[some people here mistakenly think that what matters is the impending collapse
of American agriculture and energy supply, but should we really discuss trivia
like the fate of the San Joaquin valley, the Ogallala, the Colorado river, the
salinisation and irrevocable ruin of Florida farmland, loss of the Everglades
etc, when what REALLY matters is American porn?]
"Chloe retains the approval of her parents "
--------------------------------------------------
A rough trade
Martin Amis reports from the high-risk, increasingly violent world of the
pornography industry
Guardian, Saturday March 17, 2001
Pussies are bullshit. Don't let them tell you any different. "Answer me
something," I said to John Stagliano. We were stepping out of the porno home -
on to the porno patio with its porno pool. This was Malibu. Down the slope and
beyond the road lay the Pacific Ocean; but the Staglianos have no access to
its porno shore, in the evening they can watch the porno sunset with its porno
pink and mauve and blood-orange, and then linger awhile, perhaps, under a
porno moon. "Answer me something. How do you account for the emphasis, not
just in your . . . work but in the industry in general, how do you account for
the truly incredible emphasis on anal sex?"
After a minimal shrug and a minimal pause Stagliano said, "Pussies are
bullshit." Now John was being obedient to the dictionary definition of
"bullshit" which is nonsense intended to deceive.
With vaginal, Stagliano elaborated - well, here you have some chick chirruping
away. And the genuinely discerning viewer (jack-knifed over his flying fist)
has got to be thinking: Is this for real? Or is it just bullshit?
With anal, on the other hand, the actress is obliged to produce a different
order of response: more guttural, more animal. As Stagliano quaintly puts it,
"Her personality comes out." He goes on: "You want guys who can fuck really
good and make the girls look more . . . virile." Virile of course, means
manly; but once again Stagliano is using the King's English. You want the
girls to show you "their testosterone".
The name of Rocco Siffredi, again and again, was wistfully and reverently
conjured. Rocco, the big-dorked Italian, and porno's premier buttbanger or
assbuster (to use the dialect of this tribe).
"Rocco has far more power in this industry than any actress," said Stagliano,
pleased to be pulling one back for the boys (generally speaking, men are the
also-rans of porno). "I was the first to shoot Rocco. Together we evolved
toward rougher stuff. He started to spit on girls. A strong male-dominant
thing, with women being pushed to their limit. It looks like violence but it's
not. I mean, pleasure and pain are the same thing, right? Rocco is driven by
the market. What makes it in today's market place is reality." And assholes
are reality. And pussies are bullshit.
Features and gonzo
There are, at present, two types of mainstream American pornography: Features
and Gonzo. Features are sex films with some sort of claim to the ordinary
narrative: characterisation, storyline. "We don't just show you people
fucking," said a Features executive. "We show you why they're fucking." These
movies are allegedly aimed at the "couples market". Couples, it asserted, want
to know why people are fucking. I can give these couples a three word answer
that will hold true in every case: for the money.
In Flashpoint (Wicked Pictures), for instance, a bunch of porno stars are
dressed up as firefighters. As the film opens, we see the porno stars sliding
down the pole and boarding the crimson firetruck. An exploding car, a
colleague (not a porno star but an ageing extra) falling in the line of duty.
There follows an insanely boring funeral, which includes the whole of the
Lord's Prayer and the slow and solemn furling, by a porno star, of the
American flag. Porno star Jenna grieves for the fallen extra. After returning
from the funeral she finds herself alone with another porno star dressed up as
a firefighter. He seeks to assuage her grief, so she gives him a blowjob plus
full intercourse. The next sex scene, which occurs about a millennium later,
is also triggered by grief counselling. Here a male porno star comforts two
female porno stars, one of them anally . . .
After a while you begin to think that porno stars, despite being very bad at
acting, are very good at acting in one particular only: they can keep a
straight face. But then humourlessness, universal and institutionalised
humourlessness, is the lifeblood of porno. Films like Flashpoint go out to the
video stores and, in the soft version (where the hard action is partly
obscured by some stray object - a fireman's hat, say, or a fireman's boot),
are sold to cable and to hotel chain franchises, and so on. Features owes the
humiliating fatuity of its conventions to an old legal precedent called the
"Miller Test".
Miller v California (1973) established that a dirty movie was obscene if it
was "utterly" without social, literary, artistic, political or scientific
"value". In juridical terms, the key word here, of course, is "utterly" and
millions of dollars have been spent on its definition.
With a wife like Hillary, Bill Clinton could never be a true pal of porno, but
he largely left it alone on First Amendment grounds. Unlike his two
predecessors, who systematically harassed the industry with confiscations,
multiple prosecutions, fines, jail terms. It's a fair guess that porno never
felt more gorgeously secure than when Clinton, in his second term, became in
effect the porno president.
Now porno is tensed and braced forchanges. It feared Gore. It dreaded Bush.
Gonzo porno is also known as "wall-to-wall". It shows you people fucking
without concerning itself with why they're fucking. There are no Lord's
Prayers, no furled American flags in Gonzo. Features porno is much, much
dirtier than it used to be, but Gonzo porno is gonzo: way out there. The new
element is violence.
Strength and Pain
I had lunch with Temptress (Features). I had lunch with Chloe (Gonzo). And the
next day I joined Chloe on the set of Welcum To Chloeville.
My lunch with Temptress was a relatively sedate affair. At first I was
reminded of the time I interviewed Penny Baker, a Playboy Playmate of the
Year: within a minute I had run out of questions. Temptress, like Penny,
seemed to be inhibited by the presence of a company executive - in this case
Steve Orenstein of Wicked Pictures, for which she is a contract player. But
Temptress loosened up.
"Tell me, Temptress," I said (having apologised for the corniness and mild
hostility of my inquiry), "what won't you do?"
"I won't do anal," said Temptress. "They keep trying to coax me into it. You
know: 'Just a finger or a tongue. Or just a little bit: just the tip.' But I
won't, I used not to do facials. But I do them now."
Temptress is not talking about beauty treatments. She is talking about the
destination of what is variously referred to as the "pop-shot" or the
"money-shot": the ejaculation of the male.
"What happens," I asked, "when a co-star can't get hard?"
The fiasco used to be the nemesis of porno. A penile no-show could make the
difference between profit and loss. But the situation has been changed, I was
told, thanks to Viagra. On Viagra, the actor performs 45 minutes behind
schedule, with a flushed face and a headache. "You also lose a dimension,"
John Stagliano would explain. "The guy's fucking without being aroused." He's
just "showing off" - and pretty soon you're back to bullshit.
Another thing with Viagra is that the guy can have a problem with the
pop-shot, thus endangering the facial.
"What do you do then, Temptress?"
"You get some pina colada mix. The cock's in your mouth and you let it, like,
ooze out around it."
Physically Temptress reminded me of the daughters of my friends. She didn't
sound shy, but she looked it. With her long straight hair frequently steered
over her shoulders by her slow-moving hands, with her face unglazed by
cosmetics, with her gently narrowed eyes, she exuded what Philip Larkin called
the "strength and pain/Of being young". I asked about her history and she told
me something of it. And there was strength and there was pain (and there was
certainly youth: Temptress is 21).
"But I don't want you to write about that. And could you not mention my real
name? . . . I don't have relationships any more. They make life unstable. The
only sex I have is the sex on screen."
Temptress is one of the lucky ones. She's a star. After lunch I went to Wicked
Pictures and had a talk with Jonathan Morgan (performer turned director) in a
computerised cutting-room while he edited his latest Feature, a fantastically
unfunny comedy called Inside Porn.
"Ah," said Jonathan. "Now here we have a double anal."
A double anal is not to be confused with a DP (double penetration: anal and
vaginal). A double anal is a double anal. And there have been triple anals,
too. "The girls could be graded like A, B and C. The A is the chick on the
boxcover. She has the power. So she'll show up late or not at all. Ninety-nine
point nine per cent of them do that." He gestured at the screen and said,
"Here you have a borderline A/B doing a double anal. Directors will remember
that. She'll get phone calls. For a double anal you'd usually expect a B or a
C. They have to do the dirty stuff or they won't get a phone call. You've had
a kid, you've got some stretchmarks - you're up there doing double anal.
"Some girls are used in nine months or a year. An 18-year-old, sweet young
thing, signs with an agency, makes five films in her first week. Five
directors, five actors, five times five: she gets phone calls. A hundred
movies in four months. She's not a fresh face any more. Her price slips and
she stops
getting phone calls. Then it's, 'Okay, will you do anal? Will you do
gangbangs?' Then they're used up. They can't even get a phone call. The market
forces of this industry use them up."
I thanked Jonathan Morgan for his candour. But he wasn't as candid as Chloe.
We met in the lobby of my hotel and we strolled out to her Mustang.
"See that?"
The number plate said: STR82NL
"Straight to anal," said Chloe.
And she hadn't even got started.
Chloe was gonzo. She gave me the truth.
Extreme Productions
A single issue of Adult Video News (April 2000) yields the following. Last
October porno star Vivian Valentine attended the XXX-Treme Adults Only
vacation in Mexico sporting the black eye she copped from Jon Dough on Rough
Sex (Anabolic Video).
"I have no regrets or bad feelings about it," she said. Regan Starr who worked
on the second film in this "line", Rough Sex 2, had a different take. "I got
the shit kicked out of me," she said. "I was told before the video - and they
said this very proudly, mind you - that in this line most of the girls start
crying because they're hurting so bad . . . I couldn't breathe. I was being
hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn't stop. They kept filming.
You can hear me say, 'Turn the fucking camera off', and they kept going." The
director of the Rough Sex series (now discontinued), who goes by the name of
Khan Tusion, protests his innocence. "Regan Starr," Tusion claims,
"categorically misstates what occurred."
If you don't like Khan Tusion, you won't like Max Hardcore. AVN's regular "On
the Set" column carries a cheerfully scandalised account of the making of
Hollywood Hardcore 13. In this scene, actor-director Hardcore is having rough
sex with Cloey Adams, who is pretending to be under age. "If you're a good
girl, I'll take you to McDonald's later and get you a Happy Meal." Hardcore
then "proceeds to piss in her mouth". Addressing the camera, Cloey Adams says,
"What do you think of your little princess now Daddy?" Nor is Hardcore through
with her. "Turning to the crew, he calmly says, 'I'll need a speculum and a
hose' . . . One of Max's favourite tricks is to stretch a girl's asshole with
a speculum, then piss into her open gape and make her suck out his own piss
with a hose. Ain't that romantic?"
Now. American porno (and how could it be otherwise?) is market-driven. We can
see what the above tells us about porno. But what does it tell us about
America? And if America is more like a world than a country, what does it tell
us about the world?
The average American spends three hours and 51 minutes of every day watching
porno (video and internet).
The average non-homeowning American male spends more on porno than he spends
on his rent.
Porno accounts for 43.5% of the US Gross Domestic Product.
Like pussies, these statistic are bullshit.
I made them up. But the true figures are similarly wild, similarly dizzying,
similarly through-the-roof. This isn't bullshit.
Porno is far bigger than rock music and far bigger than Hollywood.
Americans spend more on strip clubs than they spend on theatre, opera,
ballet, jazz and classical concerts combined.
In 1975 the total retail value of all the hard-core porno in America was
estimated at $5-10 million. Last year Americans spent $8 billion on mediated
sex.
Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot
reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: Banish porno, and you banish all the world.
Chloe
"I have herpes," said Chloe as she drove me to a smoker-friendly bar. "After
you've been in this business for a while, you have herpes. Everyone has
herpes. On the set sometimes you'll say to a guy, 'What's this?' And he'll
say, 'What? That? It's a fuck sore.' And it may well be a fuck sore, what with
all the traffic. But it's more likely to be a herpes sore, and that guy
shouldn't be working. My movies are all-condom, but condoms won't protect you
from herpes. They don't cover the base. Sometimes when you're doing girl-girl
you'll say, 'Honey, I think you should go and see someone.' It can be a very
stinky scene down there. I'll send her to a porno-friendly doctor (the others
treat you like shit) and she'll come out holding her Flagyll prescription with
multiple refills."
Chloe is 26. For 10 years she trained as a ballerina; then, at 17, she got
into drugs, mostly speed ("I'd fuck for 72 hours"); at 20 she started shooting
up heroin and was already in the industry by the time she quit, over two years
ago. Chloe has fair, fine red hair and a warm and clever face. She has a
ballerina's body: strong legs, a full muscular butt -
"- and no tits. It's true that some Features companies urge the girls to have
implants and offer to pay for it. On the road [ie, stripping] girls used to
boast about the cubic capacity of their titjobs. 'I've got 840s.' 'I've got
1220s'. One of them turned to me and said, 'Get tits or suck cock.' I'd rather
suck cock, I really would."
If you're going to be a porno star, what do you need? It's pretty clear by
now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex drive.
You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally "mud nostalgia": a
childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions and wastes). And -
probably - you need damage in your past. You also need to be humourless. Chloe
is not humourless. When she talked to me she was like someone peeping over a
wall demarcating two different worlds, telling me stories about the other
side.
"I like to be peed on. I like being spat on: it feels like come on your chest.
I like to be choked. I like to be fisted. Here we have the 'no-thumbs' rule? A
girl can have 16 fingers up her. But no thumbs." She laughs, and continues:
"For vaginal I prefer a girthy kind of dick. And some of these guys" - Chloe
seizes the broad base of a water glass on the table before us - "are like
this. For anal I prefer a longer, thinner kind of dick."
"So when you do DP you get one thick one and one thin one."
"Right . . . No. Come to think of it," she said brightly, "I get two thick
ones. I like to feel crammed. You know, I did my first anal for $200? I still
can't believe that."
"And what are your rates now, Chloe?"
"In Gonzo, you're paid, not by the picture, but by the scene. So it's
girl-girl: 700, plus 100 for an anal toy. Boy-girl: 900. Anal: 1,100. Solo [a
rarity]: 500. DP: 1,500. I won't do anal fisting or double anal. People ask me
how I can hang on to my title as Anal Queen of LA when I won't do double anal.
But I have hung on to it."
In common with about 10% of the porno girls (her estimate), Chloe retains the
approval of her parents (and so does Temptress). In fact, Chloe's guardians
are gonzo. She recently shot a film out near their place, and her stepfather
(while absenting himself from his stepdaughter's scenes) "was like a
towel-boy". And Chloe's mother, for two years running now, has marched out of
the AVN Awards, brandishing Chloe's Best Anal trophies above the heads of the
crowd.
After lunch we drove to Chloe's apartment: barred gates, the feel of a
two-floor motel, a modest, comfortable, orderly apartment, featuring a cute
black cat with a porno name, Siren. Chloe thinks that some porno girls get
their names by looking out of the window at the road sign: Laurel Canyon,
Chandler, Cherry Mirage.
For a while Chloe talked about her love life. She is torn, at present, between
the neglectful Chris, a rock musician (bass), and the attentive Artie, a
fellow performer. She suspects that Chris just strings her along because it's
a status symbol for a rock star to have a porno-star girlfriend. Chris, I
think, knows about Artie. But Artie doesn't know about Chris.
"And with Artie, he comes over and I'm horny as hell and he says, 'I can't, I
have to do two scenes tomorrow.' "
"With private sex, is there a crossover in your head?"
"Oh yeah. I find myself thinking, 'Fuck. I should be being paid for this.' Or
'Fuck. I wish I had a camera.'"
"I'd better not write about Chris and Artie."
"Go ahead. They'll both be over anyway. Here, it doesn't last."
Chloe was unforgettable. I won't forget the way she said this (she said it
with sorrowful resolve): "We're prostitutes . . . There are differences. You
can choose your partners, and they're tested for Aids - you won't get your
john to do that. But we're prostitutes: we exchange sex for money."
"You've thought this through."
"I looked it up in the dictionary and that's what it says."
In etymological terms pornography is what I'm doing: I'm writing about whores.
I will see Chloe on set tomorrow morning. The scene they'll be shooting? Gonzo
girl-boy-girl anal.
Mister Monster
Towards the end of Rabbit At Rest, John Updike writes: Rabbit thinks of adding
$5.50 to his bill to watch something called Horny Housewives . . . The trouble
with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four-year-old
with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and
ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or
soft at all. It's very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care
about, you have to see them. Maybe we're all queer, and all his life he's been
in love with Ronnie Harrison.
Or, as a friend would put it to me later that week: It's no good without
Mister Monster. You must have Mister Monster.Must you? Gore Vidal once said
that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to
watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch
pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme
productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I
kept worrying that I'd like it. Porno services the "polymorphous perverse":
the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then
sooner or later porno will identify it. You'd better hope that this doesn't
happen while you're watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer - or an
undertaker. That week in Los Angeles I found out what I don't like.
I don't like Mister Monster.
High up in higgledy-piggledy Hollywood Hills, I hobnobbed with Andrew Blake,
the Truffaut of porno, and two incredibly beautiful girls in incredibly
expensive underwear (and six inch heels).
Strictly speaking, Blake's work is Gonzo: scriptless, storyless, with the
performers interacting with the camera. But Blake is pre-eminently "high-end".
His actresses look like voluptuous fashion models, and he flatters and
glorifies them on the screen, with oils, unguents, silks, cords, ribbons,
textures.
"I hired Monica because she has these beautiful breasts," he told me, "and
that's what we're going to be concentrating on. I've never worked with Adriana
before but she seems to be really something."
Laconic, gruff, direct and, of course, humourless, Blake goes about his
business.
"Now put your hand into her panties . . . And maybe a nipple comes out, a
nipple is revealed? . . . Squeeze them, caress them, do the whole nine yards
with them . . . Try opening your legs. Kind of tease the panties . . . Don't
smile so much. Just kind of be into yourself . . . So is the bra ready to
ride? Kiss the nip . . . Arch up your butt a little more . . . Cross and
uncross your legs. Show a little pussy . . . Now this is the panties coming
off . . ."
Behold. A platonically perfect pubis, wearing nothing but the latest
hairstyle, a minimal mohawk.
"This must be a tough day's work for you," said the make-up girl amiably.
"Someone's got to do it. Right?"
Her remark obliged me to examine my "affect", or feeling-tone. I admit to a
strong sense of furtive beauty-assimiliation. But the instinct being aroused
in me was not sexual so much as protective. Naked Adriana was 20 years old.
And the last thing I wanted to see, at that moment, was Mister Monster.
Outside, during an intermission, Blake said in his flat, declarative style,
"I'm into looking at woman. Not all this 'pissing and fisting'. I've never had
any legal problems."
Work permit
A "tough" day's work for me, then, and the same could be said for Adriana and
Monica. They weren't being slapped around by Khan Tusion or peed on by Max
Hardcore. But were they being "used up"?
If you're a porno performer, your latest HIV test is your work permit. Two
years ago the actor Marc Wallice started to become evasive about his work
permit. He was using an out of town health centre and seemed to be fudging his
results. By the time he was found out, Wallice's condition was fulminant. He
infected six actresses.
"The tests we take only test for Aids," says Chloe. "We've contained Aids in
the industry but what about all the others? You know we're now up to Hepatitis
G?
"You should be at least 21 before you work in this industry. You should know
your body, understand your body. But that would wipe out half of San Fernando
Valley. There are whole lines on the 18 pluses."
And there are: Dirty Debutantes, Nasty Newcomers, Filthy First Timers . . .
One of the actresses infected by Marc Wallice (his condition now is so pitiful
that no one thinks him worthy of persecuting) is Mrs John Stagliano. Stagliano
himself, the pioneer of gonzo, is HIV-positive (he contracted the virus
recreationally, in a Rio bordello). A medium-sized fortune has been made by
Stagliano, in a business where, contrary to popular belief, very few fortunes
are made. But I often think of the Staglianos, out by the pool, gazing at an
ocean to which they have no access.
Gonzo Girl-Boy-Girl
Chloe's shoot is on Dolorosa Drive.
The porno house, the porno fish in the porno tank (the fish are
porno-coloured: yellow, mauve, blood-orange), the porno TV set (as big as a
double refrigerator), the porno deck, the porno pool, with a plastic duck
floating around in it. Beyond the fence stands the house of the
pain-in-the-ass neighbour who keeps climbing on to the roof with a mouthful of
nails to get himself shocked enough to call the police.
Girl-boy-girl: the girls are Chloe and Lola (a friendly Amerindian-style
beauty); the boy is Artie (Chloe's offscreen lover: tattooed, muscular,
balding). Artie seems to be a nice guy, but he keeps talking with a jokey
French accent. Porno performers are great ones for funny voices, funny faces.
German scientists, Russian spies, French connoisseurs; in Features they can
keep it up all movie long.
There is a crew: the DP (for the time being this means Director of
Photography) and the sound-recordist, who go about their business like
middle-aged handymen; a plump youth who seems to be there for general work
experience; and Chloe's sister, Shannon, caterer and towel-girl. Chloe will
soon be calling out to Shannon, "Stop that phone!" Shannon: "It's the home
phone! There's like ten of them!"
Artie is giving us more French accent, then more French accent, while Chloe
and Lola strip for the "pretty girl" shots that will go on the box-cover.
Chloe, with whom I spent five hours the previous day, walks past me, naked. It
doesn't bother her that she's naked. She doesn't know she's naked.
The porno stills by the porno pool. "See pink? Want lots of pink?" "Let's have
some booty." "Open it? You want it all?"
It is barely 10 o'clock in the morning, and I am, I realise, experiencing the
kind of anxiety that usually precedes a mild ordeal. A line is about to be
crossed. I shouldn't be here. None of us should be here. But we all have work
to do.
Fifteen minutes later, referring to the achievements of Lola, Chloe stabbed a
hand through the air at me, and shouted with joy and triumph (Chloe is the
director, remember, and she was thrilled to have this scene in the can):
"That's the kind of blowjob I was telling you about yesterday!"
I reeled out into the yard with my notebook, laughing, and shaking my head.
There are plenty of "jokes" on a porno set, and there is much raucous mirth to
dispel tension. But only a Chloe, only an exception, can inject humour. She
sounded like Mel Brooks, in The Producers, saying, "That's our Hitler!"
The kind of blowjob Chloe was telling me about yesterday was this kind of
blowjob. It is as if the girl's passionate - indeed desperate - intention is
to kiss the boy's lower abdomen. She faces an obstacle. She can't go around
it. She has to go through it. "I mean," Chloe had said admiringly, "some of
these girls go down. Drooling and slobbering, saliva everywhere, choking
dry-heaving."
It had to be said that the dry-heaving, from Artie's point of view, was
visibly efficacious. When Lola was done, he gazed down with some complacence
as Mister Monster went from three o'clock to half past 12.
And that was the tenor of it: heat. That is where the market is taking us:
toward heat, intensity, a frenzied athleticism. More than this, porno, it
seems, is a parody of love. It therefore addresses itself to love's opposites,
which are hate and death. "Choke her!" "Spit inside me!" "Break me! You can't
break me! Try!" "COMING!!!" Chloe screamed this last word like a mother
answering a child's cry from the other end of the house. Then, to Lola, "Choke
me!" And Chloe's entire upper body flushed with pink, and she seemed to swoon
. . .
"I wanna piss," said Artie, during one of his many intermissions.
For a moment the DP's eyes widened in alarm. He thought, wrongly, that Artie
wanted to piss on camera. "Pissing is as bad as coming," he confided to me.
"They're supposed to piss and they can't. They go off to the shower, then they
say they can piss and they can't."
Artie trudged back from the can, worriedly nursing his condomed erection. "God
I'm old," he muttered, as he headed back to the fray.
Well I'm old too, and I blew a kiss at Chloe and took my leave - before the
anal and the popshot. Shannon drove me back to the hotel. Poor Shannon: she
was having one of those days. First, shopping in a health-food store, she
dropped a jar of wheatgerm on her foot and was now limping heavily. Then she
discovered that her boyfriend was cheating on her - and she fired him.
Contemplating the suspension of her love life, Shannon said sadly, "And when
you compare it to that, the sex doesn't seem much anyway."
I knew what she meant, in a sense. Chloe-Artie-Lola made me feel like a
virgin.
_______________________________________________
CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
