "What's so funny?" she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff's hand shot up - "I can do it," he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going "me too!" (Gigi Grazer - wife of Brian - later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.
Judith Regan chimed in preposterously, maintaining that her Jenna Jameson autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, really was "a cautionary tale" rather than just an afterthought of a subtitle. She argued that all sex workers are victims of sexual abuse. Frontliner Peter Boyer went on on about rape porn and tried to raise a quorum on fisting.
Which left the task of defending Deep Throat and the porn world by extension to Alan Dershowitz, who pointed out that to say porn promoted rape was akin to saying that rap promoted. . . But then Elvis Mitchell leapt to his feet, as if about to throw a Springer-like punch, and put us all out of our misery by ending the panel abruptly.
Adjourning to the after party at 81/2, Michael Musto said, "Congratulations, you've managed to incite the exact same debate that happened 30 years ago. People said exactly the same things they said decades ago. That really takes some doing."
And after that, everyone wound up at the after-after party at The Cock. Except Catherine McKinnon.
.
