Seizing Moving Image Pornography
The proliferation of hard-core film pornography during the 1970s in the form of feature-length adult films intensified the production of sexual fantasies and sexualities through the cinema. The porno chic heralded by works such as Boys in the Sand (Wakefield Poole, 1971) and Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) turned the motion picture apparatus and some fledgling pornographers, performers, and audiences into instruments of what Michel Foucault calls the implantation of perversions. Something of an American Kama Sutra began its intense and rapid expansion, engendering and also recording what Foucault discussed as the visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities, the analytical multiplication of pleasure, and the optimization of power that controls this new discourse of sex.1 To cite one example, the famous series of extra deep blow jobs given by Linda Lovelace, while dismissed by one contemporary feminist for being only as erotic as a tonsillectomy, nevertheless inspired much discussion, became a set piece of straight porn films, and have since been rehearsed offscreen to such a point of mastery that talk of young women with no gag reflex has become common in college dorms. Seen in this light, the visual text of porn movies is revealed to consist of much more than just filmed sex acts. They encode and disseminate practices of sexuality. They ceaselessly improvise scenarios of erotic fantasy. They generate schemes for the disposition of bodies across historical, ethical, and imaginary space. They [End Page 121] weave fugitive patterns of moving and still elements. They legislate the pleasures that should be associated with the perversions on display. One even finds in these films, just beneath the overplayed expressions of ecstasy, marks of the actors self-consciousness about performing the perversions and being seen while doing the dirty deed. Those nervous ticks and awkward gestures make visible such abstractions as the films mode of production or, to use colorful moralistic language, even the actors (and spectators ) state of concupiscence.
The resulting massification and complexity of pornographic moving images demand a triangulation of analytical approaches that deploy mise-en-sc ne analysis along with the explication of sonic elements, the decoding of symptomatic and referential meanings, the disclosure of the text s mode of production and contextual relations, etc. Regardless of the scholar s specific research question, the political stakes of the project should rest at least partly on the examination of the implanted perversions as they are visually instantiated by the pornographic text.2 I have in my mind the look of Wakefield Poole s Boys in the Sand. In interviews with The Advocate and Drummer, the justly celebrated pornographer stressed the importance of beauty as a legitimating strategy in his depiction of gay sex ( I wanted a film that gay people could look at and say, I don t mind being gay; it s beautiful to see those people do what they re doing )3 and in his mise-en-sc ne ( That atmosphere was very controlled. That s why straight film reviewers took notice. Boys was the first gay film that straights perceived as not sleazy. )4 Without showing examples of Poole s beautifully composed images, it would be very difficult to demonstrate the extent to which he invested in ornate and often ethereal images to make all male action aesthetically pleasing to a critical audience that he saw as including not just gay men but straights. Still images of Poole s films show us precisely how he deployed fantasy—deliberately, reflexively, and often daintily—to soften the hard-core rawness with which the camera registered the homosexual perversities that were emerging into visibility at the time of gay liberation. To see these prettified images is thus to grasp the politics behind their conjuration. And while it seems odd for Poole to mind the straight audience, the following quote from Screw s review of his second film, Bijou (1973), shows us just how important (but ultimately insufficient) beautiful images were to the heteronormative standards of the adult film s most...
