"Real" orgasms

I.

I some­times won­der the extent to which the much-celebrated Katz’s Deli “I’ll have what she’s hav­ing” scene in Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s 1989 When Harry Met Sally affected the sex lives of the Joe and Josephine Popcorns, if you’ll excuse the phrase, who have seen it over the years. The scene is a clas­sic for a reas­on; Meg Ryan’s Sally hoists Billy Crystal’s Harry by the petard of his own sex­ist pre­sump­tion but good. But one reas­on the movie is as cozy a con­coc­tion as it is has to do with the fact that after the punch­line, it nev­er returns to the top­ic of female orgasm; the dis­com­fort Harry feels after ini­tially sleep­ing with Sally and then flee­ing from her pri­or to the inev­it­able fate­ful facing of facts and return to romance has noth­ing to do with this par­tic­u­lar facet of sexu­al or emo­tion­al exchange. Someone might expect, in the depic­tion of their grow­ing intim­acy, a query from the accept­ably neur­ot­ic Harry along the lines of “how do I know you’re not fak­ing it with me?” But the view­er is left to pre­sume that they’ve worked that all out. Actually, giv­en the way the movie pro­gresses to its con­clu­sion, my feel­ing is that the film­makers were/are hop­ing that you’ve pretty much for­got­ten about the whole thing. This is When Harry Met Sally, not The Mother And The Whore. The view­er is meant to feel pleas­ant feel­ings, not par­tic­u­larly com­plic­ated or uncom­fort­able or unpleas­ant ones. 

This idea as it per­tains to com­edy, and to romantic com­edy, is changing—see Girls on the one hand, and the Hangover movies on the oth­er (what they share in com­mon is the view that pretty much all sexu­al rela­tions are some­how pre­dic­ated on hostility)—and it’s also chan­ging as it per­tains to drama, and romantic drama. The ideas change, but the issues of rep­res­ent­a­tion remain just as fraught. Next to race, the depic­tion of sexu­al­ity on screen is about the most fraught thing ever, and right now it is as fraught as  it ever has been. And crit­ics, depend­ing on their ideo­lo­gic­al per­spect­ive, dir­ect and/or unique exper­i­ence, or just plain con­trari­an pissi­ness (to name just three of what could be dozens of factors) will unpack a giv­en work deal­ing with this rep­res­ent­a­tion in some­times wildly diver­gent ways. 

In 1969, express­ing what he char­ac­ter­ized as his sole major dis­ap­point­ment in dir­ect­or Tony Richardson’s adapt­a­tion of his nov­el Laughter In The Dark (whose female lead’s name, Anna Karina,  appar­ently amused him no end), Vladimir Nabokov said: “Theatrical act­ing, in the course of the last cen­tur­ies, has led to incred­ible refine­ments of styl­ized pan­to­mime in the rep­res­ent­a­tion of, say, a per­son eat­ing, or get­ting deli­ciously drunk, or look­ing for his spec­tacles, or mak­ing a pro­pos­al of mar­riage. Not so in regard to the imit­a­tion of the sexu­al act which on the stage has abso­lutely no tra­di­tion behind it. The Swedes and we have to start from scratch and what I have wit­nessed up to now on screen—the blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, the four or five mingled feet—all of it is prim­it­ive, com­mon­place, con­ven­tion­al and there­fore dis­gust­ing. The lack of art and style in these paltry cop­u­la­tions is par­tic­u­larly brought into evid­ence by their clash­ing with the mar­velously high level of act­ing in vir­tu­ally all oth­er imit­a­tions of nat­ur­al ges­tures on our stage and screen. This is an attract­ive top­ic to pon­der fur­ther, and dir­ect­ors should take notice of it.” This was in an inter­view with Philip Oakes of the Sunday Times of London that ran on June 22 1969 and was of course reprin­ted in Strong Opinions, a com­pen­di­um of inter­views and essays and occa­sion­als by Nabokov. 

Since 1969, sig­ni­fic­ant strides, one could say, have been made in the on-screen depic­tion of the sex act, although it would be use­less to spec­u­late as to wheth­er they might have found favor with the notori­ously par­tic­u­lar Nabokov. Nudity is no longer so taboo, although the pro­scrip­tions regard­ing who may see nud­ity in films remain pretty strong. The sim­u­la­tion of sex acts has become more real­ist­ic via the use of pros­thet­ics (see Catherine Breillat’s Sex Is Comedy, a droll behind-the-scenes look at the absurdity and awk­ward­ness of a film set not unlike one of Breillat’s own) and digit­al manip­u­la­tion (by which means, say, an act­ress’ body stock­ing can be hand­ily erased). There is also a mild trend toward unsim­u­lated sex. The sex in the early films of Joe Swanberg, while staged, is often not sim­u­lated. Martin Scorsese once said he did­n’t like nude scenes because they stopped a film’s nar­rat­ive dead; cine­mat­ic open-heart sur­geon John Cassavetes also largely abjured them, per­haps for dif­fer­ent reas­ons. In films such as those of Swanberg’s, they are inex­tric­able from the nar­rat­ive. Although I con­tin­ue to insist that the dis­com­fort the scenes in Swanberg’s films might cause in a view­er have little to do with Swanberg’s inten­tions or motiv­a­tions. (I con­tin­ue to believe that Swanberg began his movie­mak­ing efforts as a Joe Francis with a film-appreciation-class schtick under his belt, and that his cur­rent films are an attempt to live that unsa­vory fact down.) In mat­ters sexu­al as depic­ted on screen, there’s a con­tinu­ing fas­cin­a­tion with/desire for the real. Only it’s not desired in the con­text of por­no­graphy, at least that’s the party line. Pornography, no mat­ter what it show us, isn’t art. Pornography does­n’t win Palmes d’Or, nor does it get its par­ti­cipants com­men­ded for their bravery. Pornography does­n’t count. But why should it not? 

II.

Here is a pas­sage from “Big Red Son,” David Foster Wallace’s essay chron­ic­ling the Adult Video News Awards of 1998. The char­ac­ter of “Harold Hecuba” is in fact Evan Wright, who was a writer and edit­or at Hustler magazine at the time. Not to poten­tially ali­en­ate any of my young­er read­er­ship by get­ting too “Losing My Edge” on them, I can con­firm that Wallace, writ­ing under a dual pseud­onym, here sets down the story pretty much as Wright told it (maybe over­sell­ing the super-decent-guy aspects of the detect­ive char­ac­ter just a teensy bit): 

“Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails review­ing dozens of adult releases every month, has an inter­est­ing vign­ette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detect­ive he met once when H.H.‘s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. video­tapes was stolen (a box with H.H.‘s name and work address right on it) and sub­sequently recovered by the LAPD. A detect­ive brought the box back to Hecuba per­son­ally, a ges­ture that H.H. remembered think­ing was unusu­ally thought­ful and con­scien­tious until it emerged that the detect­ive had really just used the box’s return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose crit­ic­al work he appeared to know, and to dis­cuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective—60, hap­pily mar­ried, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy—was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over cof­fee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obvi­ously decent fel­low squarely on the side of law and civic vir­tue was a porn fan, the detect­ive con­fessed that what drew him to the films was ‘the faces,’ i.e. the act­resses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or acci­dent­al ten­der­ness when the star­lets dropped their styl­ized ‘fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl’ sneer and became, sud­denly, real people. ‘Sometimes—and you nev­er know when, is the thing—sometimes all of a sud­den they’ll kind of reveal them­selves’ was the detect­ive’s way of put­ting it. ‘Their what-do-you-call…humanness.’ It turned out that the LAPD detect­ive found adult films mov­ing, in fact far more so than most main­stream Hollywood movies, in which lat­ter films actors—sometimes very gif­ted actors—go about feign­ing genu­ine human­ity, i.e.: ‘In real movies, it’s all on pur­pose. I sup­pose what I like in porno is the acci­dent of it.’ ”

Below, although it is not in any way expli­cit, is an argu­ably “not safe for work” image of then-porn-performer Stephanie Swift in an early appear­ance, in a seg­ment from a por­no­graph­ic antho­logy fea­ture, one of whose prime dir­ect­ives involves demon­strat­ing the intens­ity of Ms. Swift’s actu­al orgasms. 

The fea­ture in ques­tion was/is Up And Cummers 29, pro­duced in 1996 and sub­sequently antho­lo­gized in count­less col­lec­tions either high­light­ing star Swift or the newbie-gonzo genre or the real-female orgasms cat­egory or what have you. Images of Swift exper­i­en­cing ostens­ibly real orgasms are widely avail­able all over the inter­net. In 1998, at the Adult Video News Awards, she won a Best Female Performer statuette. 

So yes, Swift DID recieve an award, argu­ably, for both her will­ing­ness and her effec­tu­al­ity in con­vey­ing the real to her cir­cum­scribed audi­ence, but let’s not kid ourselves, the AVN Awards pretty much exist only to be ridiculed, or pondered over in think pieces such as the one that “Big Red Son” both was and sort of tried to res­ist being, think pieces that con­clude either that por­no­graphy is kind of bad and kind of sad, or pieces that try to debunk that think­ing and tell us to loosen up and smoke a joint and relax and enjoy your­self for once but which sim­il­arly insist, mostly indir­ectly, that por­no­graphy is not and can­not be art and can­not tell indi­vidu­al view­ers or the cul­ture any­thing epi­stem­o­lo­gic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant. There is also the inher­ent sup­pos­i­tion that if porn ever shows view­ers real­ity, or the real, its doing so is entirely incid­ent­al and besides its ostens­ible point, which is catering/pandering to male sexu­al fantas­ies. This gen­er­al­iz­a­tion, while not entirely unreas­on­able, fails to take into account cer­tain vari­et­ies of porn. For instance, in the lat­ter part of her career as a por­no­graph­ic per­former, before it was ended after a bout with can­cer and a sub­sequent exper­i­ence of born-again Christianity, Swift appeared in sev­er­al titles for a pro­duc­tion con­cern called Sweetheart/Sweet Sinner, foun­ded by Nica Noelle, who dir­ects a num­ber of its titles. The dual label (Sweetheart deals exclus­ively in les­bi­an con­tent; Sweet Sinner caters to straight couples) touts its product as show­cas­ing “real love­mak­ing, real orgasms.” 

After relat­ing Hecuba/Wright’s anec­dote, Wallace warms to the theme: porn films “are sup­posed to be ‘naked’ and expli­cit but in truth are some of the most aloof, unre­veal­ing foot­age for sale any­where. Much of the cold, dead, mech­an­ic­al qual­ity of adult films is attrib­ut­able, really, to the per­former­’s faces. These are faces that usu­ally appear bored or blank or work­man­like but are in fact simply hid­den, the self locked away some­place far behind the eyes.” Describing the (in his exper­i­ence of view­ing) extremely rare occa­sions when “the hid­den self appears,” Wallace avers: “It’s sort of the oppos­ite of act­ing. You can see the porn per­former­’s whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blank­ness (in most males) yields to some genu­inely felt erot­ic joy in what’s going on; the sighs and moans change from auto­mat­ic to express­ive. It hap­pens only once in a while, but the detect­ive is right: The effect on the view­er is elec­tric.” And what is the reward for the per­former who reveals this to the view­er? There is none, really, and it’s rather likely that the per­former did­n’t get into the busi­ness with the express idea of reveal­ing the real to his or her audi­ence anyway. 

III

The Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival went to a film called, in French, La Vie d’Adèle, and in English, Blue Is The Warmest Color. It is based on a French graph­ic nov­el by Julie Maroh and was dir­ec­ted by Abdellatif Kechiche. In award­ing the fest­ival’s highest hon­or to the film, the Cannes jury head Steven Spielberg insisted that its lead act­resses Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopouos take the stage with its dir­ect­or. Spielberg later said at a press con­fer­ence that “had the cast­ing been even three per­cent wrong, [the movie] would­n’t have worked for us as it did.”

The movie, which I have not seen, is a coming-of-age romantic drama about a love affair between two young women. The reac­tion from Cannes reflec­ted on its gen­er­ous three-hour run­ning time, and on its unusu­ally expli­cit love scenes. In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called it “a blaz­ingly emo­tion­al and explos­ively sexy film.” Warming to his theme, Bradshaw con­tin­ued that Blue “reminds you how tim­idly unsexy most films are, although as with all expli­cit movies, there will be one or two airy soph­ist­ic­ates who will affect to be unmoved by it, and claim that the sex is ‘bor­ing.’ It isn’t.” As Nigel Tufnel before Bradshaw observed, there is noth­ing wrong with being sexy. If you can­’t swing with that, Bradshaw reck­ons, you’re affected, and prob­ably epi­cene. For whatever reas­on, Bradshaw has made his agenda not just the movie and his dir­ect exper­i­ence of it, but how uptight any­one who claims to be unmoved by the movie has to be. I get it—you should too—and that fel­low over there?—let’s not have him at our party. This is all fine as far as it goes, in a settling-scores-with-a-straw-man kind of way. When The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis registered an excep­tion with respect to the sex scenes, the back and forth became some­what more reveal­ingly specific. 

“As as the cam­era hov­ers over  [Exarchopouos’] open mouth and splayed body, even while she sleeps with her der­rière pret­tily framed, the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than any­thing else,” Dargis wrote. “Kechiche registers as obli­vi­ous to real women.” Once the film was awar­ded the Palme d’Or, Jeffrey Wells gloated that the Dargis com­plaint (his term: “too male horn-toady”) fell on deaf ears and then quoted a “film­maker friend” who spec­u­lated that the jury gave the film an award spe­cific­ally as a rebuke to Dargis. The only thing this mini-masterpiece of very male spite omit­ted was the instruc­tion that Dargis ingest a bag of penises. 

Certain more eru­dite ripostes and apo­lo­gi­as fol­lowed. One per­son implied that the amount of (appar­ently unsim­u­lated) snot blown out of the lead act­resses’ noses dur­ing the cry­ing scenes more than made up for whatever pruri­ent interest the love scenes might have enter­tained for the males in the audi­ence; anoth­er mourn­fully spec­u­lated that aca­dem­ic fem­in­ist jar­gon was gonna get in the way of our feel­ings, man. (Just ima­gine, in this day and age, when the phrase “male gaze” has gained suf­fi­cient main­stream cur­rently that it can be reg­u­larly abused by writers for Badass Digest.) Again, I haven’t seen the film, so I have no idea of what I’m talk­ing about, only I did get a very dir­ect sense, in read­ing the responses to Dargis’ objec­tions, of boys who have finally been pushed to admit that they’ve got­ten a little fed up with being prop­er, with doing the right thing. What I can­’t stop myself from hear­ing under­neath all of the argu­ment­a­tion is: “I’ve been a good boy. I’ve played nice. Why can­’t you let me have this?” 

IV.

My friend Susan Walsh, a writer, worked on and off as a strip­per and sex show per­former until she dis­ap­peared, in a still-unsolved case, in July of 1996. One of the writ­ing pro­jects she was most proud to have been involved in was Red Light: Inside The Sex Industry, a book of short essays and pho­to­journ­al­ism by the pho­to­graph­er Sylvia Plachy and the report­er James Ridgeway. The book was issued by Powerhouse Books just a month before Susan disappeared.

In addi­tion to assist­ing Jim and Sylvia with research and inter­views, Susan allowed her­self to be one of the book’s sub­jects. She appears in sev­er­al pho­to­graphs by Sylvia, one a very haunt­ing posed por­trait, the oth­ers depict­ing her in sev­er­al faceoffs with pat­rons of a New Jersey strip club. She allowed Jim and Sylvia to repro­duce a pas­sage from her journ­al, the last para­graph of which reads: “ ‘Just let me get my fin­ger wet and I’ll give you this twenty,’ one cus­tom­er will say, hold­ing the bill between two fin­gers as if it’s his pre­cious dick, the middle fin­ger erect and point­ing between my legs. Then he’ll try to shove it in before I can move back as his friends laugh. Their buddy’s get­ting mar­ried and deserves a little from the slut on stage. Wagging their tongues in proud dis­plays of cun­ni­lin­gus, grasp­ing my hand after they tip me so I can­’t go back on stage, pulling me by the wait and plant­ing me on a barstool as I try to run to the dress­ing room, they struggle to be war­ri­ors in the dirti­est battle known to humanity.”