pornography

Pornography Trichotomy

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Anytime the cult media distributor Vinegar Syndrome advertises an online sale, I immediately start perusing the offerings on their sister site Méluisne, where they’re also selling discounted Blu-rays of vintage pornography. Since most streaming services won’t touch hardcore titles of any quality, the only legal way to access most Golden Age pornos is to collect them on physical media, which makes Mélusine an irresistible siren during sales. That’s not to say that Vinegar Syndrome’s work restoring vintage horror schlock like Nightbeast, Demonwarp, Devil Fetus, or The Suckling is any less important than their restoration of retro pornos, but there’s something about the physical-media-only exclusivity of Mélusine’s library that routinely has me reaching for my wallet. It’s highly plausible that I could catch up with an Italo horror relic like Burial Ground on Tubi one day, for instance, while the same can’t be said for the hardcore cuts of titles like SexWorld, Blonde Ambition, or Pandora’s Mirror. So, during Vinegar Syndrome’s recent “Halfway to Black Friday” sale, I picked up a trio of Golden Age pornos to add to my personal schlock pile simply because they were discounted and looked interesting. As a group, the movies ultimately didn’t have much in common besides their shared X rating, their early-80s premiere dates, and their universal inclusion of a gentle lovemaking scene on the carpet in front of a fireplace. Individually, however, I found them taxonomically clarifying in the way they identify three distinct modes of traditional pornographic storytelling: the expected collection of standalone sex scenes that became an industry standard in the VHS era, the saga of absurd letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies you’ll find in stereotypically airheaded pornos, and the shockingly thoughtful & tragic dramas that are too much of a bummer for you to imagine anyone actually getting off to them despite all of the exposed & penetrated flesh.

1981’s Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was the directorial debut of its titular star, who makes direct eye contact with her audience while inviting us along to indulge her hottest sexual fantasies, one at a time. Sprinkle starts the picture pouring a glass of wine under the candelabra lighting of her living room piano, then shows the audience childhood photos from her life before the industry, when loved ones knew her as Ellen. After this photo album nostalgia trip, the camera pans over to a fireplace that’s been cropped just outside the frame, where two naked men are arm wrestling on the carpet as foreplay, waiting for Sprinkle to use their bodies. She quickly obliges, guiding the audience through her individual fantasies as she fucks new scene partners in every room of the house, narrating instructive demos for novelty sex acts like tit jobs, golden showers, and prostate play. The one-on-one intimacy of this non-narrative hangout would become much more common in the home video era that would soon snuff out the industry’s Porno Chic boom. In order to properly break the fourth wall, Sprinkle has to film herself instigating an orgy in the rows of a 42nd Street movie theater, exciting the audience with the fantasy that she might sit next to us at any time. It’s more an elaborately mediated act of mutual masturbation than it is a proper Golden Age porno, which has only become more standard and more direct in the modern era where performers can now interact with their audience in real time on video chat sites like OnlyFans. Sprinkle’s early prototype for that modern porno template—wherein narrative has been excised in favor of stringing together a collection of standalone sexual stunts—is still heavily scripted, though, and it includes such delightful cornball dialogue as, “Do you like big tits? Well, as you may have noticed, I have rather larger ones.” It’s just a nice, holesome hangout with our good friend Annie, who would later push its interactive format to much more psychedelic extremes in the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, an all-timer in pornographic video art.

You can tell Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was ahead of the curve in its audience-interactive intimacy by watching the bonus features for Neon Nights, which was also released in 1981. While providing commentary for a reel of unused outtakes, Neon Nights director Cecil Howard calls attention to the shots where Kandi Barbour makes direct eye contact with the camera during her own fireplace lovemaking scene, which had to be trimmed as a result. Neon Nights is much more traditionally narrative than Deep Inside, following the hitchhiking adventures of a horny runaway teen (Lysa Thatcher). That’s not to say Howard’s movie is better behaved than Sprinkle’s, though. It starts with Jamie Gillis fisting that teenage runaway’s mother while the teen listens intently from the opposite side of her bedroom wall, brushing her hair & practicing her makeup before using her beauty instruments as makeshift dildos. She decides to hit the road when her stepfather hits on her the next morning, in one of two scenes that reference the infamous shower stabbing sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho. The horrors continue on the road, where she encounters swinger magicians who make her levitate out of bed like Linda Blair, an unscrupulous nude photographer who likes to fuck on a bed of porcelain babydolls, and a dreamworld doppelganger for her creepy stepfather that she’s much more willing to sleep with. Neon Nights is one of the few movies where you’re grateful for a last-minute “It was all just a dream reveal,” since it recontextualizes a series of seemingly nonconsensual sex acts as the incoherent fantasies of a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants. More importantly, it’s an instructive look at the thin border that separated horror & pornographic filmmaking sensibilities in its era — two disreputable genres that were culturally dismissed for their shared cheapness & prurience. The runaway’s far-out sexual exploits are often set to the spooky theremin sounds of a sci-fi soundtrack. Veronica Hart’s sex scene among her babydoll collection is frequently punctuated by flashes of lightning to accentuate the taboo. Much like many dirt-cheap horror titles of its time, Neon Nights would make for an excellent classroom tool to demonstrate how simple lighting & color scheme choices (from the titular neon hues of a motel sign to the more porno-specific contrast of a pink-flushed face pressed against a lime green bedspread) can make even cheapest sets look fantastic … if it weren’t for all of the vigorous onscreen penetration that would alienate most students. It’s also just a very silly story about a teenage hitchhiker’s letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies, nakedly so.

When most modern audiences picture a narrative porno, they’ll think of outlandish fluff like Neon Nights, wherein a hitchhiker’s road trip storyline is used as a flimsy excuse to connect a series of standalone goofy sex scenes, even if artfully staged. There was a brief time, however, when Porno Chic features were thought to have a “crossover” commercial appeal and, thus, were expected to be populated by real characters with real emotional crises that could be resolved dramatically instead of pornographically. 1982’s Roommates (directed by Chuck Vincent) is the rare hardcore title that leers harder at women’s internal lives than their external ones, the kind of Golden Era porno that’s so dramatically heavy that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being turned on by it. Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart, and Kelly Nichols star a trio of young professionals sharing rent in a New York City apartment while struggling to break into the entertainment industry. Fox is eager to get into movie production work but is professionally haunted by her previous career as a callgirl; Hart is getting her feet wet as an off-Broadway stage actor but is caught between the affections of her seemingly gay costar and her older, married drama teacher; Nichols is a fashion model whose escalating drug addiction leaves her vulnerable to creeps & stalkers (most notably Jamie Gillis, again playing to type). All three women are on the verge of thriving, with only the universal problem of men being disgusting getting in the way of their success. As a result, most of the sex they have along the way is intentionally, uncomfortably bad — tainted by coercion, extortion, intoxication, and abuse. It’s the only professional porno I’ve ever seen where women immediately disengage from oral sex to spit in disgust, once in a toilet and another time onto the trousers of a reviled colleague. It’s also the only professional porno I’ve seen that convincingly stages actual, recognizably human arguments instead of bouts of belligerent shouting (give or take Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street). It’s as heavy on dialogue as it is short on sex, to the point where even its obligatory fireplace lovemaking scene is staged in front of the punier flame of several candles instead of the real deal. As a result, it’s the only title out of this trio that could be convincingly passed off as “a real movie” to most discerning audiences, which is a designation that’s often saved for pornos that are too dramatically upsetting to function as a genuine turn-on.

Obviously, the major cinematic draw of these vintage porno titles is the opportunity to see extreme images no other filmic genre would dare show onscreen. There is no shortage of those extreme moments in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, but I think I was most surprised by the infinite angles & configurations Sprinkle (along with uncredited co-director Joe Sarno) came up with to capture the action of Ron Jeremy’s hardon sliding between her “rather large” breasts. On the opposite end of the dramatic-pornographic spectrum, Roommates thought to include representation of cis women huffing poppers on a nightclub dancefloor, a salacious pastime that has become something of a trend among young partygoers in recent years but has obviously been in practice for decades. The real standout moment to me, however, is a scene from Neon Nights where actress Arcadia Lake is painting a giant cock on her home easel while actively masturbating between brushstrokes, which is just about as honest of a depiction of artistic process as I’ve ever seen in cinema. While cheap-o horror schlock and other disreputable genres have gradually been legitimized as worthy cultural artifacts, vintage porno is still a niche beat for professional critics & academics to cover, if it’s touched on at all. Since sexual fantasy is just as integral to human life and cinematic expression as any other natural impulse, it’s a shame that it has so little room for discussion or exhibition in the modern discourse, while half a century ago it was being covered by outlets like Variety and The New York Times. Even as someone who already values this kind of cultural runoff, I’m struggling to not make qualitative judgements about the naked titillation tactics of Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle or the daffy daydream fantasies of Neon Nights against the more somber downbeats of Roommates, which earns instant respectability by undercutting its own eroticism. I’ll need to watch more vintage pornography to work on that. In fact, all serious cinephiles should be watching more pornography of all varieties, the more outdated the better. There’s much left to interrogate & discuss, while most avenues of vintage horror discourse have already been exhausted well past their dead ends.

-Brandon Ledet

Take One (1977)

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They say all pornography, no matter how scripted, is partially documentary. You’ll find the phoniest characters, dialogue, and scenarios cinema has to offer in porno, and yet the physical sexual contact between performers is more real than all other cinematic action — unstimulated, often documented by the camera in medical detail. It’s easy to look back to vintage titles of the Porno Chic era and retroactively impose anthropological meaning on them, citing them as a document of a bygone era, since their unpermitted street shoots and nonexistent costume budgets often captured the people of the time as they were in daily life. Pornography is also immediately documentary, though, caught between the extremes of both staged cinematic fantasy and the documented reality of the performers within that fantasy. This is not a new observation. One of Porno Chic’s earliest auteurs was playing around with the tension between those extremes a half-century ago, coining the term “docufantasy” to describe his chosen artform’s dual, self-conflicting nature. Wakefield Poole’s 1977 “docufantasy” Take One opens by warning the audience that trying to parse out what’s fiction and what’s reality is a fool’s errand, announcing, “For your enjoyment, do not try to understand this film: there is nothing to understand. It is only real people doing reel things and making them real together.” That distinction between the “real” and the “reel” sums it all up more concisely than I ever could.

Take One finds Wakefield Poole on the opposite coast than his crown jewel Bijou, now docu-fantasizing about the gay men in 1970s San Francisco. In an early precursor to Beth B’s reality-TV prototype Visiting Desire, Poole invites eight men from the local scene to confess their fantasies in videotaped interviews, then act them out in front of 16mm cameras. Unlike in Visiting Desire, this experiment reliably results in onscreen fucking, with each performer given a spotlight fantasy sequence before they all gather for a climactic orgy in the theater where the movie they’re participating in premieres mid-runtime. Some fantasies are more abstract than others, such as an early sequence where a young man gets so revved up thinking about his muscle car that he finds a way to passionately penetrate its hood ornament, à la Julia Ducournau’s Titane or Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos. In another, a domestic couple has semi-public sex on the sunny roof of their isolated desert home, leaning heavily into the soft psychedelia of the film’s post-hippie era. The most shocking sequence is the one in which two real-life brothers have sex on camera, fulfilling an incest fantasy most pornos only playfully hint at to capitalize on a convenient taboo. Here, the siblings’ lovemaking is warmly tender to an almost disconcerting degree, as if the audience has been invited to witness an intimate moment that no one outside their unusual relationship was ever meant to see. That sequence is more “real” than it is “reel,” alarmingly so.

If Take One falls short on either side of the real/reel divide, it’s in the supposedly documentary interview sequences that justify their resulting fantasies. For the most part, the initial video interviews that inspired the film aren’t incorporated into the final cut and are instead restaged and scripted in a more traditional pornographic narrative style. So, like Bijou, the film is at its best when it goes full fantasy mode, staging the abstract sex acts inspired by those interviews in an endless black void. The best scenes in the film are pure jack-off material, with men narrating their fantasies to the audience while masturbating in a featureless room decorated only with slideshow projections of momentary illustrations, as described in their horned-up ramblings. It’s a surprisingly poetic approach to pornography that’s introduced as soon as the opening scene, wherein a nude ballet dancer performs a full routine for the audience after emerging from the silver screen like a cryptid hatching from an egg. That poetic approach to the genre is later echoed in Poole’s liberal use of color gels, as he bathes his performers in fantastic colored lights that untether them from this earthly realm. The film’s incidentally documentary glimpses of vintage gay San Francisco are cool & all, but we spend most of the runtime indoors, so Poole is smart to attempt to document their internal lives instead. We learn about them by finding out what gets them off.

Because this project is so dependent on Wakefield Poole’s distinctions between the “real” and the “reel,” the filmmaker himself inevitably becomes part of the story. Take One is a meta-porno, including footage of Poole & crew recruiting performers, conducting interviews, operating cameras, and exhibiting film prints between the purer sensory immersions of the full-on fantasy sequences. The reality of the movie being made & projected in-film fully breaks down by the mid-premiere orgy sequence, which gets so out of control that even the projectionist gets in on the action, receiving a surprise blowjob in his hermetic booth above the fray. Having already fulfilled all of his obligations as a documentarian and a pornographer, Poole fully lets loose in that sequence, playing around with as many color gels and camera angles he can afford to shoot while his performers shoot all over each other. He becomes especially enamored with repurposing a glory hole as a peephole in that sequence, viewing the action from a self-imposed distance on the other side of a faux patrician. For all of the semi-documentary elements that make Take One interesting as a consciously academic object from porno’s distant past, it’s still most useful and most remarkable when it drops the bullshit and gets down to the task at hand: filming unstimulated sex acts in the most aesthetically pleasing light possible. Poole didn’t need to go out of his way to stage a “docufantasy”; that’s already the business he was working in.

-Brandon Ledet

Gums (1976)

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Steven Spielberg’s sharksploitation progenitor Jaws celebrated a 50-year anniversary last year, and the occasion was marked by a wide theatrical re-release, followed by an extensive, interactive exhibition at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. I assume, then, that its most noteworthy porno parody, 1976’s Gums, will be receiving the same 50-year fanfare later this summer. If one is not already in the works, it’s not too late to slap a theatrical re-release together, thanks to the fine folks at the American Genre Film Archive already having a cleaned-up scan of the curio on-hand, ready to roll. Gums is included as a B-side bonus feature on AGFA’s Blu-ray release for Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, the only other film of note from director Robert J. Kaplan. In a way, Gums does recall that earlier, mightier title by hiring porno queen Terri Hall to swim through an underwater garden of sea cucumbers (i.e., a coral reef composed of gigantic cocks), but it’s overall too restrained and too straight to match the delirious heights of Kaplan’s hippie-NYC masterwork. It’s a straight-up, few-frills Jaws parody with a one-joke premise: What if, instead of a killer shark, a beach town was terrorized by a killer mermaid who bites off men’s penises mid-fellatio. In 1976, there was enough pot smoke in the air to land that kind of novelty in movie theaters across the country, allowing Gums to contribute to Jaws’s legacy in a way that deserves some official acknowledgement, however small.

In the cold-open kill, a young man skinny-dips fully nude instead of a young woman — the camera zooming in on his flaccid penis before it’s castrated via mermaid. Once detached, it then floats to shore as a disembodied dildo. That dildo is the closest thing you’ll see to an onscreen erection in this film, since Gums opted to stick to a softcore rating in order to swim its way into as many theaters is possible, treated more as a campy midnight-movie novelty than a Porno Chic marital aid. Like the shark in Jaws, Terri Hall’s cock-chomping mermaid is mostly hidden from the audience in the first half of the (mercifully short) runtime, leaving the audience to hang out with her horned-up macho victims for far too long. Spending so much downtime with such beloved Jaws-spoofing characters as Deputy Dick, Dr. Smegma, and Captain Clitoris, I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s “First Law of Funny Names,” which declares that “funny names, in general, are a sign of desperation at the screenplay level.” Gums has no clue what to do with itself when not filming Terri Hall swimming between killer blowjobs underwater, as it cannot fill its runtime with hardcore sex without censoring the action with comic book panels of phrases like “Pork!” and “Slurp!” So, it stages a collection of go-nowhere bits, throwing anything it can think of at the audience to reach feature length: stock footage of real-life beavers, a buzzard puppet with a human hard-on, home movies of mating pet dogs, a Mel Brooks-style Nazi spoof, and whatever else got a chuckle from the crew while passing joints around the set. It’s all obnoxious nonsense, but it’s at least constantly surprising obnoxious nonsense. When the non-mermaid main characters are abruptly replaced by puppets in the final scene, there’s no possible reaction other than “Sure, yeah, whatever.”

The only dialogue exchange in Gums that got a genuine laugh out of me, was when Dr. Smegma (the Hooper stand-in) explains to Deputy Dick (the Brody stand-in) that true mermaids don’t have actual fish tails, that their tails are “psychological.” It’s a hilariously labored, unnecessary excuse for the lack of craft in Terri Hall’s costuming, which essentially amounts to some dramatic drag-queen eye makeup and a coral tiara. It’s also one of many instances in which the script seems to be working out its core gimmick in real-time, sometimes even workshopping what the eventual title will be with alternate options like Deep Jaws (in reference to Deep Throat) and Thar She Blows! (which is repeated at top volume ad nauseum). For all of its failed humor and self-censored sensuality, though, Gums does achieve some semblance of arts-and-crafts beauty in its underwater photography, whenever it drops all of the schtick onshore to instead focus on Hall hunting down her next victim. Maybe there’s not enough substance there for it to earn its own year-long Academy Museum spotlight, but maybe it could be included in the ongoing Jaws celebration as a backroom exhibit, hidden behind a red curtain like the porno rooms at the video rental stores of old. All they’d need to add is a few video arcades showing loops of Terri Hall swimming around pantsless in her underwater sea-cucumber garden to demonstrate the kind of effect Jaws had on the wider culture (beyond inventing the summer blockbuster as we know it). Gums doesn’t deserve much, but it at least deserves that.

-Brandon Ledet

Café Flesh (1982)

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The most infamous critical assessment of pornographic filmmaking was penned by a judge, not by a professional film critic. During a 1964 obscenity case, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was forced to legally define the dividing line where sexually explicit art becomes hardcore pornography, and the best he could come up with was “I know it when I see it.” At the time, he was ruling on what kinds of material would be legally approved for public exhibition in the US, participating in a long tradition of governmental censorship of pornographic art, but it was such a rarely honest, human moment within that tradition that it’s continued to reverberate in the half-century since. That “I know it when I see it” ruling even continues to resonate in how modern film critics write about pornographic cinema, as the Porno Chic moment of the 1970s & 80s has once again become a fascination for film-nerd tastemakers. There’s an attraction among hip genre-film aesthetes to treat vintage hardcore pornography as the next taboo cult-cinema frontier to be conquered, now that every last slasher, giallo, erotic thriller, and noir pic of any interest has already been given the loving 4K Blu-Ray restoration treatment. How far does that renewed critical interest in hardcore porno go, though? If a vintage porno like Bijou or Blonde Ambition is worthy of critical re-appraisal through a modern lens, why aren’t more recent best-seller titles like Visiting My Anal In-Laws 2 or POV Juggfuckers 8 also afforded that same critical consideration? I’ve personally reviewed feature-length porno parodies of films as wide-ranging as Batman, West World, The Exorcist, and Repulsion on this very website, so why haven’t I also made the time for Pulp Friction, American Whore Story, or Back to the Cooter? Part of that decision making is that all movies become more interesting and culturally significant with time, so the better-funded, better plotted pornos made in the Golden Age of Porno Chic are going to be inherently more attractive for critical analysis than the straight-to-VOD porno of today. But where is the dividing line? Is there a definitive temporal or budgetary cutoff that cleanly divides the art from the schlock? The simple answer is no; I just know it when I see it.

Of course, this fussy self-analysis over what forms of hardcore pornography I consider worth covering on this sub-professional film blog doesn’t carry much big-picture significance. I’m no Supreme Court Justice. It was just on my mind after I looked up the 1982 dystopian sci-fi porno Café Flesh on the social media website Letterboxd: this generation’s online hub for cinematic discourse. I had just watched Café Flesh for the first time after purchasing a nice, newly restored scan of it on Blu-ray from the niche genre-cinema label Mondo Macabre. As if it wasn’t already embarrassing enough that I was curious what my fellow Letterboxd users had to say about the artistic merits of a 40-year-old porno, my search also dug up three titles in the Café Flesh series, not just the infamous one from director Stephen Sayadian. Apparently there was a Café Flesh 2 produced in 1997 and a Café Flesh 3 in 2003, long after the Porno Chic wave had crested. While the original film maintains a small, niche place in genre-filmmaking history (and on the boutique Blu-ray market), those two direct-to-video sequels are the kind of long-abandoned porno schlock you’ll only find on copyright-infringing streaming sites with names like SpankBang & TNAFlix. Based on their release dates, screengrabs, and slipcover art, I totally get it. They appear to be purely, crassly commercial products that conform to the respective industry standards of their times, produced entirely with the intent of arousing a few orgasms and, more importantly, selling a few video tapes. Meanwhile, Sayadian’s original Café Flesh is a bizarre cultural oddity: a hardcore porno that routinely, deliberately makes creative decisions that undermine its commercial, erotic potential. A post-apocalyptic sci-fi parable about a near-future dystopia where most nuclear-fallout survivors can’t stomach sexual contact without wanting to vomit, the film is stubbornly silly, depressing, and gross. Maybe that’s the dividing line between pornographic art and porno schlock: the willingness to undermine any possible titillation to be found in visual depictions of penetrative sex with so much extraneous bullshit that the audience can only walk away wondering, “Who was this for? Why was it made?”

Set in “a world destroyed, a mutant universe” left over after our impending nuclear holocaust, Café Flesh imagines a future society in which 99% of surviving humans become insurmountably nauseated when they attempt to have sexual intercourse. So, a fascistic government agency has been created to force the remaining 1% of sexually viable survivors to perform for the majority population’s entertainment, as a kind of addictive surrogate for sexual release. The titular “café” is a nightclub in which large groups of Sex Negatives gather to watch a small celebrity class of Sex Positives get it on in public, performing on a small stage as if they were singing karaoke. Think it of it as the de-evolution porno, a series of novelty sex acts staged through music video choreo in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone’s horny but (almost) nobody fucks. Stephen Sayadian puts his personal stamp on the material as a name-brand reprobate auteur (under the porn-industry pseudonym Rinse Dream). Here, he develops a lot of the sound-stage surrealism imagery he would later push to ecstatic German Expressionist extremes in his career-high achievement Dr. Caligari, to much sillier results. In the opening sex number, a milkman in a humanoid rat mask fucks a bored housewife while her three overgrown man-babies watch from their high-chair perches in the background, dancing in place to the beat. Then, a giant sports-mascot pencil in a business suit fucks an office worker on his desk while his secretary types notes in rhythm, giving new meaning to the phrase “pencil dick.” Even when these cartoonish exhibitions are replaced with more traditional sex acts, Sayadian continues to undermine all potential for sincere arousal in his audience, such as in a lesbian orgy that is scored with maniacal male laughter and the droning bomb sirens of an oncoming air raid. These theatrical novelty acts are broken up by the recursive reaction shots and petty domestic squabbles of the Sex Negative audience watching from the floor, occasionally interrupted by a Steve Martin-impersonating MC who ads an air of state-sanctioned menace to the proceedings. The only genuine moments of eroticism are found in the taboo of crossing the threshold from observer to participant. When someone officially designated as Sex Negative is found out to be a Sex Positive in hiding and pressured into exhibitionism, the movie allows for genuine erotic tension to hang in the air; everything else is grotesque mockery of Reagan’s America and its inevitable toxic fallout.

While Dr. Caligari is Stephen Sayadian’s greater artistic achievement overall, Café Flesh holds its own cultural significance as the definitive 80s movie. It expresses all of the artistic & sexual neuroses of a generation rattled by Porno Chic, MTV, and nuclear bombing drills through a funhouse mirror reflection of the times. I’ve seen lowlier, crasser versions of this exact 80s-specific porno aesthetic in contemporary titles like New Wave Hookers, but I’ve yet to see it achieved with such an active disinterest in the erotic potential of the depicted sex. Even in making that distinction, I’m attempting to draw a line between the commercially minded pornographic filmmaking of Gregory Dark and the for-their-own-sake poetic indulgences of Stephen Sayadian, once again relying on a “I know it when I see it” system of assigning artistic merit to one version of pornography over another. Sometimes you just have to admit that there’s nothing new or novel left to say about film as a medium that wasn’t already better worded decades before you were born; it’s just that we’re more used to those short-hand critical wisdoms coming from a Roger Ebert or a Pauline Kael, not a judge on the Supreme Court.

-Brandon Ledet

Naked Ambition (2025)

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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

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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

FYC 2024: Queens of Crude

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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