Filmmakers lack depth in pornography study
WASHINGTON -- Signs of a cinematic backlash against the Bush administration and the red state-blue state division are visible in the art houses of America. Not surprisingly, the movies present romanticized images of a liberation movement of the second half of the 20th century, juxtaposed against rigid, unthinking conservatism.
But rather than sanctify the antiwar movement, civil rights, or even women's liberation, the flimmakers behind ''Kinsey" and ''Inside Deep Throat" have chosen to celebrate the sexual revolution, perhaps believing that the theme of freedom vs. repression would be especially relevant today.
The biodrama ''Kinsey" did not advertise its politics and portrayed the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey as a curious academic researcher whose lifelong interest in sex, a reaction against his repressive father, coexisted comfortably with his long, happy, fully functional marriage. His critics thus came off as the deviant ones, and ''Kinsey" stood its ground in the culture wars without pushing its point.
The documentary ''Inside Deep Throat" is a different matter. It recruits an A-list cast of social commentators, straight from the ''Tonight Show" couch of the 1970s, to repeat its point that the famous porn movie ''Deep Throat" was, in the words of one, ''a badge of the new freedom." And various veterans of the porn industry are allowed to portray their work as a conscious attempt to shake mainstream America free of its repressions.
Interviewing the makers and promoters of ''Deep Throat" in their old age and dwelling on them as they toddle out to mailboxes and bicker with their equally elderly wives, seems intended to point up their ordinariness and their innocence. But the camera reveals a deeper sleaziness that cannot be air-brushed away. To say that these porn merchants have aged badly does not fully capture their degradation: They look like they have been dipped in grease and rolled in cat hair.
But these people are actually the protagonists, and the narrator, Dennis Hopper, and commentators such as Gore Vidal and Erica Jong, express shock at the backlash that followed ''Deep Throat." The worst culprits are the conservatives, led by Richard Nixon. But things get really hairy when some feminists start to join the chorus.
Playboy maestro Hugh Hefner describes his dismay at feminist critics with a kind of ''whoa, what got into you" incredulousness. He argues the porn industry was closely allied with the women's movement in presenting women's desire for sexual gratification as equal to men's. And while some women are shown on camera arguing that ''Deep Throat" features only male forms of gratification, the larger claim of an historical alliance goes unchallenged.
In fact, the star of ''Deep Throat," Linda Lovelace, eventually became a strong witness against pornography. In a book and subsequent congressional testimony, she said she was forced to perform in the movie by her husband, Chuck Traynor, who constantly beat her, raped her, and threatened her at gun point. He sold her interest in the movie for $1,250.
Traynor, who died of a heart attack in 2002, denied forcing her to appear in ''Deep Throat." But porn historians have generally portrayed him as a pimp and hustler with a violent history: After Lovelace left him, he promoted his next wife, Marilyn Chambers, in porn movies.
Lovelace never changed her story, though after age 50, having lost two jobs and being nearly broke, she did another seminude photo spread. By then, she had had a radical double mastectomy due to bad silicone injections during the years she was with Traynor and had declared she was dying of liver disease. The documentary does not mention these things and implicitly seems to endorse ''Deep Throat" director Gerald Damiano's portrayal of her as a weak figure who always needed direction, taking her cues first from Traynor and then from feminists.
She died at 53 after a car accident in 2002. Casting a sharper eye on Lovelace's woes might have reinforced the idea that Traynor, Damiano, and others associated with ''Deep Throat" did not do her any favors, and that ''Deep Throat" should probably be remembered as something other than a celebration of fun sex.
Instead, the makers of the documentary use ''Deep Throat" as bait to catch their real targets, the censors and moralists who tried to get the movie banned. Larry Parrish -- the lay minister who, as an assistant US attorney, tried to get Lovelace's costar, Harry Reems, imprisoned simply for appearing in ''Deep Throat" -- is the main antagonist. In a recent interview he expresses hope that terrorism would subside so the Justice Department could get back to prosecuting smut.
But the interview with Parrish only serves to confirm the weirdly symbiotic connection between smut and those who dedicate themselves to scrubbing the world clean of it. Parrish and Damiano may be two sides of a strange coin, but at least Parrish did not force anyone to perform oral sex on camera.
No one needs to be an avenger of the religious right, or even a hater of pornography, to find the ''Deep Throat" saga more than a little sordid.
Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.
