2. By Making Porn Tragic
The flipside of the “porn is hilarious” approach comes almost as instinctively to filmmakers who want to make serious, adult movies about “adult movies”: porn is heart-breakingly sad. For whom? For everyone, of course!
On the one hand, producing porn is a tragic business, a cruel starlet-crushing machine ideally suited to lazy Lifetime biopics about shy young girls from nice small towns who get seduced into a seemingly glamorous world of sex, drugs and easy money, until they etc. etc. etc.: fill in the blanks.
This is clearly the route that “Lovelace” has chosen to go down (see our review) and while its true that Linda Lovelace did have a rough and complicated life, it’s also true that there’s a huge amount of interesting discussion to be had about the cultural atmosphere that created her career, and the subsequent cultural impact that that career had. For everyone who wails about how porn is so much more present in the mainstream today than it was in the past, you would do well to remember that for many months in 1972 you could just go into your friendly neighbourhood cinema and watch “Deep Throat” as though it were a mainstream release. “Lovelace,” unsurprisingly, doesn’t really bother getting into any of that, though the 2005 documentary “Inside Deep Throat” does and is more worth your time.
On the other hand, however, consuming porn is also apparently a tragic business which transforms you into a gnarled, emotionally stunted beast (if you’re a man; if you’re a woman, you obviously don’t consume porn). This was the attitude on display in, for instance, Steve McQueen‘s much-praised “Shame” (although in fairness, that film is really about how sex obsession transforms you into a gnarled, emotionally stunted etc., and porn is just a subset of that). It’s also a problem that “Don Jon” deals in (our Sundance review is here), with a lighter touch, but still. Is it too much to hope for a film about someone watching porn and living a normal life?
Such a film would be especially welcome in an era in which people who make porn are visibly living a normal life, as documented on social media, where stars with some level of mainstream profile, like Stoya and James Deen, document lives just as quasi-normal as those of any celebrity. In fact, is there any difference left?
3. By Flirting With Porn Stars, But Not Going All The Way
Once in a while (more so recently, but still not much), a cinematic director actually hires a porn performer and inevitably, a ripple of discussion is set off about whether it’s possible for someone to make the professional leap from porn to mainstream movies. The answer so far seems to be “no,” but not through any fault on the actor’s part. Because when pornstars get offered a mainstream role, they usually end up getting screwed.
Sasha Grey, then the industry’s biggest star, had a good try in 2009 with Steven Soderbergh‘s “The Girlfriend Experience,” and though mainstream stardom didn’t follow, neither did disaster. Previous attempts at this kind of breakout (notably Nina Hartley‘s) had tended to involve B-movies, not indie flicks by major, respected and interesting directors. But still, Grey was hired to play an escort in a movie directed by a man who got famous for a film called “sex lies and videotape.” Reviews were sniffy and she hasn’t made much headway in the mainstream since. (Her most notable role afterward was an arc playing herself on “Entourage“).
Perhaps the biggest name in the industry since Grey is James Deen, who is now attempting to pull off the same trick in “The Canyons.” Although Deen has a higher profile than most in the XXX industry, it is looking like his participation in Paul Schrader’s movie will be a one-off lark. His day job is still whipping it out on camera, and it doesn’t seem like the doors are being blown open by offers for Deen to join any other notable mainstream productions anytime soon.
Still, Grey and Deen did better than some. Also, here’s a weird fact about Nicholas Winding Refn‘s beloved “Drive”: two porn stars had parts in the film that were cut before it ever hit cinemas. Apparently, stamping on a man’s head 17 times was something audiences were expected to love, but sympathetic characters played by porn actresses weren’t, and on that assumption, they never made it into the final film. Which is symptomatic of maybe the biggest problem of all…
