The Big Screen (72 page)

The attempt to isolate “red-light districts” where porn was shown, sold, and enacted seems as quaint now as hoop skirts. In the short age of video stores, there were “Adult” sections, often behind transom doors that spoke of the Wild West. Clerks were not supposed to rent those tapes to people under eighteen, but I have known infants who crawled beneath the transom and had to be retrieved before they had studied too many of the cassette covers. (This was in the era of VHS.) All safeguards fell aside as cable television offered pornographic channels, only for that après 10:00 p.m. delight to be surpassed and censorship ridiculed by the Internet. In July 2011 a search for “hardcore movies” on Google produced fifty million results instantaneously.

Like so much movie over the decades, hard core is sensational but monotonous. You can't credit what you're seeing, yet you can't wait for your chance to get away—it resembles a weekend in Las Vegas, and breeds as many dismayed losers.

Hardcore movies range in length from a minute to over two hours. I have viewed only a tiny fraction of the fifty million, and I am excluding such genres as bestiality, but still I feel confident about the pattern of what I will call heterosexual hard core. There are five actions, or books of the testament: vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, cunnilingus, fellatio, and what is called the cum shot. The women look like movie women. They are young (the word
teen
is often used in the promotional tag lines and that gets close to the law; it is illegal to broadcast hard core with people under eighteen). They are frequently very attractive, slender, but with big breasts. The men are not as good-looking, though they are well endowed. Most pubic hair in both sexes has been eliminated—for greater visibility. There is another point about the films that a film critic notices: the anonymous settings are usually very well lit, and shot in high-key photography, and the camera prefers extended takes. There are intricate, probing movements to get a better view. It is not quite Max Ophüls or Kenji Mizoguchi, but the shooting style and its relevance to the action is invariably more fluent and interesting than one finds in today's average feature film.

The women are sometimes called “sluts.” The men often talk to them abusively. Occasionally the women seem to be in pain or distress, though this can be hard to distinguish from ecstatic conditions. Characteristically, the women are obedient and imprisoned, the visual centerpiece, but without character, voice, or script beyond the moaned “Fuck!” and “Oh yes!” They seem always on the point of orgasm without quite getting there. The climax of most of the films involves the man withdrawing his cock from extensive fucking of the woman, masturbating, and then spraying his semen on the patient, open eyes and mouth of the woman.

The films are very matter-of-fact. It is important that the viewer believe he or she is seeing something intimate and actual, a record of the action. But the viewer learns that few facts can be trusted. The feelings are simulated or acted out. The female orgasm is invisible and uncertain, so it is not trusted. The male cum shot establishes that the man will not climax within the woman, but upon her. He retains his power and his loneliness. There is also a terrible sense of hollow reality despite the unbroken scrutiny of the filming. The sum effect of it all is to ascertain that sex has sunk to a performed process without meaning or desire. The light is bright. The image is carnal. But the members of the mass are imprisoned by privacy, the essential stance of watching hard core and the realization that movie and its yearning are at a terminal state.

If you haven't, you should see for yourself, and begin to realize why desire's fruition in lovemaking has withered on our screens. But if there is no desire left, why do we look, except to observe the torture and the hell?

Desire can take us to the brink of damage and dread. The people watching movies have always wondered how to reconcile the two. In
The Birth of a Nation
(1915), we watch as John Wilkes Booth (played by the future director of
White Heat,
1949, Raoul Walsh) prepares to shoot Lincoln. D. W. Griffith took pains to make his set for Ford's Theatre look like the real thing. So there is an inescapable urging from our pained history and our injured innocence to stop Booth from doing what we know he will do. It's like the boy's cry to Harry Houdini in E. L. Doctorow's novel
Ragtime
: “Warn the Duke!” (the archduke, who is on his way to Sarajevo in June 1914). But just as irresistible is the energy that movie suspense has built in us that whispers, “Shoot the gun!”

The violence doesn't have to be physical. There is a film called
Damage
(1992), from a novel by Josephine Hart. David Hare adapted it, and Louis Malle directed it in 1992. I used to think the film was flawed, but I find I can't forget it. Jeremy Irons plays a leading British politician. He lives in a very nice house with his wife (Miranda Richardson). They have two children; one is a pleasant if naïve young man (Rupert Graves) who gets engaged to a curious foreign girl, Anna (Juliette Binoche). Anna is beautiful but icy. She rarely speaks or communicates beyond routine small talk. She is cut off, like a screen, but if you touch the screen, it has scalding erotic fantasy. She will do anything, as a dream, or a nightmare. So Irons has a dreadful affair with her—wonderfully filmed as something devouring but involuntary, like a fatal illness—and the son dies when he discovers what has been happening. There is no need of moral commentary in the film; it would be stupid. The process simply admits, of course, we do damage because we need it as much as we need love.

But if a film like
Damage
teaches us something pitiless and uncomfortable about human and social nature, there are more films that make us wonder how far the separation from reality in the cinema's technology enforces the loss of pity. When the Production Code yielded in the 1960s to change, most of the early attention went to sexual opportunity. But as sexuality seemed culturally disappointing, so the other old taboo, violence, came into its own. And in some crucial and shocking moments, sex and the violence are inseparable.

Sam Peckinpah's
Straw Dogs
was filmed in 1971. An American mathematician, David (Dustin Hoffman), takes his new wife, Amy (Susan George), back to the part of the English countryside where she was raised. (They filmed in Cornwall.) He wants to escape America because of its violence. The wife discovers young men from her youth, who may have romanced her once. They are a building crew repairing the couple's cottage. They lure the husband away on a fool's errand. Then one of the men approaches Amy.

She is stretched out on a sofa—we watch or don't, but what are the movies if we don't watch? Amy protests his sexual advance. She says, “No!” repeatedly. The man pulls off her blouse and removes her underpants. He penetrates her and he fucks her, and in the process she is aroused enough to feel pleasure and to stroke his head. (This may be my reading of the scene, but Peckinpah was usually good enough to deliver his intention.)

After the first man takes Amy, a second man appears and tells number one to hold her down so that she can be unequivocally raped. The twenty-year-old Susan George (thirteen years Hoffman's junior) was cast as Amy, and she knew there was a rape scene in the script. But as the shooting developed, Peckinpah became more intimidating—his own sexual attitudes, his use of drink, and his misogyny were all mixed up in this. He regarded himself as an artist, and in
The Wild Bunch
(1969), at least, he had made a fine picture. But the actress was becoming increasingly nervous: “I dreaded that rape scene…Sam kept saying he was going to shoot the greatest rape scene ever put on film. He went on and on about it and he'd be very visual in his descriptions of the things he was expecting, physical things that he was going to film.”

In a panic, George went to the producer, Dan Melnick, and asked to have the details of the scene itemized in advance. Peckinpah complained but complied, but his list of actions and humiliations made the actress even more alarmed. She begged for limited nudity and showing things with her eyes. There was a compromise: she shows her breasts but not really more in the week it took to film the double rape. I want to stress that the scene is essential to the story (if you want this story): it motivates a violent, lethal revenge on the crew by Hoffman's husband. The filming is done with hideous impact, and Peckinpah, no matter how troubling, was very talented. But it's naïve to say the scene is done only from the victim's point of view. It shudders with a horrible detachment, a voyeurist privilege, a threshold to inhumanity. It is a chance to see a rape. You cannot miss Peckinpah's curiosity or your own mixed feelings.

But rarely with rapes are huge, unknown crowds encouraged to watch and charged for the spectacle.
Straw Dogs
predates the widespread availability of hardcore movies, and as a scenario, it is more inventive than that genre. As motion picture, it is lit and shot with an intimacy that may be nauseating; there is even music (by Jerry Fielding) that is unnervingly seductive. Still, what makes this scene appalling is its instinct for our predicament and advantage at the movies. Just as once—in Muybridge, Lumière, and Griffith, for example—we noted the sense of miracle and shared wonder in being able to see (let there be light), by the time of
Straw Dogs
we are at odds with ourselves as to whether we should be looking.

As soon as that issue is raised, we are into the vexed area of consequence, which applies equally to sex and violence—and even to the larger matter of how we perceive and place ourselves in the world as a whole. In a nutshell, the questions are simple: Does motion picture affect us? How has it lasted a hundred years and more if there wasn't an impact and an imprint? Were we not amused, excited, frightened, and moved? Weren't we entertained? And if we regard it as beyond dispute that people growing up learned more about how to speak and pause and think from the movies, and sometimes came to consider hitherto alien ideas—such as the humanity of blacks, women, cartoon characters, and murderers—then isn't it reasonable to suppose that a sense of story and order has also been communicated, along with notions on how to behave, dress, undress, be violent, and have sex? The possibility of being photographed in surveillance is at the heart of the widespread fear we have about privacy being invaded.

There are those who think hardcore movies may be useful. They allege that this stuff may be watched by solitary, or lonely, people who find relief in the experience sufficient to offset otherwise violent and antisocial impulses. There is no evidence for this theory, so it is hard to resist the implication that sexual and violent energy are related, along with undue loneliness and antisocial urgings. In other words, some deep-seated guilt or dread remain attached to sex. On the other hand, some people may learn useful things about sex from hard core: what to do and how to do it. It may still be the case that plenty of healthy young men and women don't know enough about these things, because the fear or dread is enough to keep it from being a topic of education in schools or in the home. So “Sex Ed” may teach kids how pregnancies occur, but it is shy of recommending pleasure.

Some of us may watch hardcore movies because we derive more stimulation, excitement, or pleasure from screened sex than from the real thing. For this book, at least, I watch them as a historian or a commentator on film, which means that I try to describe the cinematic experience. Just as if I am writing about Ophüls, Renoir, or Welles, that involves the filmic expressiveness of a particular moment.

That's why the structural monotony and the camera's openness in hard core are so instructive, yet so antagonistic. Susan George got off lightly (though I think she felt damaged by
Straw Dogs
, and if you search for her on the Net, that dire scene is always there). She kept some privacy. She did it with her eyes. And if her Amy yielded for a moment or two, still the character was allowed to be outraged. She was able to signal the nature of the violence, and the condition of her imprisonment. But in hard core the slavery is borne without protest, with a “sexy” smile and a camera as wide open as the woman's orifices. The filmmakers, unseen behind the camera, often ask, “Well, what are you going to show me today?” They make it plain that their process is at our service: we want to see, without being seen. One day soon (with some skillful lighting) there may be a camera inside the vagina for the cum shot, or the bombs bursting in air.

Ah, well, you say, that's just hard core. But the threat and the safeguard of simulation go all the way through the feature films we esteem and enjoy. It is even true in “documentary” that the vaunted truthfulness of film is unreliable. As long ago as the 1960s most of us in the “free world” had seen about twenty thousand represented killings on film and television by the age of twenty without being aware of a massacre. By now that figure must be so much greater, for it was in those same 1960s that screened violence was liberated.