Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  Ms. Ellen Thompson, AVN Associate Editor and an Awards judge who votes under the n.d.g. Ida Slapter: 35 “We’ve heard this for years. I hear this complaining also goes on in the mainstream. I don’t like insulting anybody, but sometimes there’s sour grapes. What are we supposed to say? Vivid and VCA put out good product. We truly, honestly do vote fairly.”

  Mr. Dick Filth: “The best perception, backed up by tons of anecdotal evidence, is that they are totally, totally fixed and rigged.”

  Saturday’s the big night. The banquet, the onstage entertainment, the headline Awards. See & be seen. Gamblers and conventioneers and mooks of all ilk are massed at the Caesars cabstand to watch the starlets arrive. There are camcorders and flashbulbs but no paparazzi per se. Some of the performers come in limos, others in shiny penile sports cars; others seem to mysteriously just suddenly appear. There are even more starlets here than there were at the CES, and they are seriously dolled up. There are cerise halters and pear-colored Lycra bodysuits with open-toed pumps of burgundy suede. There are platinum lamé gowns slit all the way to the tenth rib. Bottoms less covered than shellacked look like they by all rights should have panty- or at least thong lines but do not have such lines. There are lime-green vinyl leotards and toile bellbottoms and fishscale bustiers and miniskirts the same texture and length as a tutu’s ruffle. Garter straps flash and Merry Widow bodices shade the interiors of translucent blouses. Several of the outfits defy very basic precepts of modern physics. Coiffures are towering and complex. The starlets are all on the arms of men, but none of these escorts are male porn performers. Average heel-height is 4"+. A loud-voiced civilian in the cabstand crowd actually utters the phrase “Va Va Voom,” which yr. correspondents had never before heard anywhere outside a Sinatra movie. Breasts are uniformly zeppelinesque and in various perilous stages of semiconfinement. Max Hardcore is under a Stetson the color of weak chocolate milk, and his adjustable B-girl—arrayed in a type of scarlet cowboy suit that’s mostly fringe—has inflated her breasts to what’s got to be maximum capacity.

  Woodman-wise, black is clearly In at the 15th Annual AVNAs. A lot of the men are in black tuxedos and black ties and black dress shirts. One is wearing a paisley suit of either serge or some kind of upholstery material. Another has silver platform shoes and a silver vest w/ no shirt underneath. The XPlor boys are in Klein sweatshirts and urban-camouflage fatigues, and there’s a large contingent with them that may or may not include the South Park brain trust. A guy on the arm of Ms. Morgan Fairlane has an immense and razorous violet mohawk à la British punks of the late 1970s.

  Inside the hotel, a kind of impromptu cocktail party forms in the broad marble hall outside Caesars Palace’s largest and reportedly classiest ballroom, which is called Caesars Forum. Burly casino staffers stand taking tickets and being very discouraging about anybody trying to bum-rush the show. The crush of bodies out here entails a degree of physical contact that CES mooks never even dreamed of. There are pockets of klieg-glare as cable TV reporters interview various performers about (sic:) the air of keen excitement in the air. Mysterious bundles of co-ax emerge from under the Forum doors and go all the way up the length of the hallway and disappear around the corner. A suspicion that we’d had all week but decided was unverifiable is now instantly verified when one of yr. corresps. gets accidentally shoved against a starlet and is jabbed in the side by her breasts and it hurts. A lot of people are holding drinks in plastic glasses and it’s unknown where they got them. The starlets take turns getting interviewed re atmospheric excitement while the woodmen all avoid the cameras like mafiosi. The TV lights are not doing anyone’s skin tone any good at all. In their all-black tuxes, several of the male Insiders—including e.g. John Leslie and Tony Tedeschi—are so pallid and sallow as to appear diseased. Mr. Nick East devotes a full 5.5 minutes of rapt concentration to the cuticle of his left thumb. A slight surprise is that a lot of the industry’s elite woodmen are short—5'6", 5'7" 36—and most of their companions tower over them. Dick Filth confirms that the contemporary industry’s 5'6" standard helps a prodigious male organ look even more prodigious on videotape, a medium that apparently does all kinds of strange things to perspective.

  Tickets for Saturday’s main event are $195 per, in advance. It’s unclear whether any Insiders’ tickets are comped, but journalists pay full retail. Our tickets designate our table as #189. Twenty-five hundred tickets have been sold, and since it’s highly doubtful that anybody got past the flinty-eyed casino guys outside without a ticket, tonight’s attendance can confidently be fixed at 2,500.

  The Caesars Forum ballroom itself is a huge L-shape with the stage at the—as it were—joint; thus half of the 15th Annual AVN Awards’ audience is geometrically invisible to the other half. This problem is addressed via six sail-sized video screens that hang from the ceiling at strategic points throughout the auditorium. During the nearly two hours 37 between when the doors open and the Awards show actually starts, the screens alternate quick clips from porn classics 38 (recall that the theme of the 15th AAVNAs is “The History of Adult”) with live shots of various people making their entrances and mugging for the remote cameras AVN has got circling the room.

  Both Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth have come equipped with binoculars (H.H.’s in a very official-looking Audubon Society case), which seems mysterious until we all arrive at Table 189, which is at the very, very back of the ballroom’s L’s northern leg, hundreds of yards from even the nearest video screen. “They always put the print guys out in mookland,” Hecuba explains. This fact is unpleasant surprise #1. Unpleasant surprise #2 is the supper the $195 includes, which turns out to be buffet-steam-table-style and might best be described by inviting you to imagine a very cosmopolitan and multiethnic hospital cafeteria. 39 Several of the male Insiders, we now notice, have brought in their own picnic hampers.

  Now moving w/ laden plate to a table near us is a man in a full-body leopardskin suit whose way of acknowledging people he knows is to point at them rather than wave at them. On his arm is a B-girl in a body stocking made of what appears to be a densely woven net. Two Astral Ocean Cinema contract starlets have on identical copper-colored beaded gowns with myriad lengthwise slits in the skirt parts’ fronts and backs and sides, so that as they walk to their table their upper halves look normal and their lower halves seem to be passing through an infinity of bead curtains. Obviously, the whole scene is overwhelming. The average American rarely gets to see aerobic legwarmers with 4" spike heels. The Caesars Forum ceiling is the color of rancid meringue; it has 24 chandeliers that are designed to look like concentric opened fans but actually look more like labia or very well-organized fungus. Mr. Joey Buttafuoco is in the house, accompanying 40 Al Goldstein of Screw, who is here to receive a Special AVN Achievement Award for His Lifelong Defense of the First Amendment. Black is so resoundingly In this year that even the starched linen napkins at everyone’s place settings are black. The wineglasses all have little frosted cameos of J. Caesar on them. Humorless men with walkie-talkies stand guard at each of the ballroom’s fire doors—apparently last year there were some problems with unauthorized Caesars Palace employees sneaking in to watch the gala. The video screens are now showing the climactic scene of Debbie Does Dallas, the one where the nebbishy little stand-in for all mooks everywhere finally has sex with Bambi Woods and then the screen flashes “NEXT?” The South Park boys are indeed in attendance, up at Table 37 w/ Farrel and the XPlor coterie. There are also rumors that Boogie Nights auteur Paul Thomas Anderson possesses a ticket to the gala and might show up. 41

  The closest thing to any kind of Insider table near ours is #182, which according to its black table-tent is reserved for Anabolic Video (not an industry force) and is currently occupied by a spiriferously coiffed and sullenly chewing Dina Jewel (who declines to return Harold Hecuba’s blown kiss) and her escort, a young fellow whom one can easily envision head-butting somebody in a mosh pit. D. Filth confides that this Anabolic guy is a close friend of woodman Vince Vouye
r (again, sic), who himself is not up for many ’98 Awards because he spent a good part of the past year in court and/or detention for helping operate an escort service which authorities alleged was not a bona fide escort service at all.

  It turns out that Hecuba and Filth have kept from yr. correspondents as unpleasant surprise #3 the single chintziest thing about the $195-a-head 15th AAVNAs banquet & gala: Beverages are not compris. And not just alcohol, either; even a lousy club soda w/ lime 42 is $6.00. Worse, it turns out you can’t run any sort of tab—you have to pay the waiter in cash when you order the lousy club soda w/ lime, and he (theoretically) brings your change back with the beverage. Thus a separate and memory-intensive transaction is required for each drink that each of the six-to-eight persons at each of the appr. 375 tables in the auditorium might order, with additional complications if certain people are buying drinks for certain tablemates but not for certain other tablemates, etc. 43 The whole unfree-drink situation is incredibly annoying, not only because of the outlandish ticket price but because the ballroom’s 100 percent Middle Eastern waiters (decent and hardworking fellows all, to be sure, who are taking some serious abuse about the pay-as-you-go beverage policy from mooks with cigars at the nearby tables, despite the fact that the waiters don’t make the rules and must surely find having to remember and make change for six to eight different customers per table a piercing pain in the ass 44) have only rudimentary ESL skills and tend to confuse both drink orders and currency denominations. Dick Filth leans over and shouts: “Now you can maybe see why this is a multibillion-a-year industry—they’re tight as a duck’s butt!” 45

  The crowd lingers over hypersucrotic cake and coffee and $9.00 cordials and howls conversation at itself for 90 more minutes before the house lights dim and the 15th Annual AVN Awards gala starts. What follows thereon is a kaleidoscopic flux of stilted acceptances and blue one-liners and epileptic strobes and spotlights following winners’ serpentine and high five-studded paths to the stage, of everything from generic Awards Show schmaltz to moments of near-Periclean eloquence, as in e.g.:

  “Fellow MENSA members and aficionados of Shakespeare!” intones Al Goldstein of Screw, 62 and obese and white-bearded and crazy-haired and dressed in a sportcoat whose lapels are two different primary colors, looking pretty much exactly like that one certain old guy in the neighborhood your mom warned you never to try to sell Cub Scout chocolate mints to, and glorying in a Special AVN Achievement Award he confesses to feeling he’s long deserved. “I want to thank my mother, who spread her legs and made all this possible.” Large sections of the crowd are on their feet—Goldstein is a porn icon. He was distributing NYC’s Screw on photostat when most of the people in this room were still playing with their toes. He’s been a First Amendment ninja. He drinks in the applause and loves it and is hard not to sort of almost actually like. He’s clearly an avatar of contemporary porn’s unabashedness, its modern Yeah-OK-I’m-Scum-but-Underneath-All-Your-Hypocrisy-So- Are-You-and-at-Least-I-Have-the-Guts-to-Admit-It-and-Have-a-Good-Time persona:

  “I salute the women with eleven-IQs and the men with eleven-inch cocks. The real heroes are the cocks and pussies who fuck on-screen. They’re the real heroes.” Goldstein is less conducted than borne back to his seat.

  This has followed Robert Schimmel’s intro and a 20-minute “Musical Salute to the History of Adult,” in which topless dancing girls do a medley of disco, new wave, and so on. 46 The stage band is ragged and unevenly amplified, and they all have flared collars and tight perms—it’s like watching The Brady Bunch’s final season through borrowed binoculars. The stage is lit by autotrack spotlights whose colors alternate w/o discernible scheme.

  The whole 15th AAVNAs Show lasts 3.5 hours and resembles nothing so much as an obscene and extremely well-funded high school assembly. The mix of garish self-congratulation 47 and clumsy choreography is often so weird as to be endearing. There are never fewer than six presenters for each award, and they never seem to know whose turn it is to announce a nominee, and there are always a couple who don’t get close enough to the mike to be audible and a couple others who get too close to the mike and produce a jolt of feedback that sends people and cocktails flying out of chairs in the first rows of tables. Wicked Pictures’ Satyr, a multiple-category nominee, gets repeatedly pronounced “Satter.” Winners are supposed to exit stage-left after their acceptance speeches, but even people who’ve won and been through the process several times in recent years keep forgetting and trying to exit stage-right and colliding with the hostesses who are there to escort them leftward. Some presenters insert brief rote antidrug messages into their intros, while around them twitch and sniff other presenters—not many, but some—who are obviously coked to the gills.

  Probably the most neutral and economical thing to say is that large parts of the ceremony are unintentionally funny. Winning woodmen extend earnest thanks to directors and execs for giving them “an opening” or “a shot” or “my big shot” and seem wholly unaware of the carnal entendres involved. Back at the journalists’ table with us is a 40ish woman in two-piece Armani who’s doing a spot on the Awards for ABC Radio; she spends most of the evening hunched over with her head in her hand and her tape recorder not even on. Dick Filth spends the show’s whole second hour trying to track down a waiter who owes him beverage change. AVN’s Gene Ross pays tribute to ’98’s Male Performer of the Year by saying: “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Tom Byron’s wrinkled nuts on a seventy-inch TV screen.” Rob Black’s Miscreants keeps getting nominated in category after category, and time and again there’s a frantic caucus at the podium about the correct pronunciation of miscreant, complete with a couple of presenters audibly whispering what in the fuck is the word even supposed to mean. 48

  To be fair, some of the nominated products’ titles are genuinely confusing. Triple Penetration Debutante Sluts 4 is up for Most Outrageous Sex Scene—along with Wild Bananas on Butt Row and 87 and Still Bangin’—but loses out to a scene the Program entitles “Anal Food Express” 49 from a video called My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend. Paul Thomas’s Bad Wives wins Best Film. Evil Angel’s Buda wins Best Shot-on-Video Feature. The Best Foreign Release statuette goes to something European called President By Day, Hooker By Night. Bad Wives also wins Best Actress/Film for Dyanna Lauren, Best Supporting Actress/Film for Melissa Hill, and Best Anal Sex Scene/Film 50 for Lauren and Steven St. Croix. Best Compilation Tape honors go to The Voyeur’s Favorite Blow Jobs & Anals. David Cronenberg’s mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film. Ms. Stephanie Swift wins Best Actress/Video and tells the crowd: “Thanks, everybody. My gang bang was a blast.” 51

  Max Hardcore, to Table 189’s immense and unkind delight, doesn’t win one single thing.

  An actor named Jim Buck wins AVN’s Gay Performer of the Year Award, and you better believe yr. corresps. sit bolt upright when the person who appears onstage to accept the award is a pink and leptosomatic 4'10" and is wearing an Eton collar and appears, even under 125X binoculation, to be a twelve-year-old boy. And it turns out it is a twelve-year-old boy: It’s Jim Buck’s little brother. “Jim can’t be here tonight because he’s performing in a Shakespeare festival in New Orleans,” the little boy says (correspondential expressions of bug-eyed inquiry at Hecuba and Filth—Shakespeare festival? sending a prepubescent relative to collect your excellence-in-filmed-sodomy prize?—are met with bemused shrugs), “but I’m here to thank you on his behalf, and to say that I taught Jim everything he knows.” [Enormous audience laugh and ovation, single spasmodic shudder from hunched ABC Radio lady.]

  A strange and traumatic experience which one of yr. corrs. will not even try to describe consists of standing at a men’s room urinal between professional woodmen Alex Sanders and Dave Hardman. Suffice it to say that the urge to look over/down at their penises is powerful and the motives behind this urge so complex as to cause anuresis (which in turn ups the trauma). Be informed that male porn stars cre
ate around themselves the exact same opaque affective privacy- bubble that all men at urinals everywhere create. The whole Caesars Forum’s men’s room’s urinal area is an angst festival; take it from us. The sink-and-mirror-and-towelette area, however, turns out to be a priceless mash of Insider jargon and shoptalk, all made extra-resonant by echolalic tile and a surfeit of six-dollar drinks. One performer-turned-auteur is telling a colleague about an exciting new project:

  “Found this Russian, this chick like nineteen, can’t speak a word of English, which for this [ = for the exciting project] is perfect.”

  “You going to get in there? Just for maybe like one scene?”

  “Nah. That’s the whole point. I’m the director. This is my package now.”

  “Oh man though but you got to get in there. Just one scene. Nineteen, no English. Probably got a butthole about this big” [illustrative gesture unseen because auditor is still standing complexly traumatized at urinal].

  “Well, we’ll see.” [Mutual laughter replete w/ warmth of genuine friendship, fellow-feeling; exeunt.]

  The Awards Show’s planners have obviously studied at the Oscars’ feet. Not only are the high-profile AVNAs held to the end—though with occasional teasers like Best Supporting thrown into the first two-thirds to keep people attentive 52—but the endless lists of categories and nominees are interspersed with little entr’actes of musical entertainment. Ms. Dyanna Lauren, for instance, appears between Best-Selling Tape and Best Foreign Release to sing her original composition “Psycho Magnet,” a hard-rock ballad about being a porn star and getting constantly stalked and harassed by mentally ill mooks. The song’s argumentation strikes yr. corresps. as a bit uneven, but Ms. Lauren struts and contorts and punctuates her phrasing with uppercuts to the air like a genuine MTV diva. The downside is that vocally, even with heavy amplification and digital synthesis, Dyanna Lauren sounds like a scalded cat, although Dick Filth points out that so does Alanis Morissette, and H. Hecuba chimes in by shouting: “Say whatever you want about the song-and-dance numbers here, they sure beat what Wahlberg and Reilly were coming up with in Boogie Nights!”