A Title Does Not Ask, But Demands That You Make a Choice: On the Otherwise Films of Bruce LaBruce

The Frenchman, dismissive of the philosopher's problem, replies: "Everyone knows what a pornographic film is. There are no characters, there is nothing but sexual activity and it is not made by anyone one has heard of." Williams insists: "But . . . what if these criteria diverged? What if a film of nothing but sex were made by, say, Fellini?"

I.

The title does not ask, but demands that you make a choice. Titled "Art or Porn?" the quiz on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian presents visitors with a series of ten film stills, ostensibly from either "the highest expressions of the seventh art" or pornography, and instructs the user to classify them according to their type.¹ The subject being tested selects one of two white buttons, blanks waiting to be filled in with signification:

Art

Porn

The resolute white space between. You may not choose both.

Our textual guide for the anxious determinations insists that the truth will not be so difficult to come by—"Have a look at these ten pictures, and for each case answer one simple question: art, or porn?"—but the delayed order, the deferral of the bad object pornography after the promising lift of the comma, lends an ominous verbal weight to the possibility that indeed this choice will not be so simple. The quiz opens with mirror images, literalizing the tease of the title: two nearly identical film stills of bodies glimpsed through a keyhole, that metaphor of cinema, delimiting the distance necessary for voyeurism. What it is we are spying on—the body on the other side or the film from which it emanates?—is left unclear, as is whether or not the keyhole is framing us for the films, while the quiz looks intently on as we make our awkward choice.² A discursive distinction between the "highest expressions" and what is presumably the "lowest" is made: each question suggests a classic work of cinematic art (fairly canonical choices: Buster Keaton, Claude Chabrol, Fritz Lang) and endows it with a name, date, and a star or auteur's moniker, while the other, degenerate choice is left anonymous and undifferentiated (for example, Question 4: "A glimpse of stocking. Is it art [Marlene Dietrich in 1930's The Blue Angel]? Or porn?"). But despite this rhetoric of supreme difference, other features remain starkly the same: nearly every image is of a partially undressed and sexualized woman—that fascinum par excellence of all cinematic projects—and where a woman is not alone, we glimpse a heterosexual pairing, in a few cases one man with two women. Thus, the quiz begins and enacts a series of visual equivalences while nevertheless maintaining in its linguistic utterances that above all, underneath all, the two fields are not the same.

Two things are fascinating about this quiz: (1) the choice that is demanded, that a film be either art or pornography (a strict evaluation normally reserved for courts determining obscenity standards; let it be clear: one is, in a very literal sense, judging these images³ ); and (2) the teasing gimmick of the quiz, which is that the ontology of the images cannot be reliably demonstrated by simply looking at an isolated film still, as though the fantasy is held out that were one able to spectate in another light or context, or view the film in its entirety, one could tell. That is, the quiz maintains that there is a difference, while simultaneously enacting and celebrating the invisibility of that difference and the instability of any attempts at classification. This move is the classic gesture of fetishistic disavowal—"I know very well [that there is a difference between art and pornography], and yet . . . [it is extraordinarily difficult to locate that difference]." At stake in the quiz (and art, and pornography) is the question of knowledge. These images reveal no truth about their nature, they do not give up their secrets. These ten questions turn on its head the received wisdom about both art and pornography—that one knows when one...