-Brandon Ledet
Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera (1963)
pornography
Naked Ambition (2025)
One of cinema’s greatest virtues is how it functions as a populist access point to art. Not only is the medium itself a collaboration between artists of many talents—photographers, writers, actors, costumers, sculptors, set designers, musicians, make-up artists, etc.—but its documentary branch can also document and distribute fine-art images to the widest audience possible, making fine art objects readily accessible to virtually everyone. While it could be prohibitively expensive to travel the world seeing the great works in person or to collect high-end art books that present them in the best 2D renderings available, it doesn’t cost all that much to watch a movie. With enough patience & a library card, you can even access most documentaries about fine artists for free. There’s obviously something lost in not seeing a large-scale oil painting in person or hearing a world-class musician perform from across the room, but fine-art photography is especially apt for the documentary treatment, since montages of still photographs largely function the same way as catching a photographer’s career-retrospective slideshow in a physical art gallery. Thanks to the movies, I’ve seen hundreds of photographs from the likes of Nan Goldin, Lauren Greenfield, Ernest Cole, and George Dureau that would have cost exorbitant sums of money & time to track down in other venues. Formally, documentaries about photographers don’t need to try very hard to be worthwhile. A feature-length slideshow narrated by talking heads who know the artist personally is already well worth any art-enthusiast’s time, especially if you don’t live the kind of life that allows you to travel to Paris, London, and New York City between shifts at your soul-crushing 9 to 5.
It might seem a little flippant to praise a documentary for providing wide public access to vintage nudie pics as if they were the cultural equal to Guernica or the Mona Lisa, but vintage cheesecake photographer Bunny Yeager has well earned that art-realm prestige. The new documentary Naked Ambition argues that Yeager should be recognized for her artistic & political merit as a skilled portraitist, pushing back against her superficial reputation as the pornographer who made Bettie Page the world’s most famous pin-up model. However, that work has already been done by fine art curators in recent years, who have staged retrospectives of Yeager’s work in legitimizing gallery spaces instead of the nudie mags where her photos were more traditionally exhibited. Even if Bunny Yeager were “just” a pornographer, her contributions to the visual lexicon of American pop art would still be worthy of a career-retrospective gallery show or documentary. Her iconic collaborations with Page and her aesthetic-defining contributions to Playboy‘s early, semi-literary days helped define an entire genre of vintage American smut that has been gradually disseminated & recontextualized enough that her artistic influence is now immeasurable. She also has a great print-the-legend story as “the world’s prettiest photographer,” having started as a pin-up model herself before learning how to operate a camera. As profiled here, Bunny Yeager was just as highly fashionable as she was highly ambitious. Her career as a public spectacle affords the movie more than enough vintage talk show clips, nudie cutie excerpts, and celebrity name-dropping anecdotes to fill its 73-minute runtime, but the real treasure is the access it gives the public to high-quality scans of her photographs. Like Bunny herself, they consistently look fantastic and convey a timeless cool.
If there’s any value to Naked Ambition outside of its function as a Bunny Yeager slideshow, it’s in its peripheral portrait of Miami, Florida sleaze from the 1950s through the 1970s. Alongside young feminist talking heads who link Yeager’s work to modern phenomena like burlesque revues, Insta selfies, and OnlyFans modeling, the doc also drags out a few surviving old-timers from Yeager’s heyday to attest to the grease & sleaze of vintage Miami living. The late, erratic news anchor Larry King is a surprise MVP in that respect, telling wild stories about how easy it was to get laid in his radio broadcast days that have no direct relevance to Yeager’s work except to establish the mise-en-scène in which it was created. There are also brief glimpses into the private lives of Sammy Davis, Jr. and the surprisingly gravel-voiced Bettie Page that happen to appear in anecdotes, but for the most part Yeager’s social life appeared to be more domestic than glamorous. As much as Yeager’s skill & fashionability elevated her work to fine-art quality, it was still produced as commercial material meant to financially provide for her family. Her surviving daughters are in an ongoing dispute about whether to treat the work she’s left behind as archive-worthy art or disposable smut, but they at least appear to agree that they were raised in a loving home with emotionally present parents. If you read between the lines during their opposing interviews, there is some juicy drama to be found here in how Bunny Yeager is being remembered by the people who loved her most, but that domestic conflict isn’t really any of Naked Ambition‘s business. The movie cares most about the work itself, which is presented in constant art-gallery slideshow. Assuming the public display of nude breasts can no longer shock a modern audience, there is nothing especially surprising or daring about that cinematic presentation, but there is something greatly virtuous about its ease of access.
-Brandon Ledet
Reality, TV, Violence, Pornography
I have owned the same used copy of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi actioner The Running Man for as long as I can remember. It’s been so long that the DVD itself has become just as kitsch as the cheesy 80s movie it stores. Between its standard-definition transfer, its double-disc presentation of both wide & full-screen formats, and its 3D-animated menu transitions, it’s a time capsule of physical media’s ancient past. What really dates that Special Edition DVD set, however, is its special features menu, which includes two short-form documentaries explaining The Running Man‘s continued cultural relevance into the early 2000s. One disc includes a featurette titled “Lockdown on Main Street,” which links the film’s themes of totalitarian government surveillance to the privacy-violating overreach of the Bush Administration post-9/11. Topical! The other disc’s featurette “Game Theory” covers the prescience of the film’s game-show premise in predicting the dystopian state of reality TV in the early aughts, which had then recently mutated from early human-interest documentaries PBS’s An American Family & MTV’s The Real World to more preposterous, sadistic programs like Survivor & Fear Factor. The titular, fictional TV game show The Running Man is a government-sanctioned crime & punishment program in which prisoners fight for their freedom against homicidal American Gladiator types with deadly weapons & pro wrestler gimmicks. The real-world state of reality TV hadn’t gotten quite that malicious by the early 2000s, but the other fictional programs advertised during its fictional television broadcasts—Paul Verhoeven-style—weren’t too much of an exaggeration. For instance, the commercial for a show titled Climbing for Dollars, in which contestants climb a rope over a pit of barbed wire & rabid dogs, no longer felt all that outlandish in a world that had already produced Fear Factor or the Japanese game show “A Life in Prizes” (as documented in last year’s The Contestant). Even when that Special Edition DVD was produced in 2004, the film’s dystopian game show America still seemed plausibly achievable by its far-away future setting of 2019.
The Running Man‘s quirks & charms have not changed much over the years. As a pun-heavy action showcase for a spandex-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s just as amusing now as it was four decades ago. The worst you can say about the way it has aged is that it’s been outshone by its Verhoeven-directed contemporaries RoboCop & Total Recall, which make for much sharper & more vicious satire. Oddly, the short-doc featurette “Game Theory: An Examination of Reality TV” feels much more out of date, since it speaks to current trends of reality TV production in the early 2000s instead of predicting what the format might evolve into in the future. There’s something surreal about watching talking heads explain the basic components of reality television after decades of drowning in household-name series like Real Housewives, Below Deck, Love Is Blind, The Bachelor, etc. Everything from those shows’ reduced production costs to the way they’re cast for conflict to the way their semi-scripted & heavily edited version of “reality” is a far cry from pure documentary filmmaking is spelled out as if the audience is considering those factors for the very first time. Even if obvious to a modern audience, there is still something validating about hearing former Survivor contestants and Fear Factor showrunners explain that what they’re attempting to capture is a genuine reaction to artificial scenarios — a conscious mix of reality & artifice. Sometimes, it does help to hear an everyday concept defined in simple terms like that, even if in this case it feels like explaining the existence of water to a fish. The fictional TV program The Running Man could not be more artificial; it has a pro-wrestling promotion’s relationship to Reality. The pain, shame, and death that contestants suffer on the show is real, though, which is why it’s totally plausible that massive audiences would tune into its bread-and-circuses entertainment spectacle as nightly appointment viewing. It’s the same sadistic impulse that recently inspired Netflix executives to greenlight a “real” version of The Squid Games to cash in on the popularity of the fictional one, with predictably inhumane results.
This early-2000s “Game Theory” understanding & definition of reality TV is both accurate & incomplete. It gets across the reality TV audience’s bottomless sadism, but it largely ignores the sexual voyeurism that also makes the format so enduringly popular. The success of Survivor & Fear Factor may have made it seem like society was headed towards more physically violent & punitive television programming in an impending Running Man dystopia, but it’s arguable that the format has veered towards a more sexually pornographic impulse instead. While early reality-TV breakouts like The Real World & Big Brother offered brief, night-vision glimpses into its contestants’ private sex lives, more recent shows like Love Island, Temptation Island, FBoy Island, MILF Manor, and Naked Attraction have disposed of any pretense that the audience cares about anything else but sex. While The Running Man & “Game Theory” only acknowledge the format’s sex appeal in context of casting hottie hunks & babes as eye candy, there were other early examinations of the format that fully understood its reliance on sexual voyeurism. For instance, No Wave filmmaker Beth B’s 1996 documentary Visiting Desire plays like a direct response to & escalation of the sexual voyeurism of MTV’s The Real World. Triangulating the middle ground between Annie Sprinkle, Marlon Riggs, and the street interview segments of HBO Real Sex, Visiting Desire is a social experiment shot in the cultural dead zone between reality TV & amateur pornography. It starts with a sequence of therapists & psychologists explaining the function of Fantasy in healthy adult sexuality, staged in a black-box void to look like an especially risqué episode of Charlie Rose. Then, Beth B points her camera at a series of NYC pedestrians, who ruminate on what fantasy they would want to play out if they could share a bedroom with a stranger for 30 minutes, no boundaries. Finally, she puts that scenario to a live test, bringing two strangers at a time into a sparse set decorated with only a bed, a chair, and a box of Kleenex, with 30 minutes to act out a fantasy of their choosing. It looks & feels like the set-up to an amateur porno, but the bridge from fantasy to reality becomes too intimidating in the moment for most participants to cross, and it ends up playing like an art-gallery video loop instead.
Already a few years into the initial run of The Real World, Visiting Desire totally understands the basic appeal of reality television. Beth B has set up an intensely artificial scenario (30 minutes of filmed fantasy play with a total stranger) hoping to illicit & capture a genuine human reaction (sex, or something like it). It’s not accurate to call it a failed experiment, exactly, but the range of genuine human behavior captured in the film isn’t as sexy nor as gratifying as its premise promises. Some participants are committed to the semi-scripted fantasy of their choosing: trading spankings, swapping clothes & gender roles, instructing a stranger to masturbate, etc. Unsurprisingly, NYC punk scene legend Lydia Lunch is especially game to lean into her dominatrix persona for the camera, fully playing out each fantasy prompt she’s confronted with regardless of whether she shares any attraction with her scene partner. Most participants completely chicken out, though, shying away from the fantasy they entered the room ready to perform and, in several instances, breaking down crying. That fear and that emotional release still count as unexpected genuine reaction to the artificial “reality” of the project, but they also so obviously miss the mark of what Beth B initially proposed that the cast often apologizes to the camera for not giving her what she wants. While the Running Man “Game Theory” undersells the pornographic aspect of reality TV, Beth B’s take on the format also misunderstands an essential component of what makes it work in the first place. 30 minutes is simply not enough time for her cast to adjust to her artificial environment or, more importantly, to her camera. In “Game Theory”, a former Survivor contestant describes how awkward she felt during her initial hours in front of the cameras, but then she became a more natural version of herself a few days into the shoot as she adjusted to their presence. All Visiting Desire has time to capture is that initial, awkward awareness of the camera without breaking through to the comfort that allows for genuine human response to its artificial scenario. If it were a multi-episode TV show instead of academic video art, it might’ve gotten somewhere genuinely interesting (and genuinely sexy). Instead, it’s a mixed-results experiment that’s neither pure documentary nor pure pornography.
If there’s anything instructive about this early reality-TV academia, it’s that Edgar Wright’s upcoming Running Man adaptation is unlikely to have much new to say about the violent or pornographic extremes that make the format popular. The Running Man-style violence of game shows like Survivor & Fear Factor peaked twenty years ago, while the pornographic avenues the genre has recently taken instead have no relation to the film’s Stephen King-penned source material. It’s difficult to imagine a new Running Man could even be dated in the fun way, not without Arnold Schwarzenegger quipping, “I’ll live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist, because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” in his trademark Austrian accent. The cartoonish action cinema of the original Running Man movie was already outdated by the 1990s, and the American game-show dystopia it predicts was already in full swing by the 2000s, long before its 2019 setting. So, what’s even left for a new movie adaptation to accomplish? Based on current trends, the future of reality TV looks a lot more like the semi-pornographic artifice of Beth B’s Visiting Desire, flaws & all. Maybe that’s what we should be remaking instead, now that TV producers know exactly how to manipulate game show contestants into fucking on camera. It would likely make for some very popular major-network primetime porn, à la Love Island UK (or whatever happens to be your island-themed softcore game show of choice).
-Brandon Ledet
A Woman’s Torment (1977)
-Brandon Ledet
FYC 2024: Queens of Crude
There are few genres cozier than the talking-heads documentary about a subject you already love. It’s like switching your brain off to reality TV, except you get the vague feeling that it’s somehow good for you. In my case, I love kicking back to talking-heads docs about vintage smut – the kinds of movies that exist solely for Boomers to wax nostalgic on-camera about how grimy New York City was before Mayor Giuliani ruined everything. This year has seen the wide-release of two notable documentaries in that specific cozy-viewing category: Queen of the Deuce and Carol Doda Topless at the Condor. Split between opposite ends of the US coast, they both cover the professional lives & exploits of women who became infamous sex-industry titans of the 1960s & 70s. One’s about a stripper, one’s about a porno distributor, and both were great low-effort watches to enjoy with a warm cup of tea on my couch.
Unsurprisingly, the more famous of the two women was profiled in the better documentary of the pair, as her talent for publicity left more archival material behind for her biographers to work with. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is a glowing portrait of “The Queen of Topless,” America’s first topless dancer. A woman of many professional aliases, Carol Doda was first publicized as “The Girl on the Floating Piano,” since she was the only dancer brave enough to do her go-go routine on the Condor night club’s hydraulically lifted & lowered piano. She then transformed San Francisco’s striptease scene forever by being the first dancer brave enough to perform in the “monokini” (a topless swimsuit) and, thus, kickstarting “the topless craze” that made the city a global tourist destination for vice entertainment. Her first topless performance also happened to coincide with San Francisco hosting that year’s Republican National Convention, which allows the movie to argue that the city’s strip club scene was an epicenter of 1960s Civil Rights activism, while also shamelessly indulging in the vintage softcore of Russ Meyer’s America. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is overflowing with smutty stock footage, interview clips, rock & roll performances, and mafia-connected murder conspiracies involving the infamous Floating Piano. It’s got everything a bored pervert could want; it just doesn’t break any cinematic conventions delivering it.
Queen of the Deuce is not so fortunate. Its subject, Chelly Wilson, was more of a behind-the-scenes player on the NYC porno theatre circuit, so you can only catch direct glimpses of her in home-video footage and a single tape-recorded interview. When you hit the 2D animation in the first few minutes of the documentary, you might panic that there’s not enough archival material to justify a feature, but it is worth sticking around to get to know the singular Wilson . . . in other people’s words. Queen of the Deuce is a real-life girlboss story about a Greek lesbian Holocaust survivor who became an unlikely porno magnate in 1970s NYC. She worked her way up from importing Greek romances & comedies that reminded fellow immigrants of home to producing & screening hardcore pornography in cinemas like the all-male venue The Adonis (immortalized in the Golden Age porno A Night at The Adonis). Her life is retold as a flip through her family photo album, with her grandchildren fondly reminiscing about the long climb up the porno-theatre stairs to grandma’s apartment and listening in on the “cabal of Greek witches” who would chain-smoke there – some of them lovers, all of them friends. It’s not an especially impressive movie and it can barely drag itself across the finish line of a feature-length runtime, but it’s a warmly pleasant watch, especially if you’re the kind of audience who perks up in your chair when an interviewee drops names like Jamie Gillis, Al Goldstein, and Gerard Damiano.
Although Carol Doda Topless at the Condor was the better, more energetic documentary of the pair, I still got great cozy feelings from the vintage smut of Queen of the Deuce. It may not have had the bottomless wealth of archival clips to work with as its West Coast counterpart, but it did have me reaching for my notebook more often to write down the titles of other vintage schlock to check out later, most notably a pantyhose-fetish roughie Wilson produced titled Scarf of Mist, Thigh of Satin and a vampire comedy her grandson filmed inside The Adonis titled Gargoyle and Goblin (which sadly appears to have only ever screened once at the NYU Student Film Fest). As cinema in their own right, neither film is especially daring or groundbreaking; they both fall into the rigid template of the standard talking-heads doc without many bells & tassels getting in the way. Their entire goal is to introduce you to badass women who briefly held power in small corners of the traditionally macho sex industry, so that they are not forgotten to time. It is indeed a pleasure getting to know them, even if a simple one.
-Brandon Ledet
52 Pick-Up (1986)
-Brandon Ledet
Sex Demon (1975)
These days, rip-offs & retreads of The Exorcist are all the same grim-grey trudges through tired Catholic iconography. They’re so dutifully routine that I can close my eyes and picture the entirety of titles like The Exorcism, The Last Exorcism, The Pope’s Exorcist, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose without having seen so much as a trailer; the only novelty left in the genre is Russell Crowe occasionally doing an outrageous Italian accent. That wasn’t always the case. While William Friedkin’s original Exorcist was a relatively reserved, grounded horror film that tried to make a supernatural phenomenon feel like a genuine real-world threat, a lot of its immediate echoes were bonkers, wildly unpredictable novelties (not least of all its own sequel The Exorcist III). We used to live in a world where an Exorcist riff could be a Blacksploitation sex romp like Abby, a Turkish copyright violator like Şeytan or, apparently, a hardcore gay porno like 1975’s Sex Demon. To be clear, Sex Demon is not a porno parody of The Exorcist. It’s a strangely serious, sinister knockoff of the original – a psychedelic story about a cursed medallion, nightmare-realm Satanic orgies, and a couple who’s normal, milquetoast life together is violently disrupted by demonic possession . . . and ejaculating erections. It would take a lot of footage of Russell Crowe riding a Vespa to match that kind of novelty.
To celebrate their anniversary, a gay male couple have morning sex and then venture out of the apartment to buy each other gifts. Some misguiding antiquing leads to the purchase of a cursed medallion (helpfully accompanied by a note that explains “This medallion is cursed”), which the older man buys for his younger lover as an affectionate gesture. Since there’s less than an hour’s worth of celluloid to fill, the medallion makes quick work of transforming the younger boyfriend from gentle lover to demonic rapist, sending him on a manic quest to fist, piss on, and cum inside as many men as he can before either the spell wears off or his body expires. The movie skips all of the science vs. religion diagnoses of its source text and gets right to the bed-rattling goods, but it somehow doesn’t lose an ounce of the feel-bad domestic horror in the process. By mirroring specific objects & moments from the original Exorcist, it invites a parent-child reading on the main couple’s age gap relationship, which is a kind of 40-something/20-something affair. Having given his younger boyfriend a cursed anniversary present, the older man is worried that he’s psychologically fucked the kid up for life, and a lot of the same helpless exasperation Reagan’s mother feels in the original carries over here. It’s a feel-bad porno where even the sex scenes are set to a somber, menacing orchestral score, leaving you to wonder exactly what audience this was intended to please.
Sex Demon‘s specific allusions to moments & totems from The Exorcist are relatively sparse beyond a brief recreation of the Catholic, climactic bedside ritual meant to cast the demon out of its host body. It might not have clearly been presented as an Exorcist knockoff at all if it weren’t for the final scene’s violent tumble down a flight of apartment stairs or the marketing tagline declaring “Not even an exorcist could help!” It’s only in retrospect that some moments stand out as allusions to The Exorcist, like Reagan’s masturbation with a crucifix being reworked as the possessed man stabbing a hookup in the anus with a screwdriver. A lot of Sex Demon‘s horror is of its own making, including a ritualistic Satanic orgy that signals halfway through the runtime that the demonic possession has begun (a move that feels more inspired by Rosemary’s Baby than anything Friedkin directed). The real creative centerpiece is a concluding montage that chaotically remixes all of the preceding film’s imagery into a violent, dizzying meltdown. Sex scenes, antiques, dive bar strippers, candles, skulls, kitchen cabinets, and wobbly lamps rapidly flash over a menacing orchestral soundtrack, as if every frame snipped onto the editing room floor was randomly stitched together in lieu of filming something new for the climax. That nauseating montage feels legitimately evil by the time it reaches its fever pitch, and for the first time you almost forget you’re watching something otherwise dutifully derivative.
Sex Demon was a lost film for nearly four decades, recently rediscovered and restored through the archival diligence of Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell. This was a much more substantial preservation of a lost porno parody than the infamous Bat Pussy reels uncovered by Something Weird in the 1990s. It’s a battered, seemingly incomplete print, but it gets across the film’s artistic significance as an independent queer cinema mutation of a now-canonized horror classic. Bat Pussy is much too silly of a comparison point, since Sex Demon takes its dramatic, romantic tension seriously enough to match other vintage porno outliers like Both Ways, Equation to an Unknown, and Pandora’s Mirror. If you’re looking for a goofy parody of The Exorcist, you’re looking for the 1990 Leslie Nielsen comedy Repossessed. Sex Demon is much more concerned with echoing the evil, supernatural horrors of the original, which is a pretty lofty goal for low-budget pornography.
-Brandon Ledet
Blonde Ambition (1981)
I recently picked up a used copy of Linda Williams’s landmark academic text Hard Core at The Book House in Dinky Town, a wonderful Minneapolis bookstore. Written in response to the anti-porn feminist movements of the 1980s, the cultural context of Hard Core‘s arguments may initially seem outdated, but it’s proven to be an extremely useful read. In attempting to assess the filmic medium of pornography from a neutral, objective distance, Williams found herself writing one of the first substantial academic works on the subject. She breaks the genre down to its building-block elements, performing a kind of autopsy on the fresh corpse of porno’s Golden Age, killed by the rise of home video. One of her methods in attempting to define pornography in academic terms (beyond the famously vague “I know it when I see it” definition coined by the Supreme Court) is finding direct 1:1 comparison with other cinematic genres. The most obvious go-to for those comparisons is usually the horror film, since they are both genres that intend to stimulate a physiological response in the audience. Williams goes a step further by citing horror’s “Final Girl” trope, indicating that pornography invites male viewers to identify with its female stars the same way they are when watching slashers. The genre comparison that really tickled me in Hard Core, though, was pornography’s likeness to the Old Hollywood musical, which I had never considered before.
The generic parallels between the porno and the musical are obvious once you start looking for them. Williams spends a lot of time cataloging the individual “numbers” that make up a typical porno feature (i.e, the blowjob scene, the masturbation scene, the lesbian scene, the group sex climax, etc.) and likens them to the way musicals stop their plot momentum dead to deliver a full song-and-dance number. She writes, “It is commonplace for critics and viewers to ridicule narrative genres that seem to be only flimsy excuses for something else—musicals and phonography in particular are often singled out as being really about song and dance or sex. But as much recent work on the movie musical has demonstrated, the episodic narratives typical of the genre are not simply frivolous pretexts for the display of song and dance; rather, narrative often permits the staging of song and dance spectacles as events themselves within the larger structure afforded by the story line.” In that paradigm, the spectacle of a blowjob or a threesome is just as worthy of a minutes-long break from narrative as a Fred & Ginger dance routine; they’re the very reason for the film’s existence. Porno may be similar to horror in its intent to provoke a bodily response in its audience, but in terms of narrative structure it’s much more akin to the movie musical. It’s a variation of musical with all of the usual song-and-dance numbers replaced by suck-and-fuck numbers instead.
Given this astute observation of the structural similarities between the porno and the musical, it’s incredible that Williams does not cite the 1981 feature Blonde Ambition in her research. It perfectly illustrates her point. Blonde Ambition is deliberately structured as an Old Hollywood backstage musical wherein all of the song-and-dance numbers are replaced by sex numbers. The movie chronicles the sexual exploits of the Kane Sisters (Suzy Mandel & Dory Devon) as they rise up the entertainment industry ranks from Podunk South vaudeville performers to reluctant porn stars to makeshift drag queens to Broadway legends. They’re characterized with a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dynamic, wherein the older sister (Mendel) shrewdly negotiates their business deals while the younger, ditsier sister (Devon) constantly cruises for men. Like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, there’s even a comedic mix-up involving a wealthy man’s inherited jewels (in this case, a diamond-encrusted broach instead of a diamond-encrusted tiara). Otherwise, Blonde Ambition reaches even further back into the great Hollywood songbook to follow the example of Busby Berkeley backstage musicals like 42nd Street, finding hokey humor & romance in the lives of off-duty Broadway performers. Only, the joke is that that the Kane Sisters are not especially talented. When they receive their first round of applause from a smitten hunk during their dive-bar stage act, they ask “What was that noise?” in total confusion.
Blonde Ambition‘s substitution of song-and-dance numbers for hardcore sex numbers is so direct and so literal that there’s no point in hammering the point home any further. My favorite example is a shower masturbation scene in which one of the sisters slips into what would normally be a dream ballet in another musical but instead is a kaleidoscopic homage to the gay-male psychedelia of Wakefield Poole’s Bijou. Directed by and partially starring gay men, Blonde Ambition also shares DNA with the Old Hollywood musical in the conceptual conflict of its heterosexual romance narrative versus its aesthetic appeals to queer sensibilities. Once the sisters make it to New York, they become overly friendly with a gay couple who live one floor below their apartment (including coercing them into sex with women, of course), and the whole saga climaxes at a dive-bar drag night hosted by one of those men. In an effort to reclaim possession of the Buckingham Broach, the women sneak into the bar undercover as drag queens, performing for a room full of leather daddies who find themselves disappointed (and comically horrified) by the resulting strip show. Blonde Ambition was ostensibly made with a straight male audience in mind, but it’s so classically Old Hollywood gay that it includes an “original gowns by” credit in its opening scroll.
Less surprisingly, it turns out the shared intersection of the Golden Age porno and the Golden Age musical is shameless hack comedy. Comedically, Blonde Ambition is located much closer to Branson than it is to Broadway, but its punny, campy humor is charming all the same. Between its cutaways to barnyard animal reaction shots and the costuming of its orgiastic Gone with the Wind parody sequence, the musical it most directly resembles is The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (released just one year later), which has just the right sweetly hokey flavor to counterbalance its old-fashioned sensibilities. Presumably, the locker room jockstrap number in that musical was also designed for a gay audience’s gaze, despite the totally hetero sex shenanigans in the foreground. Although Linda Williams does not directly assess Blonde Ambition in her book, she does frequently touch on that dissonance between the presumed sexual orientation of pornography’s target audience and the audience mostly likely to enjoy it. That topic mostly crops up in the way presumed-straight male consumers view pornography socially and value extraordinarily large male genitalia in their erotica, suggesting their enjoyment of the medium is somewhat inherently bisexual. In the addendum of my 1999 edition of Hard Core, Williams also references her own participation in that dissonance, explaining that as a straight female viewer, her favorite, most effective category of pornography depicts male-on-male gay sex, something that was presumably not made with her gaze in mind. Blonde Ambition works much in the same way. It’s self-categorized as a straight film, but most of its scene-to-scene appeal would be to gay men who enjoy vintage showtunes. Those men might have preferred to watch actual musical numbers instead of the sex numbers that provide the movie’s narrative-stopping spectacles, but the genre’s dissonance is often its greatest source of fascination & entertainment, especially after decades of distance.
-Brandon Ledet
Lagniappe Podcast: Boogie Nights (1997)
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic Golden Age of Porno drama Boogie Nights (1997).
00:00 Boomer rants
12:04 Winter Kills (1979)
18:39 Dazed and Confused (1993)
24:12 Mars Express (2024)
30:46 Class Action Park (2020)
36:28 The First Omen (2024)
44:54 Kalki 2898 AD (2024)
49:29 The Bikeriders (2024)
52:39 Pandora’s Mirror (1981)
54:44 Boogie Nights (1997)
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew
Pandora’s Mirror (1981)
It doesn’t matter how many times you see the same story repeated in genre movies, as long as there’s a little stylistic or thematic novelty added to the template. I’ve seen plenty of characters purchase possessed antique mirrors that warp their perception of reality and perception of their selves, mostly in cheaply produced horror pictures like Oculus, Mirror Mirror, and The Evil Within. I’ve never seen that story adapted into a feature length Golden Age porno before, though, which is the novelty that the 1981 film Pandora’s Mirror brings to the template. Vintage porno star Veronica Hart stars as the titular Pandora, who is mesmerized by an “enchanted” (i.e., cursed) mirror that she finds in the back of a dusty antique shop. No one in the film ever refers to her by “Dora” or “Dorie” or any other nickname; it’s “Pandora” every time in case anyone in the audience loses track of the allusion. Instead of seeing a demonic presence or an evil reflection of herself in the mirror like in most of these stories, Pandora’s mirror allows her to watch the sexual adventures of its previous owners over the past couple centuries, hypnotizing her in an erotic trance. Obviously, that set-up is mostly just an excuse to stage hardcore sex scenes in various period costumes, but it also plays directly into one of my favorite genre tropes: the doomed protagonist who becomes obsessed with something that’s obviously going to kill them, but they keep at it anyway because it makes them horny. The fact that the object of obsession is a magical mirror in this case is only the icing on the erotic novelty cake.
The only thing you need to know about Pandora is that her erotic obsession with her mirror is out of character and a cause for concern among her uptight yuppie social circle. The only thing you need to know about the mirror is that its owner is a seemingly immortal Dan Ackroyd type (Frederick Foster), who appears in every vignette but never has sex on camera; he’s only around to ominously answer questions like “How long have you been here?” with “I have always been here.” He does helpfully provide the backstory of the mirror’s enchantment, explaining that it was made from the wood of an oak tree that was struck by lightning, which is apparently where all enchanted lumber comes from. For any information on why the mirror is evil, we just have to draw our conclusions from the spooky synth score and the fact that Pandora is immediately addicted to gazing into its enchanted glass. There’s an interesting subversion there in how an object that’s typically associated with self-obsession and vanity is instead a voyeuristic window into the sex lives of others, but it all comes around by the time Pandora sees her own sexual fantasy reflected in cursed object (a threeway with the two gym bros who lift weights on the rooftop across the street from her apartment). This is largely a story about a woman’s masturbatory fantasies taking over her waking life until all she can or wants to do is stare into the sex mirror, to the point where she’s literally consumed by it.
If there’s anything especially notable about the sex here, it’s that every period-piece fantasy depicted is a group activity. We start with a Revolutionary War foursome, ramp up to an Old Hollywood poolside fivesome, ease back into a 1970s Broadway foursome, and conclude with a full-on S&M dive bar orgy (at NYC’s infamous Hellfire Club, reigned over here by a tiara-crowned Annie Sprinkle). The only one-on-one coupling occurs in a go-nowhere side plot in which Pandora’s boyfriend (Jamie Gillis) cheats with her conniving frenemy (Sandy Hillman) after being abandoned for too long as she stares into the mirror. Situationally, the sexual scenarios that appear in the mirror are pretty hot, especially as they play with the power dynamics of timid newcomers being seduced into deep-end group sex hedonism. In practice, the action can be a little too impractical & inhuman to maintain that erotic tension, though, especially since every single act of cunnilingues & analingus (and there are plenty) includes way more biting and random tongue flittering than direct, effectual licking. Worse yet, the casting-couch Broadway audition segment requires a performer to masturbate with the world’s least convincing dildo: a hollow, plastic toy seemingly cut in half with scissors, so that it collapses any time it’s squeezed. It would be beside the point to knock the film for not properly cropping out the shotgun mics & stage lights that creep into the frame during those sex scenes, but I don’t think it’s out of line to say the sex itself could’ve been a little more sincerely steamy.
Overall, this is a much classier picture than the only other title I know from director Shaun Costello (credited here as Warren Evans): the infamous 1970s enema-kink geek show Water Power (credited there as Helmuth Richler). The gauzy soap-opera cinematography, ambient synth soundtrack, and urban fairy tale premise all add to its mystique as one of the eerier outliers of narrative pornography’s Golden Age, at least in the wraparound story that connects the less satisfying tangents of cosplay group sex. It’s the sex that makes the picture an outlier in the larger canon of haunted mirror movies, though, so it almost doesn’t matter that none of the performers can seem to go down on each other without using every tooth in their jaw, or that Costello has seemingly never seen a functional dildo before. Just the mere fact that they’re fucking on camera at all is enough.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 