Gerard Damiano dreamt, quite sincerely, of the day when pornography and Hollywood would seamlessly meld together into a nexus of sex and story telling. That was the vision he had when he started making his movies, and that was the ethos behind his most famous film, Deep Throat. Instead, his work galvanized a country, revolutionized the porn industry, and, if we’re to believe the directors of the new documentary, now playing at the Clay Theatre, Inside Deep Throat, forever separated pornography from the mainstream.
Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato wrote and produced Inside Deep Throat, a documentary that chronicles the making of the movie, the publicity and sexual revolution that followed, and today’s story of yesterday’s stars. The movie flits between comedy and seriousness, succeeding, largely, in making a compelling cultural story out of a movie that famously told the story of a woman whose clitoris was located in the back of her throat. To begin from that plotline and weave the Nixon-era politics, the age of the VCR, and feminist/post-feminist critiques of pornography into one coherent documentary is no small feat, and the directors certainly make it an entertaining ride.
Somewhere in the middle of it all are the characters. Most impressively, Bailey and Barbato gathered a diverse selection of talking-heads, from Gore Vidal to Camille Paglia to Dick Cavett, to talk about the movie, and their current interviews with the cast and crew show a deft touch in letting interviewees speak for themselves. In the interviews, the story of Deep Throat ekes out-a low-budget movie that began as a lark catapulted into the national spotlight once the government focused anti-smut legislation against the film and its producers. In an unsurprising turn of events, the publicity only made the film more popular and, eventually, Deep Throat began to stand for something more than sex on screen, but, maybe, as an expression of a new American sexuality.
While we might want to bestow some of the credit for that move onto the film’s producers and directors, they are almost uniformly self-deprecating about the original intent of the film. Director Gerard Damiano, a man whose charm is only slightly offset by the inhuman height at which he wears his pants, offers no grand explanation for his film beyond the shock with which he realized the unique talent of the film’s star, Linda Lovelace. Nor does Harry Reems, the star turned scapegoat turned First Amendment crusader turned alcoholic turned real estate salesman, seem particularly proud of his cinematic achievements. But nonetheless, Deep Throat, in some way, moved America, whether that was its original intention or not.
The movie’s directors would like us to believe that the debate over Deep Throat thirty-odd years ago might shed some insight into the dichotomous political and social battleground of today’s cultural wars. Certainly, when Larry Parrish, the prosecuting attorney in the Deep Throat Supreme Court Case, tells the camera that he believes toady’s America is riper for the upholding of obscenity laws than in the era of Deep Throat, the air gets a little bit thicker. Of course, he adds, we need to get rid of the pesky terrorists first, and that’s no small first step. But while the directors and cast of the original Deep Throat seemed to have a grasp on their relationship to the world stage, Mr. Bailey and Mr. Barbato allow themselves to get too wrapped in their own work to separate cultural object from cultural moment.
While Deep Throat may have acted as a catalyst, the film was never, as the narrator Dennis Hopper claims in the end, more about a cultural divide than anything else. In fact, the movie was about a unique physical trick, performed, for the first time, on the large-screen. The religious right may have brandished the first swords in the crusade against Deep Throat, but at least if sales are any indicator, it was the pornography industry that won in the end.
And that continues to win. One of last year’s biggest porn sellers was One Night in Paris-the night-vision tryst between heiress Paris Hilton (then 19) and her boyfriend-at-the-time, Rick Solomon. While those sex tapes may have been part of a larger publicity effort, the public’s reaction to the tapes seems worth noting. In this case, Solomon, 13 years her senior, taped his sexual encounters with Hilton (which, it bears mentioning, involve the same acts, though performed perhaps less skillfully, that made Deep Throat famous), and then, against her wishes, sold the tape to the public. In this case, sex as film was made and then sold against the will of one of the participants. Late in life, Ms. Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace, testified to congress that every time someone watched her film, it was as if she were being raped. Feminists, including Gloria Steiner (whose brief presence in the film provides such a reminder of her brilliance that her absence nearly lingers), used Ms. Lovelace to attack the porn industry, most often rightly, for the damage it did to women. But interestingly, it was that same movement that allowed the Reagan Administration to then over-look scientific inquiry and merely rely on testimony in order to pass the Meeks Report, which classified pornography as dangerous and harmful to society.
The question of Ms. Hilton, then, becomes more interesting. Where, in our timeline, did our perception of sex in the public eye change? To what extent has it become ok? The directors argue that, more than anything else, Deep Throat stands at the center of this change. In the end, they argue, Deep Throat self-destructs, along with the vision of Mr. Damiano. The movie that meant to bridge the gap between hard-core sex and Hollywood created a backlash that pushed sex out of the studios and into the VCR, which, in turn, lowered the artistic value that Harry Reems had cloaked himself with in order to avoid jailing. Art left porn, sex left Hollywood, and Ms. Hilton, a willing partner in a private act but an unwilling actor in a public performance, has nearly no one to come to her defense.
Inside Deep Throat covers a lot of tricky ground, not least among it being the feminist take on a movie that locates female pleasure in the back of the throat (and, consequently, in the realm of male fantasy). There seems to be a fine line between liberating sexuality and sex that reinforces other types of oppression, though that line, despite the presence of weighty feminist thinkers, is not one that this film walks. When the directors stick to the story, Inside Deep Throat provides an engaging look at a particular moment in American history, and a very personal and emotional look at its consequences. When the directors attempt to extrapolate cultural clashes and today’s political climate, they fall woefully short.
Of course, there is one point worth savoring in the allegory: it was Deep Throat, both the cultural rebellion spurred by the movie, and the identically-named political informant, that eventually brought Nixon down, an irony worth savoring. Thirty years later we face another president with a similar atitude towards the media and pop culture. With all of the fuss about moral values, there has yet to be a moment or object that effectively organizes counter-culture against the sort of First Ammendment repression that this administration favors. Paris Hilton does little for us, but perhaps we’re simply waiting for our own version of Deep Throat.
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