Empire of Illusion (11 page)

She would shoot scenes with men who disgusted her, whose sweat and smell “made me cringe.” And when the lights went off and the cameras stopped, she would stumble off the set in pain, her face often covered with semen. “Sometimes they would hand you a paper towel to wipe your face off,” she says, “and sometimes they would say, ‘Don't touch us. You're gross.' I remember the first time I had come all over my face. I was so pissed off, but I took it. I pretended to like everything they did. I took pride in being a good gonzo girl. My fame came from this.”

By the second year of shooting, with an income of $100,000, she had turned to drugs, including painkillers and muscle relaxants.

“The lifestyle of a porn star is to spend your money as soon as you make it on weed, alcohol, coke, ecstasy, and Vicodin,” Roldan says. “I wanted to be the good gonzo girl they wanted me to be. I took this so I would not feel anything. By the next year, instead of only Vicodin I began to drink vodka, a whole bottle. Every girl I knew used alcohol. We were drinking so we did not feel the pain, physically and emotionally. I remember driving home thinking, ‘I could be stopped for DWI.'”

Roldan usually socialized with other porn stars, whom she and everyone in the industry call “girls.” They often spent their days drinking. “Most are very lonely,” she says. She longed for a relationship, “but it felt weird to have a boyfriend.”

Adult video companies such as JM Productions and Extreme Associates, which includes graphic rape scenes in its array of physical abuse of women, make no attempt to hide the pain and acute discomfort endured by the women. The pain and discomfort are the major
draws of the productions. JM Productions pioneered “aggressive throat-fucking” videos such as the
Gag Factor
series, in which women have penises pushed all the way down their throats until they gag or vomit. On the
Gag Factor
Web site, the producers promise “The best throat-fucking ever lensed.” It offers still shots of women being “face-fucked.” One typical description of a film begins with the standard brief summary, as if the women were criminals with a rap sheet: “Degraded On: 10/8/08. Name: Ashley Blue . . . Age: twenty-five. Status: Happy? Home Town: Thousand Oaks, CA.” It shows a picture of a woman with black hair lying on her back with her eyes closed. Her face is covered with semen and a penis is buried in her throat.

“Here's Your Retirement Party,” the description of the film reads. “As many of you will remember, for quite a long time superwhore Ashley Blue was the official JM contract whore. But like the sole of an old shoe, porn whores eventually wear out and have to be thrown away. So, our way of throwing a retirement party for Ashley was to have her head get pistonfucked one last time. Enjoy!”
²

Las Vegas, a city built on illusions, lends itself to the celebration of porn. It is the corrupt, wilfully degenerate heart of America. It is, in Marc Cooper's memorable phrase, The Last Honest Place in America. Las Vegas strips away the thin moral pretension and hypocrisy of consumer society to reveal its essence. The commodification of human beings, the heart of the consumer society, is garishly celebrated in Las Vegas. Here there is no past, no history, no sense of continuity, and no real community. The mammoth resorts and casinos glittering in the desert are monuments to greed and vice, even as the rest of the country crumbles under the onslaught of physical decay, shuttered stores and factories, a disintegrating infrastructure, and mounting poverty.

Las Vegas is the city of spectacle. The Treasure Island Casino has an hourly pirate battle with two clipper ships, smoke-filled cannons, and scantily clad female pirates in a fake lagoon. Tourists can visit the New York-New York Hotel & Casino and take in a replica of the city's skyline. They can go to the Venetian, board gondolas, and be poled down indoor copies of the Venice canals by aspiring opera singers. They can watch the pathetic eruption of the belching man-made volcano and the
rubberized trees in the “rain forest” of the lobby of the Mirage. They can eat in a replica of a French bistro called Mon Ami Gabi, under the shadow of a half-size copy of the Eiffel Tower.

Mon Ami Gabi, where I went one day for lunch in the forlorn hope of escaping the ugliness and noise of the Strip, has waiters in black vests, white shirts, black bow ties, and long, white aprons. But, like the rest of Las Vegas, the exotic is only a veneer. The menu offers hamburgers, sandwiches, waffles, and, in what I suppose is a concession to France, French toast. Diners at the bistro look out on Caesars Palace, where Roman statues speak, although not in Latin, in Caesar's Forum. It is a short walk to diminished copies of the Giza pyramids at the Luxor.

Las Vegas sells a cartoon version of other cultures and other lands. It is a monument to pseudo-events. It is a place where stereotypes can be experienced as reality. The guts and sinews of every theme-park hotel and casino, however, hold the same, mind-numbing slot machines, roulette wheels, and blackjack tables. A trip to Las Vegas is a visit to a sanitized, cutout version of foreign countries without the intrusion of foreign people, the hassle of unintelligible languages, strange habits, different ideas and traditions, or bizarre food. Here everyone speaks English. Here you are surrounded by Americans. Here, once you get past the façade, it is all the same. There is always beer on tap and hamburgers. The chaos of the real world, of other cultures and ways of being, is purged and made tidy, easy, and accessible. But it is all a game. New York-New York will part you from your money as efficiently as the Luxor. And that is the point. It is all about taking your money, and when the money runs out, you might as well not exist. Las Vegas, unlike the rest of the culture, is brutally honest about its exploitation.

Las Vegas speaks in the comforting epistemology of television. Many of the slot machines have movie and television themes with audio voices of characters from the
Austin Powers
movies,
I Love Lucy,
or
The Price is Right
cheering on the slack-jawed, glazed-eyed customers who repeatedly pull the lever, or, increasingly, push a button, to set off the whirl of icons. In Las Vegas the illusion of the exotic overlies the banal comfort of the safe and familiar. In a nation where less than 10 percent of the population has a passport, how many Americans can
tell the difference between the illusion of France and the reality of France? How many can differentiate between Egypt and the illusion of Egypt? How many care?

Las Vegas should, as Neil Postman observed in his 1985 book
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
be considered the “symbolic capital” of America. “At different times in our history,” Postman wrote, “different cities have been the focal point of a radiating American spirit. In the late eighteenth century, for example, Boston was the center of a political radicalism that ignited a shot heard round the world—a shot that could not have been fired any other place but the suburbs of Boston.” In the mid-nineteenth century, “New York became the symbol of a melting pot America.” In the early twentieth century, Chicago, “the city of big shoulders and heavy winds, came to symbolize the industrial energy and dynamism of America. If there is a statue of a hog butcher somewhere in Chicago, then it stands as a reminder of the time when America was railroads, cattle, steel mills, and entrepreneurial adventures.”

“Today,” Postman concluded,

The Las Vegas Strip is a monument to our nation's cult of eternal childishness. It plays off of our fear of growing up. In Marc Cooper's portrait of Las Vegas
, The Last Honest Place in America
, he wrote:

Porn films frequently build their themes around reality shows or popular sitcoms. I stand at the AVN expo in front of a display where the newest release is called
I'm Dreaming of Genie
. The company has also filmed
Paris and Nicole Go to Jail
and
Getting It Up with the Kardassians
. Jessica Lynn, twenty-three, plays the role of the porn Genie and for the convention is dressed in a replica of the television character's costume.

“I usually do whatever I want and think later,” she says. “I won't do anal yet. I basically do boy-girl, girl-girl.” She does do ATM, although she says, “I don't like to. There are a lot of infections.” She says she can climax on the set, something most ex-porn actresses, including Lubben, insist never happens. “I can come if there is a vibrator.” She says her parents recently discovered what she is doing and have asked her to get out of the industry. She has a boyfriend, whom she later calls her husband, who “is cool with it,” and she says she sometimes “brings girls home for him.” “I love watching my husband fuck other girls, watching him make her feel good.” She has been in scenes, she said, that “got too violent and rough and one where one of the men began to eat his own come.” She said she is saving money for college and has stayed away from drugs. “A lot of girls have breakdowns,” she says. “They call me. I have had numerous calls. They are freaking out about their life and they are usually on drugs.”

Jeff Thrill, who uses the pen name of Roger Krypton, writes porn scripts for the Hustler Video Group. He wrote
Not the Bradys XXX
,
This Ain't the Munsters XXX
,
Very Happy Days
,
This Ain't Gilligan's Island XXX
, and
This Ain't the Partridge Family XXX
. The logo on the poster for
This Ain't the Partridges XXX
has a line of little birds shaped as penises with wings.

“There have been parodies in porn forever,” he says. “In the past, it might have been
Forrest Hump
. But they were not true to the original show. In my films we make sure the actors look like the characters and, God willing, deliver dialogue like the characters.”

Thrill's big hit this year was
Who's Nailin' Paylin: Adventures of a Hockey MILF,
shot with a porn actress who resembled Sarah Palin. The actress, Lisa Anne, played a character called Serra Paylin. Nina Hartley plays Hillary Clinton and Jada Fire plays Condoleezza Rice. The women have a three-way sex scene. In the movie, Serra Paylin participates in sexual encounters with visiting Russian soldiers. There is a flashback to college days, in which her creationist science professor teaches her lessons on the “theory of the Big Bang.” There are also shouts of “Drill, baby, drill” during sex scenes and many “you betcha”s. During a Serra Paylin press conference, there is an ode to the podium scene in the 1984 comedy
Police Academy
.

The film was featured on Fox News and the
Colbert Report
, as well as on
The O'Reilly Factor
. It sold well, four times Hustler's other releases, Thrill says. DVD, video, and magazine sales of porn have dropped by 25 to 45 percent because of free Internet porn. Thrill said he had just completed
Everybody Loves Lucy
. In this latest film, Lucy and Ethel sneak into Rickey's club and find that it is a sex club. “People like these familiar characters that they already know,” Thrill says. “You would not think anybody would want to see Herman Munster have sex, but they actually did.”

Thrill spends about six or eight hours on scripts, most of which have five scenes. A script runs about a dozen pages. “Once you get into the actual sex, we like them to stay in character,” he says, “but these are no Academy Award-winning performances.”

The sex those in the porn industry claim to promote is as fake, absurd, and unattainable as the façade of the Luxor casino and hotel. Porn is not about love or eroticism. It is about power and money. It is a transaction. It is based on the conversion of women into objects. They are assigned a monetary value and sexually exploited for profit. Most porn stars are also prostitutes. They charge a range of fees, usually in the thousands of dollars, to fans on porn escort Web sites.