Making Art From Porn

Making guys uncomfortable with my direct sexuality has always been a turn on for me. The art of sexual frustration is the ultimate aphrodisiac, exquisite torture what’s lacking in most porn. It’s not enough to see actors that want to fuck. I want to see actors that have to fuck. The driving force behind the orgasm, the journey leading to release, is the very essence of sex. I was always fascinated by David’s desire to do a porn flick in which the viewer could even taste, touch and smell him – visceral pornography. Of course literally this is impossible, but an approximation, a transporting of the audience to another world, is the very foundation of film. The problem with porn is that it doesn’t strive for this higher level.

Never underestimate the power of the actor. If the acting is good, the audience will empathize with the character, feel his pain and live his hope. It’s no different for porn – no difference between crying with a character and coming with him. Good “acting” equals feeling empathy equals experiencing his orgasm. And the bar is set so low for porn that it’s easier to do something groundbreaking in the blue, to sneak art into porn like the Hayes Code era directors sneaked “porn” into art. After all, you can learn just as much about characters by the way they have sex than by any other behavior they might exhibit in a movie. Director John Cameron Mitchell once described his indie film “Shortbus” as “one of many recent cinematic exercises to see whether ultra-explicit sex can be used in a non-pornographic way (i.e., not focused on getting you off) to tell us about the film’s characters and, we hope, ourselves.” I wasn’t interested in doing this. A porn flick with a great script will go farther than an independent film with hardcore sex (though a hardcore version of “Secretary” would have been brilliant. In films like this where sex is integral to story, it’s a disservice to the movie to “edit out” the sex – as bad as adding gratuitous sex to boost box office). I want to see if meaningful characters and a well-developed script (i.e., the hallmarks of indie filmmaking) can get one off at a deeper, more connected level – and in the process tell us more about ourselves. Perhaps Mitchell and I are heading in the same direction from opposite starting points.

Gratuitous sex in cinema is a given – but no one ever talks about its absence. Certain films would make more sense, be more natural and organic with the inclusion of hardcore imagery. A master like Antonioni would have made a brilliant pornographer – Bertolucci, too. “Blow-Up” and “L’Aventura” and “Last Tango In Paris” are all the more alien for their exclusion of real onscreen sex within their sexually charged worlds. Even Kubrick’s “Spartacus” along with his “Eyes Wide Shut” could have benefited from some actual fucking. Since I lived the S&M version of “Last Tango In Paris” publishing my memoir as erotica allowed me the freedom to stay true to every detail, to not censor that which was essential to the story. I would hope that as porn enters the mainstream, “legit” casts and crews would become interchangeable with the blue, that a director would be no more stigmatized for going from an R film to an X than he or she would be for moving from a PG project to an R. Where are the film world’s Henry Millers, the Anais Nins?