Sexfilm:

The next last frontier of B filmmaking

Essay for the Stranger, 10/24/94

Sci-fi, horror and fantasy used to be the place to learn the craft of the simple direct narrative film, as a potential creator or simply a more informed viewer. These genres once offered bright delicious eye-and-ear candy, films that cut through the boundaries of slick production and linear narrative to speak directly to their audiences with imagery, energy and audacity.

But the days of low-budget screamfests like Basket Case, The Stuff and The Corpse Grinders now seem long gone in this age of morphing effects, video-game plots and $70 million vehicles for mass-murdering “heroes.”

Meanwhile, the “experimental” or “underground” film has been permanently corrupted by the theft of almost all its repertoire of techniques by music videos, fashion videos and even snowboarding videos.

Likewise, the formerly reviled “shockumentary” has become big business as tabloid TV.

At the other end of the sellout spectrum, the suspense thriller has turned into the USA World Premiere Movie and a host of direct-to-video films by directors imitating 0899506186 De Palma’s imitations of Hitchcock. The only suspense in most of these lame exercises is figuring out which beginning-screenwriting course the writers just came from.

Only one American commercial exploitation genre retains its power to keep re-creating its audiovisual vocabulary, to use simple easy-to-understand tools in creating unreal domains of character and behavior–tools young filmmakers can easily comprehend and copy to their own ends.

I speak, of course, of the sex film.

By stretching its range from the dingiest amateur hardcore tapes to the slickest theatrical “erotic romances,” the sex film has become an item of mass appeal (or rather of a hundred overlapping cult audiences). And not just for the lonely-guy crowd either: the trade mag Adult Video News claims the market for adult-video rentals (hardcore and softcore combined) is 47 percent female. That’s a better gender ratio than you’ll find in many more allegedly “progressive” media like alternative comix and computer online services. It’s still not big in American multiplex theaters, it’s not on American broadcast TV, and many of its subgenres can’t be found at conservative video chain stores. That means it’s still an item people have to go out of their way to get. That means it’s still made to be something people will actually want, rather than some overproduced bland effects-fest.

And because the sex film is centered in the human body and the human spirit, it can’t stray too far from human-scale storytelling. Add money to an action scene and you get noise, smoke, computer-generated effects, and a thousand dead foreigners. Add money to a bedroom scene and you simply get a better-furnished, better-lit bedroom–and maybe some better actors.

Consider the critically-snickered-at producer-director Zalman King, purveyor of “class” adequate-budget softcore (Wild Orchid, Two Moon Junction, the made-for-Showtime Red Shoe Diaries series) for viewers who may still be a little timid about the genre. The typical King plot involves a shy heroine who becomes inexorably drawn toward carnal temptation. King and his colleagues (like Roger Corman, King now hires underlings to direct most of the films he produces) spend lots of screen time luring their heroines (and their viewers) from something approaching suburban consensus reality toward a semi-surrealistic universe of blue lighting, dreamlike nonlinear images, and hokey slow jazz-fusion music. In some King features there’s as much as a half hour before the first major nude scene. It’s an eon compared to King’s literary equivalent, the “steamy romance” novel, in which the heroine typically gets to have some action well before page 30. Yet this long first act cleverly lets King and his directors act as patient seducers, bringing viewers and characters alike into the scary freedoms of sensation and irrationality.

And because body doubles are so frequently and obviously used in King’s productions, you’re really seeing four people in every coupling–even kinkier if you think about it. This usually isn’t because the stars don’t have fine bodies, but because King likes to hire specialists in figure posing for the extreme close-ups, just like TV commercials hire separate hand models to pour the beer.

Just as there are innumerable ways to have sex, there are innumerable ways to represent it on the screen. Here are a few examples of how the combined allure and absurdity of on-screen sex, explicit or not, makes for entertaining and even breathtakingly weird film:

Rinse Dream (Nightdreams, Party Doll a Go Go) and Andrew Blake (House of Dreams, Secrets) are among the few would-beauteurs in the mostly boring world of hardcore video. Dream uses staccato video editing, Daliesque stage sets and just a dash of PoMo cynicism to enliven the standardized rite of the ritual fuck video. Blake, who started with “tasteful women’s erorica” for Playboy Video before moving into the hardcore side of the business, maintains a sense of ambitious visual pseudosophistication in his works, with wordless narratives that put teased-hair models through Helmut Newton-esque tableaux on their way toward the sex scenes. Blake is one of the few filmmakers who’s attempted to make explicit fuck scenes visually attractive; a Quixotic task at which I believe he fails.

The Playboy video centerfolds go further than Blake in exploring the inherent absurdity of out-of-context screen nudity. Each tape consists of a half-dozen vignettes, some more linear than others. Some show nude women doing things real-life people often do in the nude (stripping, dressing, bathing, sleeping, swimming, laying in the sun). Others show them doing things few people ever do nude (washing cars, riding jet skis, painting self-portraits, lying in empty storm drains, aerobicizing, doing modern-dance moves, holding up big globes or flags, playing pool, breaking into other people’s houses, making ice sculptures).

On the other end of the linear/ nonlinear spectrum are some videos marketed at female viewers. Each vignette in the Love Scenesseries begins with a conservatively-dressed young woman meeting a man who just happens to work as a male stripper; 15 minutes later, he’s privately showing her his hot dance moves (and his penile implants). Candida Royale, meanwhile, makes “feminine” hardcore tapes with lots of character development, lots of dialogue, almost halfway-decent acting, as few as two slow-paced sex scenes per hour, and the visible use of condoms (“except,” say the closing credits, “when the talent involved are lovers in real life”).

Royale’s work can be contrasted with generic hardcore, something that was never very good when it was in theaters (In the ’70s you could make the sleaziest crap this side of an Elks Lodge stag reel and the Frisco hype machine would call it bold and daring!). It’s gotten even duller on video.

A glut of producers has caused budgets to collapse. The average (and most are very average) video has five to eight fuck scenes strung together with the least possible dialogue, all quickly shot on local-news-quality camcorders and dubbed with cheesy synth music (it’s cheaper to hire a one-person band than to license stock music).

Yet this dismissal of all artistic pretension gives the assembly-line hardcore video a peculiarly honest quality. It doesn’t pretend to tell a real story or make any social statements (beyond crusading for its own legal right to exist). It is what it is, and claims to be nothing more.

With “pro” hardcore budgets so slight, it’s only a slight leap of lessened watchability into amateur hardcore videos. What they lack in picture quality they gain in energy. These are couples from across America, of all races and body types, who actually like one another and want to show you how much. If that’s not punk-rock moviemaking I don’t know what is.

There are many more sexfilm subgenres worth a cursory glance:

* sex-ed videos: many are more sex than ed, but the point is the illusion of education

* highbrow liberal sexfilm (Sirens, The Lover)

* The gloriously cheesy sex comedies USA shows late at night with all the sex cut out, like a chocolate chip cookie without the chips

* sex documentaries and shockumentaries

* short-form Playboy Channel stuff, most of which gets onto video before or after its cable run

* Euro sex sitcom films

* British sex farces (neither really sexy nor really funny, but a fantastic insight into the non-Masterpiece Theater side of English life)

* ’70s Euro erotic drama

* recent Euro erotic drama, from The Double Life of Veronique to the B melodramas released on video here by Private Screenings

* classic girlie film: strippers, nudists, David Friedman, and especially the king of over-the-top sex farce, Russ Meyer.

But we can’t leave without mentioning the best-distributed and worst of current sex genres, the made-for-video “erotic thriller.” At their best, they’re like mediocre USA World Premiere Movies with breasts added. At their worst, they’re the only current sex films that fulfill the radical-feminist stereotype of sex films as encouraging viewers to get off on violence against women. It’s a sick joke that Blockbuster will carry dozens of these but not a single tame centerfold video. (This may change now that Blockbuster’s part of the Viacom-Paramount-MTV-Showtime-Spelling empire.)