Inside Deep Throat (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) |
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For those of you who have been serving time in a
third world prison for forty years, Deep Throat was a seminal hardcore
porn film made in 1972, perhaps the first to achieve full acceptance from mixed
gender suburban audiences. The basic premise of the film was that
the main character (Linda Lovelace) was unable to truly enjoy sex
until her doctor discovered that her clitoris was in her throat,
after which point she began to experience earth-shattering orgasms
from oral sex. It's worth noting that her clitoris was
deep in her throat, not just to give us a cheap opportunity to iterate and
clarify the title,
but also because the unique gimmick of the film was Ms Lovelace's ability
to make even the largest penis disappear entirely during oral sex by
using a technique similar to that employed by sword swallowers. In
order to make the film appealing to women, Deep Throat avoided the
raincoat-perv sleaziness that had permeated earlier porn efforts,
and employed humor, sometimes very silly humor, to create a
consistently unthreatening tone. Its success was phenomenal. It
would be a dramatic use of litotes to say that Deep Throat
became the highest-grossing porn film of all
time, since it was actually the highest grossing film of any kind up
until then. If the
playing field is restricted to American theaters, Deep Throat still rivals
Titanic for the top spot. Its success went beyond the box office. Deep
Throat also entered into the mainstream consciousness of American
culture, its references penetrating Johnny Carson's monologues and
even The Washington Post's Watergate investigations. Not bad for a
film that cost $25,000 to make! Inside Deep Throat is a scattershot documentary which looks back at the legal, artistic, and cultural context in which Deep Throat appeared, and the changes that may have resulted from the film's popularity and mainstream acceptance. So is it any good? Well, kinda. It depends on what you want from a documentary. Think back to when you were in school. Your English professor assigned a paper on "Shakespeare's Comedies." You couldn't come up with any single interesting point to make, so you assembled lots of accurate facts, cited some experts, made some safe and petty observations of your own, checked your spelling and grammar, and did your best to package the paper attractively. You were embarrassed to hand in a paper with no real point to make, but you really had no choice, and were ultimately relieved to see that your professor recognized the effort you made and gave you a B+. Inside Deep Throat is a documentary like that paper. It presents lots of interesting historical footnotes about the film. For example, the courts in Memphis, Tennessee successfully prosecuted the film, but did not go after the mobsters who made hundreds of millions from it, or even the people who wrote and directed it. Instead, they prosecuted co-star Harry Reems for his participation in a conspiracy to create obscene material. Reems is a guy who made $250 for his participation in the film, and wasn't even supposed to be in it. He was working on the production crew and the shooting schedule was ready to begin when director Gerry Damiano found himself without a male star, thus pressing Reems into service. I could continue to cite many more forgotten but fascinating bits of trivia about the film, and that should give you an indication that the film is a fascinating journey back into the early 70s, especially when it is remembering the film's genesis, documenting the film as a cultural phenomenon, and recalling the context of the legal battles fought over it. Where the documentary fails is when it starts to analyze the cultural or economic impact of Deep Throat. Like your English paper, it spends a lot of time dithering about and tests out a lot of different themes and observations, but just can't seem to come up with a major point which it can support. In fact, its strongest passion evokes an anti-censorship message, but does it so ineffectively that I, a libertarian who opposes censorship, was unconvinced by the film's argument. The documentarians started out with some black hats and white hats in the censorship battle - free-thinking liberals supporting artistic expression versus close-minded religious nuts advocating repression - but the film's P.O.V. suddenly got confused at the point when free-thinking liberal women suddenly realized that porn glorified the objectification of women, and at the point where some liberal thinkers concluded that porn was harmful to society and desensitizing. Does that mean that the prosecutions may have been justified in the first place? Oh, sure, the prosecution of poor ol' Harry Reems was absurd, but what if the film had been shut down in an effort to shut off the cash faucet which was undisputedly and admittedly pouring money into the mob's coffers? Would censorship then have been OK? I kept expecting the film to try to wrap these points up a bit, but it just left everything hanging. After all, it only had 90 minutes to work with. It also makes the point that Linda was fired from several subsequent jobs in mainstream business, always soon after her employers found out that she was Linda Lovelace. Let me not pull any punches here. It was this very film which convinced me that this could not be true, since the film never gave any of those employers a chance to respond. I can only conclude that one of the following two things is true:
I can't see where there could be another explanation, and neither of those speaks very well for the documentarians, does it? So why did they bring it up in the first place? Surely they had enough points to cover without getting into such unsupportable minutiae. As film critic James Berardinelli wrote: Between archival footage and new interviews, the filmmakers collected 800 hours worth of material. It must not have been a simple matter to pare that down to 90 minutes of theatrical running time, or 120 minutes if you count the DVD extras. Given that they used less than one percent of the material they collected, I'm not surprised that the themes were difficult to focus. Yes, perhaps it tried to cover too many topics and ended up treating them all too superficially, but still and all, don't forget that you did get a B+ on that paper, and you may feel the same way about this documentary that your professor felt about your essay - that there is so much work put into it, and the period details and the background stories are so good, that you can just sit back and be entertained and ignore the fact that it is shallow and rambling. And that's not so bad at all. |
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