Well, at least someone finally got around to talking to Veronica Caine.
Thursday June 20, 2002
Which is pretty much all Salon gets points for on this one.
I mean, I’m not quite sure how to respond to sentences like, “Still, it’s difficult for me to comprehend how these women can calmly talk about performing acts that make me shudder with horror when I see them on tape.” —Gee, I dunno. You should maybe get out more? Meet more people? Get a life? Read your Bataille? Your De Sade, your Réage, your Delany? (Hell, you can even read your Rocquelaire, if you insist. I’m not picky.) Brush up on outrage and transgression and all that avant garde crap, and realize these tactics are just as valid when they come from uppity trailer trash as they are from black-turtlenecked French-spouting chain-smoking æsthetes, and above all else come down off your high horse and realize not everyone in the world shares your whitebread middle brow tastes and (oh, you just know I’ve got to say it) bourgeois outlook? —Might do for a start.
Janelle Brown is talking about the films of Lizzy Borden, whom sharp-eyed readers might remember as the woman who sent Frontline packing into the journalistic hall of shame (with, admittedly, most of the rest of today’s media) when Frontline’s crack reporting team filmed themselves leaving the set of Forced Entry. Back then, of course, Charles Taylor wrote in Salon (rather astonishingly) that—for filming a woman being hit—Lizzie and co. deserved to be prosecuted for assault. (No word yet as to whether he’s taking on Buffy the Vampire Slayer next—of course, Buffy ain’t porn. Funny how people’s critical faculties fly out the window when porn’s involved, isn’t it.) —Now, however, Salon is more than willing to slap Lizzy’s face up on their front page and sprinkle their interview with links to such salacious content as Extreme Associate’s front page (it’s past that disingenuous disclaimer) and ordering info for the awful, horrible, shudderingly terrible film in question.
What, is it sweeps week already?
At least they finally talked to Veronica Caine, whose beating drove Frontline to abandon any pretense at journalistic objectivity. Who sounds like she likes her job. Imagine that. —And certainly, Caine and Borden come off as articulate, funny, and aware of what they’re doing, and even to a certain extent why, which is more than you can say for most of us on this side of the street. And if Borden’s protests that her films are morality plays rings a little hollow (“Do this and you are going to get fucked up,” she says, as if Extreme’s catalog were full of nothing but rather explicit after school specials), well, at least it’s more honest than the whole of Brown’s article, which takes the usual hypocritically puritan tack of wallowing in the very thing it condemns. “In fact, Borden’s films are so repugnant and evil that it’s difficult to justify their existence, let alone comprehend why anyone—especially a woman—would want to make this kind of garbage in the first place,” huffs Brown, but she never really gets around to telling you how or why Borden’s films are evil and repugnant, beyond variations on “I don’t like them.” Which is fine and valid and all, but is hardly a sophisticated critical response. It doesn’t even try to imagine who might like them, and why.
Oh, Brown does summon forth these vague, ghostly Others, “creeps who get turned on by the violence in her films.” “What kind of person,” Brown asks, “masturbates to the sight of girls being slapped, drinking their own vomit or being raped?”
Well, gee. I dunno. Why didn’t you go and try to find out?
There are two problems with Brown’s approach (such as it is) to criticizing Borden’s films and their (presumed) audience. The first is to assume that, because it is a porn film, the only possible reason someone would purchase it or view it is for sexual arousal. This is belied by even a casual acquaintance with someone who is a more than occasional consumer of porn; our responses to it are many and varied. Camp value; shock value; titillation; humor; avid disgust; æsthetic appreciation—all of these have their place, and this is pointed out by Borden herself, citing Jackass and Eminem as working in a similar idiom, if different genres. —But let’s say there are people who get turned on sexually by “the sight of girls being slapped, drinking their own vomit or being raped.” —So what? (I bet quite a few of them aren’t “creeps,” either. I bet you even know someone who does. Or men being slapped, etc. etc. Yes, you. Or you. Uh-huh.) As long as it’s all consensual—as long as no one’s being forced to do it—what does it matter how horrific it seems on screen? To each his own; de gustibus, de gustibus. Remember squick, and keep it, wholly.
(Um, Ms. Dworkin? You can put your hand down, we’ll get to your objections in a minute.)
But there’s a glaring blind spot in this view of the audience, which is the second glaring problem with Brown’s approach—and Taylor’s too, for that matter. Sure, there are people who get off imagining doing all this stuff to girls.
And there are people who get off imagining themselves as the girl with the stuff being done to them.
(Really. Did this not occur to any of you? Geeze. Get out more. Read von Sacher-Masoch. Oy.)
By the way: I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will, and now’s as good a time as any: I don’t think I’d ever want to watch Forced Entry. If I did—out of some misplaced sense of duty, perhaps?—I’d probably be cringing and wincing and saying, “Oh, Jesus fuck,” a lot. This stuff—by which I mean the letters B and D, S and M, D and S—it does little to nothing for me; nor am I one of the ones who gets off imagining girls or boys being slapped or drinking their own vomit or being raped. Or on the idea of being a girl or a boy who is slapped or raped or who drinks my own vomit. Nope. (Still, we all do like dark, weird, uncomfortable stuff, stuff we’d just as soon never go near in real life; porn allows us, artists and audience, to day-trip into that dark side and come out shaken but unbowed. [Really, I shouldn’t have to say that at all.] I mean, I like [among many other things: older women with short, short hair and glasses and those long slim jersey dresses; flirting with bashful young men; ogling from behind sunglasses bared midriffs over low-slung jeans; nestling the Spouse’s buttocks right there in my groin] the idea of watching sisters commit incestuously homosexual acts. Why? I don’t know. Where did it come from? No friggin’ clue. What does it say about me? Your guess would probably be more entertaining than mine. But Coors has blessed it, so it’s better than what Lizzie does, with the horror and the violence and the misogyny. Right?) —But my opinion’s neither here nor there in the bigger picture, and no matter what I think of the film, that’s not what I found repugnant and vile and repellant and even—oh, yes—to have more than a whiff of something evil about it, as I read Brown’s article. In the end, after all, it’s just a film; it’s art; it’s a statement with many and varied ambiguous readings, and for every horrible effect you can think of it causing, I can think of a positive one—this is one of the many reasons why censorship is unworkably stupid.
Instead, go back and read the Borden interview again; read the Caine interview. Think about what a day on the job there is like, with the boot camp scenario and the territorial pissing and the dead fish and, well. Think about—yes—the misogyny inherent in industrial pornography these days; in (to be precise) those companies and that culture responsible for most (but not all; no) of the pornographic films and videos distributed in the States today.
To my mind, it’s a hell of a lot more unsettling than the idea of a badly acted pseudo-snuff film.
(Come to think of it, it’s what I should have said to Raymond: if you want to know why your sausage tastes so bad, you might want to go to the sausage factory and take a look at how it’s made. Instead of airily waving your hands and deciding it’s because most sausage eaters just plain want bad sausage. Stupid sausage eaters.)
So what’s the answer? Storm Orange County? Put those pornographers out of business? Ban their videos? Save them from themselves? Teach them a lesson? “Do this and you are going to get fucked up!” (Yes. Thank you, Ms. Dworkin. Indeed.)
Aheh. No. —After all, this state of affairs is all your fault. And mine. And his over there, and hers too, and Charles Taylor’s, even, and Janelle Brown’s, and let’s blame Britney and Madonna and Eminem, what the hell, and yes it’s Larry Flynt’s fault and Rob Black’s fault and Hef’s fault and even Bob Guccione’s, yes, and it’s Lizzy Borden’s fault, too, but don’t let’s lose track: we all of us made this bed. We’re too chickenshit the lot of us to deal with this scary ugly terrifying wondrous bizarre and destablizing chaotic beauty honestly; we’ve all run out of the room and left it to the shockmeisters and the bottom-liners and the creeps and the geeks and the freaks, and Lizzy Borden her own dam’ self, who, fucked up or not, at least has the guts to tough it out and make something on her own terms. (Are they, though? Her own terms? Shh. Stupid question.) We’re all too chickenshit, too scared of tipping our own hands, getting them dirty, opening up; we can only come at it sneeringly, contemptuously, in puritanically lurid backhanded articles like this one.
So the answer instead is this: be honest with yourself. About what you want, and why, and how. Become frankly curious about what other people want, and why, and how. Think about it all, and if you aren’t in the mood to actually try your hand at making your own (with whatever medium comes to hand), at least try to become a better member of the audience. More informed. More willing to try new things. More open, and, well, more honest. —Sounds like Morgan Freeman in the cheesed-out ending of De Palma’s adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities, doesn’t it? “Be decent to each other.” Sheesh. I mean, will this make Borden’s life any less fucked up? Make the porn industry—or at least this segment of it—any less screwed up, oppressive, exploitative? Misogynistic? (And have you worked in comics? Movies? Music? Television? You have any idea what the larger entertainment industry is like?) —No. Sorry, but it won’t.
Then, I never said it was an easy answer, or immediate. Ain’t no such thing.
We get the porn that we deserve, after all. —So get cracking.
Post scriptum, to Salon’s beleaguered copy editors: the title really ought to be “Porn provocateuse”; if you’re gonna be pretentious, no sense doing it by half. And “a woman who went where no woman, and most men, would dare to go” is either a sloppily telling rhetorical slip, or a clumsy joke that misfired, badly…