Review
INSIDE DEEP THROAT
Featuring Gerard Damiano, Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems
Written and directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato
Opens Friday, April 8
Uptown Screen
It could have been the punchline to a feminist joke about the ultimate male fantasy: a woman whose clitoris is located at the back of her throat.
Now, guys, I know how much we all like to have our cocks sucked, but, if you’ll pardon the pun, come on! (Just not on me. Nor in my mouth.) Notwithstanding the old adage that it’s better to give than to receive, how could anyone possibly delude himself that fellatio offers as much pleasure to the sucker as it does to the, er, suckee?
Well, somehow, back in the kinder, gentler times of 1972, Deep Throat became the most profitable film in motion picture history by indulging in that very delusion. Inside Deep Throat, a new documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, tries to show us that the most infamous of blue movies also sparked controversy – ultimately leading to its ban in 23 American states – because it dared to suggest women were at all capable of experiencing sexual pleasure, no matter where on the anatomy the clitoris might be located. But while the documentary occasionally overstates the place of Deep Throat in a greater national "culture war," the filmmakers still come up with a compelling docutainment that tells an engaging story of pornography’s first tentative steps toward the mainstream.
Today, long since the advent of home videocassettes and the Internet took porn out of the theatre and into the living room, it’s tough to imagine a little indie film about giving head creating much of a stir. Inside Deep Throat shows us that the mass culture was not always so blasé about pornographic movies, but perhaps errs in vilifying contemporary porn for being less artfully produced than the movie it celebrates. Like any valuable commodity, porn was ultimately industrialized, and if Deep Throat was instrumental in that industrialization because it initiated a cultural acceptance of onscreen sex, it seems somehow ridiculous to condemn what that industry has evolved into.
More interesting are the characters that emerge from the debate surrounding the film and its commercialization. For example, I had no idea that Deep Throat, produced for $25,000 by a group of investors including director Gerard Damiano, eventually grossed $600 million at the box office and that the majority of that money went into Mafia coffers. Nor did I know that the film’s star, Linda Lovelace, who was paid just $1,200 for her titular talents, eventually denounced the film during the 1986 Meese commission on pornography, only to return once more to acting in pornographic films later in life. Finally, it was a surprise that actor Harry Reems had been tried and convicted for his participation in the film, under obscenity laws that are still in place today south of the border. (It’s worth noting, too, that Reems just barely escaped sentencing – his conviction was overturned after Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected President.)
Still, it is difficult to, ahem, swallow narrator Dennis Hopper’s assertion that the film "was less about the joys of oral sex than it was about the freedom to speak out against shame and hypocrisy."
Yep, that’s quite a mouthful. While Deep Throat was undoubtedly caught up in a larger nationwide struggle for freedom of expression, a more honest, less shameful and less hypocritical way to state this might be to say that the film became emblematic of this struggle despite the fact that it was predominantly about the joys of oral sex.
And let’s just remember whose joy we’re talking about here, too, shall we? |
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