Prurient Pictures and Popular Film: The Crisis of Pornographic Representation

Simply put, the term "film pornography" defines any film that offers graphic sexual content as its primary focus. In the case of hard-core film pornography, full-frontal nudity and on-screen penetration are the norm, while soft-core may encourage the viewer to imagine aspects of the sexual encounter that cannot be shown. But in either case, the function of the film is to bring the viewer as close as possible to the sexual act itself. That said, definitions of pornography are rarely simply put. While hard-core pornography is fairly easy to spot, the line between soft-core and erotic mainstream films under the MPAA ratings of X or, more recently, NC-17 (e.g., Eyes Wide Shut, 1999; Showgirls, 1995; Henry and June, 1990; and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, 1989) is significantly more difficult to draw. For the most part, attempts to do so tend to follow former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famously ambiguous classification: "I know it when I see it." Once codified as such, the "pornographic" sexual content of a film marks the film as not only gratuitous and risqué but also degraded, amoral, and even socially corruptive. Within the liminal space between pornography and mainstream film this approach to defining pornography highlights inconsistencies in the MPAA ratings system. Controversies arise when a film's director or production company "sees it" differently and calls for a more audience-friendly rating.¹

Figure 1.

Max Renn experiences the deleterious effects of his porn obsession in Videodrome. Still from Criterion Collection DVD, 2004.

Furthermore, this muddy indistinction threatens to undermine the formal conventions and cultural value of mainstream or nonpornographic films that endeavor to represent pornography as an element within the film narrative. The titillating sexual content of film pornography combined with the notoriety and dubious morality of the industry—presumed foreign and exotic to the "mainstream viewer"—add an exciting narrative element to certain popular genre films. But because it is both loosely defined and extremely volatile, pornography poses this challenge to those who would represent it: to depict or present pornographic content without becoming, in itself, pornographic. A host of films over the past twenty-five years (including 8mm, 1999; Boogie Nights, 1997; Videodrome, 1983; Body Double, 1984; Hardcore, 1979; and The People vs. Larry Flynt, 1996) have addressed this "crisis of pornographic representation" with a complicated set of formal and narrative techniques that effectively contextualize and neutralize the explicit sexual content on-screen.

This essay investigates the ways that nonpornographic film uses pornographic cultural production (specifically, porn film) as an affective element within a larger cinematic narrative while neutralizing its inherent threat to the viewer and to the film as a whole. Pornography is crucial to the production of visual pleasure in these films, even as it is openly censured by the construction of the film. Drawing on the writings of Laura Mulvey and Gaylyn Studlar as well as Gilles Deleuze's analysis of sadism and masochism as literary forms, I explore the formal and narrative strategies these films use to mediate or subdue the volatility of pornography. By offering a neutral representation of what is perceived to be an explosive visual form, films like Hardcore, 8mm, and Boogie Nights create a particular form of visual pleasure through what I term "porn-in-film."² By understanding how such visual pleasure is constructed I posit a model for the moralizing function of these mainstream films as well as an alternative, more masochistic approach to porn-in-film that embraces pornography as a cinematic genre without turning its affect against itself.

At the heart of the mediating project of porn-in-film is the need to control what is considered gratuitous and dangerous in the presentation of sexual content: the volatility of pornography rooted in its excess of affect and its threat to narrative. In her essay "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" Linda Williams defines pornography as one of three cinematic "body genres," types of films that produce a physical response in the body...