In Montgomery Clift’s breakthrough film, Howard Hawks’s Western Red River (1948), he played the adopted son who opposed John Wayne’s tyrannical rancher, and took his herd of cattle from him, incurring lethal vengeance. Clift was handsome; he was beautiful. Not everyone thought he could be convincing as a robust Western hero—including Wayne. Did the insiders know he was bisexual? That’s less clear than Hawks’s belief that Clift was exciting box office and a worthy opponent for Wayne—even in the concluding fistfight. Still, Clift had to be taught how to work with guns on his hips, a hat on his head, and a horse between his thighs. How well he managed can be seen on the screen. He was a good enough actor to impress Wayne and Hawks, and to hold the camera.
And yet…Clift’s character wears fringed buckskin (a costume you might purchase in a gay store now). He has private movie talk with Cherry Valance (John Ireland) about their guns, the innuendo of which was noticeable at the time. Then, at the close of the picture—where the script had originally called for a death—the girl (Joanne Dru), who has been propositioned by both men along the trail, tells them to stop fighting and grow up, because anyone can see they love each other.
To the movie public for just a few years, Clift was an ideal romantic hero, someone Hawks had made seem valiant and effective in Red River. The same pattern held in other Clift pictures. A Place in the Sun is a blighted love story and a social allegory in which Clift meets an ordinary girl and has sex with her. The girl, Shelley Winters, is as deglamourized as wardrobe and makeup could permit. But then Clift sees and meets a girl from the screen. He has already seen an image that represents her, on a highway billboard, as he hitches a ride. She is the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, staggeringly attractive and with a childlike tenderness. So Clift thinks to dump the pregnant Shelley and a humdrum life for the limitless horizon with a radiant Liz and “a place in the sun.” This “place” seems perfect but only as an infant’s haven.
Although Clift only contemplates murder, a providential accident intervenes. Winters drowns, and because Clift knows he is guilty in his heart, he goes to his death. This guilt in the soul rhymes tidily with the lust in the heart that affected nearly everyone at the movies in those days. The tragedy in George Stevens’s expert film seems fixed on Clift and Taylor and the innovative telephoto close-ups that enshrined their last embraces. But there’s more, if you are prepared to see how the American dream of rising above your station and claiming your place in the shining light of happiness may be dangerous. In short, be careful with the huge fantasy urging of the movies. (As the film arrived, and made its impact, the Sands Casino opened in Las Vegas, with the engraved motto over the doorway, “A Place in the Sun.”)
In 1972, Last Tango in Paris had been hailed as a new world, or an available apartment where anything could happen. There were other flutters of orgy: Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) had an unusual and delicate scene in which Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland made uninhibited love and were intercut with glimpses of them dressing afterward. It was only an aside and a joke at the expense of the normal undressing scenes. It was there to say, “We can do this now,” in a picture the title of which reminded us about seeing things.
In American film, sex receded as soon as the chance of showing it had been won—with a few honorable exceptions. The new powers, Spielberg and Lucas, never seemed interested in love on the screen. Film was their sex. Brian De Palma was fixed on voyeurism (Dressed to Kill, 1980; Body Double, 1984) but aware of little else. Philip Kaufman made an authentically sexy film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, from Milan Kundera), under cover of a European art house film. In Japan and then all over the world, Nagisa Ôshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) explored the sadomasochism in passion. Marco Bellocchio’s Devil in the Flesh (1986) had what was said to be the first filmed, or depicted, blow job—so at last the common practice of executive offices saw the artistic light of the dark.
It wasn’t truly a first for fellatio. In June 1972 a sixty-one-minute American film had opened in “pornographic” or “adult” venues. It was called Deep Throat and concerned a young woman who discovered that her clitoris was in her throat. The actress was credited as Linda Lovelace, though her real name was Linda Boreman. The picture was marketed with the poster catchphrase “How Far Does a Girl Have to Go to Untangle Her Tingle?” Perhaps that encouraged a sense of feminist self-discovery, and this was a moment in history when many educated, middle-class women were discovering that they might have an orgasm.
Film historians were not surprised when uglier truths emerged. The picture had cost $50,000 at the outside, and Boreman had been paid just $1,250, money that went to a husband who compelled her to make the film and may have abused her in the process. The auteur, writer-director Gerard Damiano, was supposed to have a third of any profits, but he was forced out of the enterprise with a mere $25,000. How much did the film earn? No one knows, but $100 million seems reasonable, granted that the film was banned in many places and its release was controlled by organized crime figures who may have learned how to fudge attendance income from the film business.
Still, no earlier “dirty” movie had sold so many tickets to respectable people. Even the New York Times admitted the film existed, though the newspaper kept its title to Throat. The world was shifting again. While it’s fair to say that apostles of desire were often let down by the screen’s long-anticipated orgy—a lot of us are inclined to fall asleep after an orgasm—the creative pursuit of sexuality was confounded by the onset of pornography and its dwelling on routine climaxes without any moral narrative.
Some predicted that pornography would never reach through our entire culture. But the technology never knows defeat: it is our cockroach. Porno movie theaters were condemned, harrassed, and closed for years. When Travis (Robert De Niro) takes Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) to a porn flick in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), it is a fatal block to their relationship and a sign of his mental disturbance. But when Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) goes on her own to a pornographic movie in Michael Haneke’s magnificent The Piano Teacher (2001), and watches the image of a woman lying on her back taking an engorged blue-black cock (there is no better word) in her mouth, it would seem that her loneliness or pathology needs that relief if she is to carry on being such a great teacher of Schubert and living with her awful mother. The rift in her being is more convincing than the guilt or regret that Michael Fassbender is carrying in Shame (2011). Reports tell us that 70 percent of women in the West have watched pornographic films at some length, while the business generates around $13 billion a year, which is about $3 billion more than theatrical movies now take in America. But porn is movies, just like surveillance footage, and movies have always dealt in sexual excitement.
The attempt to isolate “red-light districts” where porn was shown, sold, and enacted seems as quaint now as hoop skirts. In the short age of video stores, there were “Adult” sections, often behind transom doors that spoke of the Wild West. Clerks were not supposed to rent those tapes to people under eighteen, but I have known infants who crawled beneath the transom and had to be retrieved before they had studied too many of the cassette covers. (This was in the era of VHS.) All safeguards fell aside as cable television offered pornographic channels, only for that après 10:00 p.m. delight to be surpassed and censorship ridiculed by the Internet. In July 2011 a search for “hardcore movies” on Google produced fifty million results instantaneously.
Like so much movie over the decades, hard core is sensational but monotonous. You can’t credit what you’re seeing, yet you can’t wait for your chance to get away—it resembles a weekend in Las Vegas, and breeds as many dismayed losers.
Hardcore movies range in length from a minute to over two hours. I have viewed only a tiny fraction of the fifty million, and I am excluding such genres as bestiality, but still I feel confident about the pattern of what I will call heterosexual hard core. There are five actions, or books of the testament: vaginal intercourse, anal interc
ourse, cunnilingus, fellatio, and what is called the cum shot. The women look like movie women. They are young (the word teen is often used in the promotional tag lines and that gets close to the law; it is illegal to broadcast hard core with people under eighteen). They are frequently very attractive, slender, but with big breasts. The men are not as good-looking, though they are well endowed. Most pubic hair in both sexes has been eliminated—for greater visibility. There is another point about the films that a film critic notices: the anonymous settings are usually very well lit, and shot in high-key photography, and the camera prefers extended takes. There are intricate, probing movements to get a better view. It is not quite Max Ophüls or Kenji Mizoguchi, but the shooting style and its relevance to the action is invariably more fluent and interesting than one finds in today’s average feature film.
The women are sometimes called “sluts.” The men often talk to them abusively. Occasionally the women seem to be in pain or distress, though this can be hard to distinguish from ecstatic conditions. Characteristically, the women are obedient and imprisoned, the visual centerpiece, but without character, voice, or script beyond the moaned “Fuck!” and “Oh yes!” They seem always on the point of orgasm without quite getting there. The climax of most of the films involves the man withdrawing his cock from extensive fucking of the woman, masturbating, and then spraying his semen on the patient, open eyes and mouth of the woman.
The films are very matter-of-fact. It is important that the viewer believe he or she is seeing something intimate and actual, a record of the action. But the viewer learns that few facts can be trusted. The feelings are simulated or acted out. The female orgasm is invisible and uncertain, so it is not trusted. The male cum shot establishes that the man will not climax within the woman, but upon her. He retains his power and his loneliness. There is also a terrible sense of hollow reality despite the unbroken scrutiny of the filming. The sum effect of it all is to ascertain that sex has sunk to a performed process without meaning or desire. The light is bright. The image is carnal. But the members of the mass are imprisoned by privacy, the essential stance of watching hard core and the realization that movie and its yearning are at a terminal state.
If you haven’t, you should see for yourself, and begin to realize why desire’s fruition in lovemaking has withered on our screens. But if there is no desire left, why do we look, except to observe the torture and the hell?
Desire can take us to the brink of damage and dread. The people watching movies have always wondered how to reconcile the two. In The Birth of a Nation (1915), we watch as John Wilkes Booth (played by the future director of White Heat, 1949, Raoul Walsh) prepares to shoot Lincoln. D. W. Griffith took pains to make his set for Ford’s Theatre look like the real thing. So there is an inescapable urging from our pained history and our injured innocence to stop Booth from doing what we know he will do. It’s like the boy’s cry to Harry Houdini in E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime: “Warn the Duke!” (the archduke, who is on his way to Sarajevo in June 1914). But just as irresistible is the energy that movie suspense has built in us that whispers, “Shoot the gun!”
The violence doesn’t have to be physical. There is a film called Damage (1992), from a novel by Josephine Hart. David Hare adapted it, and Louis Malle directed it in 1992. I used to think the film was flawed, but I find I can’t forget it. Jeremy Irons plays a leading British politician. He lives in a very nice house with his wife (Miranda Richardson). They have two children; one is a pleasant if naïve young man (Rupert Graves) who gets engaged to a curious foreign girl, Anna (Juliette Binoche). Anna is beautiful but icy. She rarely speaks or communicates beyond routine small talk. She is cut off, like a screen, but if you touch the screen, it has scalding erotic fantasy. She will do anything, as a dream, or a nightmare. So Irons has a dreadful affair with her—wonderfully filmed as something devouring but involuntary, like a fatal illness—and the son dies when he discovers what has been happening. There is no need of moral commentary in the film; it would be stupid. The process simply admits, of course, we do damage because we need it as much as we need love.
But if a film like Damage teaches us something pitiless and uncomfortable about human and social nature, there are more films that make us wonder how far the separation from reality in the cinema’s technology enforces the loss of pity. When the Production Code yielded in the 1960s to change, most of the early attention went to sexual opportunity. But as sexuality seemed culturally disappointing, so the other old taboo, violence, came into its own. And in some crucial and shocking moments, sex and the violence are inseparable.
Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs was filmed in 1971. An American mathematician, David (Dustin Hoffman), takes his new wife, Amy (Susan George), back to the part of the English countryside where she was raised. (They filmed in Cornwall.) He wants to escape America because of its violence. The wife discovers young men from her youth, who may have romanced her once. They are a building crew repairing the couple’s cottage. They lure the husband away on a fool’s errand. Then one of the men approaches Amy.
She is stretched out on a sofa—we watch or don’t, but what are the movies if we don’t watch? Amy protests his sexual advance. She says, “No!” repeatedly. The man pulls off her blouse and removes her underpants. He penetrates her and he fucks her, and in the process she is aroused enough to feel pleasure and to stroke his head. (This may be my reading of the scene, but Peckinpah was usually good enough to deliver his intention.)
After the first man takes Amy, a second man appears and tells number one to hold her down so that she can be unequivocally raped. The twenty-year-old Susan George (thirteen years Hoffman’s junior) was cast as Amy, and she knew there was a rape scene in the script. But as the shooting developed, Peckinpah became more intimidating—his own sexual attitudes, his use of drink, and his misogyny were all mixed up in this. He regarded himself as an artist, and in The Wild Bunch (1969), at least, he had made a fine picture. But the actress was becoming increasingly nervous: “I dreaded that rape scene…Sam kept saying he was going to shoot the greatest rape scene ever put on film. He went on and on about it and he’d be very visual in his descriptions of the things he was expecting, physical things that he was going to film.”
In a panic, George went to the producer, Dan Melnick, and asked to have the details of the scene itemized in advance. Peckinpah complained but complied, but his list of actions and humiliations made the actress even more alarmed. She begged for limited nudity and showing things with her eyes. There was a compromise: she shows her breasts but not really more in the week it took to film the double rape. I want to stress that the scene is essential to the story (if you want this story): it motivates a violent, lethal revenge on the crew by Hoffman’s husband. The filming is done with hideous impact, and Peckinpah, no matter how troubling, was very talented. But it’s naïve to say the scene is done only from the victim’s point of view. It shudders with a horrible detachment, a voyeurist privilege, a threshold to inhumanity. It is a chance to see a rape. You cannot miss Peckinpah’s curiosity or your own mixed feelings.
But rarely with rapes are huge, unknown crowds encouraged to watch and charged for the spectacle. Straw Dogs predates the widespread availability of hardcore movies, and as a scenario, it is more inventive than that genre. As motion picture, it is lit and shot with an intimacy that may be nauseating; there is even music (by Jerry Fielding) that is unnervingly seductive. Still, what makes this scene appalling is its instinct for our predicament and advantage at the movies. Just as once—in Muybridge, Lumière, and Griffith, for example—we noted the sense of miracle and shared wonder in being able to see (let there be light), by the time of Straw Dogs we are at odds with ourselves as to whether we should be looking.
As soon as that issue is raised, we are into the vexed area of consequence, which applies equally to sex and violence—and even to the larger matter of how we perceive and place ourselves in the world as a whole. In a nutshell, the questions are simple: Does motion picture aff
ect us? How has it lasted a hundred years and more if there wasn’t an impact and an imprint? Were we not amused, excited, frightened, and moved? Weren’t we entertained? And if we regard it as beyond dispute that people growing up learned more about how to speak and pause and think from the movies, and sometimes came to consider hitherto alien ideas—such as the humanity of blacks, women, cartoon characters, and murderers—then isn’t it reasonable to suppose that a sense of story and order has also been communicated, along with notions on how to behave, dress, undress, be violent, and have sex? The possibility of being photographed in surveillance is at the heart of the widespread fear we have about privacy being invaded.
There are those who think hardcore movies may be useful. They allege that this stuff may be watched by solitary, or lonely, people who find relief in the experience sufficient to offset otherwise violent and antisocial impulses. There is no evidence for this theory, so it is hard to resist the implication that sexual and violent energy are related, along with undue loneliness and antisocial urgings. In other words, some deep-seated guilt or dread remain attached to sex. On the other hand, some people may learn useful things about sex from hard core: what to do and how to do it. It may still be the case that plenty of healthy young men and women don’t know enough about these things, because the fear or dread is enough to keep it from being a topic of education in schools or in the home. So “Sex Ed” may teach kids how pregnancies occur, but it is shy of recommending pleasure.
Some of us may watch hardcore movies because we derive more stimulation, excitement, or pleasure from screened sex than from the real thing. For this book, at least, I watch them as a historian or a commentator on film, which means that I try to describe the cinematic experience. Just as if I am writing about Ophüls, Renoir, or Welles, that involves the filmic expressiveness of a particular moment.
The Big Screen Page 55