Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

  Dick Filth also appends, “apropos nada,” that Ms. Jasmin St. Claire happens in real life to be the granddaughter of late NYC capo di tutti capo Paul Castellano, who was assassinated in the 1980s at least partly because of his opposition to the Mob’s involvement in “immoral enterprises” like narcotics and porn, and who thus has to have been doing a good 180 rpm in his grave ever since WBGB2.

  PLUS APPARENTLY COMING SOON TO AN ADULT RETAILER NEAR YOU: Ms. Jasmin St. Claire, in a bid to retain and even enhance her cult status, allows butane gas to be pumped via PVC into her lower colon and set afire on expulsion, resulting in a 3.5-foot anal blowtorch for Cream Productions’ 1998 Blow It Out Your Ass. (back to text)

  18Mook means roughly what rube used to mean among carnies. Like all psychically walled communities, the adult industry is rife with code and jargon. Wood is a camera-ready erection; woodman is a dependably potent male performer; and waiting for wood is a discreet way of explaining what everybody else in the cast and crew is doing when a male performer is experiencing wood trouble, which latter term is self-evident. SS means a sex scene; a DP is a Double Penetration, wherein a starlet’s vagina and rectum are simultaneously accessed by two woodmen — q.v. 1996’s semiclassic NYDP Blue. (Certain especially stoic and/or capacious actresses are apparently available for Triple Penetrations, but these performers are rare and so, thankfully, are TPs.) Tush ’n’ Bush denotes a film with both anal and vaginal SSs. Skeet (n/v) is a term used for both the act of male orgasm (v) and the material thereby emitted (n). (N.B., however, that both H. Hecuba and D. Filth aver that one of their big challenges as reviewers is to keep coming up with lively and evocative synonyms for semen.) Money — short for money shot — is a successfully filmed male orgasm, which of course 100 percent of the time takes place external to the female partner; e.g. a facial is a money whose skeet is directed onto the partner’s cheek or forehead. Girl-Girl signifies a sapphic SS, which every single hetero film seems to require at least one of. Beam denotes a straight-on deep-focus view of a dilated and wood-ready orifice. A B-girl is a second- or third-tier porn actress who’s lower paid than a starlet and is usually available for more perverse, degrading, or painful SSs. Fluff (v) is unfilmed oral activity designed to induce, maintain, or enhance a woodman’s wood (and high-end porn films used to employ what were actually called fluff girls, who were usually B-girls in waiting).

  EXERCISE: Use at least eight (8) of the prenominate adult-industry terms in a well-formed English sentence.

  SAMPLE SOLUTION: “After a kind of long wait for wood, a B-girl fluffed the rookie woodman into a state where he could take part in a DP SS whose frequent beams required maximum wood, and after a shaky start the SS ended up a spectacular double-facial in which the starlet really displayed her professionalism by managing to stay enthusiastic even though some of the skeet went in her right eye.” (back to text)

  19 The female performers seem, in truth, not just uncommunicative but downright surly. How much of this is tradeshow fatigue and how much is the stony demeanor of Insiders toward all Outsiders is anyone’s guess. The actresses are all in post-CES mufti — baggy jeans and cotton halters and big fuzzy slippers, etc. Without their makeup and appurtenances, Savage and Dane look even prettier; the B-girls do not. They all spend most of the time on the suite’s long vinyl couch watching a syndicated Seinfeld triple-header. (back to text)

  20 (especially their bottoms, it seems, in the Gonzos of Max, Buttman, Mr. Ben Dover, and “Butt Row’s” J. Silvera) (back to text)

  21 So let’s observe that whereas traditional, quote-unquote dramatic porn videos simulate the 100 percent sexualization of real life (viz. by creating a kind of alternative real world in which everyone from secretaries to firemen to dental hygienists is always just one prompt away from frantic intercourse), Gonzo videos push the envelope by offering the apparent sexualization of actual real life (by, for instance, combining real footage of babes on the Cannes beach with scripted footage of seduction and explicit sex). Gonzo thus obviously seems like the porn equivalent of the mainstream trend in Docudramas, COPS, Real-Life Adventures of 3rd-Shift Trauma Surgeons, etc. (back to text)

  22 This is not a rumor. It is documented as fact. No theories on this phenomenon or on the civilian females’ possible motives/susceptibilities will even be attempted here — the relevant questions are just too huge and stupefying. (back to text)

  23 Max is here referring not only to Silvera and Byron and the rest of the Gonzo-come-latelies, but to directors like Gregory Dark and Rob Black, who are the spearheads of a certain other hot ’90s genre called (by Dick Filth, in print) “Bizarro-Sleaze.” Gregory Dark’s recent Snakepit and The Shocking Truth do things like seat a starlet in an interview chair and then have an off-camera inquisitor ask her, e.g., whether she thinks she’s a slut and whether she thinks she’s eventually going to go to hell for her insatiable sluttiness and how she felt about the sexual attentions of her piggish stepfather, which example then segues into an SS where four men dressed stepfatherishly in bowties and cardigans and all with plastic pig-snouts strapped onto their faces gang-bang her into a stupor. Whereas Mr. Rob Black — compared to whom Gregory Dark is Frank Capra — offers entertainment like gang bangs of paraplegic women, women being made to eat Ritz crackers that have been skeeted on, and men taking turns spitting in women’s faces.*

  Your correspondents elect here to submit an opinion. Dark’s and Black’s movies are not for men who want to be aroused and maybe masturbate. They are for men who have problems with women and want to see them humiliated. Whether Bizarro-Sleaze might conceivably help armchair misogynists “work out” some of their anger at females is irrelevant. Catharsis is not these films’ intent. Their intent is to capitalize on a market-demand that quite clearly exists — these directors’ products, like Max Hardcore’s, are near-constant presences in Adult Video News’s Top Sellers and Renters lists.

  Dark’s and Black’s movies are vile. They are meant to be. And the truth is that in-your-face vileness is part of the schizoid direction porn’s been moving in all decade. For just as adult entertainment has become more “mainstream” — meaning more widely available, more acceptable, more lucrative, more chic: Boogie Nights — it has become also more “extreme,” and not just on the Bizarro margins. In nearly all hetero porn now there is a new emphasis on anal sex, painful penetrations, degrading tableaux, and the (at least) psychological abuse of women. In certain respects, this extremism may simply be porn’s tracing Hollywood entertainment’s own arc: It’s hardly news that TV and legit film have also gotten more violent and explicit and raw in the last decade. So maybe. And yet there’s something else.

  The psychodynamics of porn seem always to have involved a certain real degree of shame, self-loathing, perception of “sin,” etc. This has held both on the performing end — “I’m a nasty girl,” “I’m a little fuckhole” — and on the consumption end — recall, or get someone to tell you about, the embarrassment of being seen at the ticket window of an adult theater, or the haunted faces of trenchcoated men in Times Square, Boston’s Combat Zone, SF’s Tenderloin. We note, though, that the faces of today’s fans at the Adult CES seem different, the affect more complex. An observer gets the odd sense that the average fan here feels slightly ashamed of being slightly ashamed of his enthusiasm for porn, since the performers and directors now appear to have abandoned shame in favor of the steely-eyed exultation that always attends success in the great US market. Wherever else it is, porn is no longer in the shadows and slums. As Max’s scarlet-clad crewman put it, “In a way, it’s kind of a drag. Now everybody’s watching it. We used to be rebels. Now we’re fucking businessmen.” †

  The thing to recognize is that the adult industry’s new respectability creates a paradox. The more acceptable in modern culture it becomes, the farther porn will have to go in order to preserve the sense of unacceptability that’s so essential to its appeal. As should be evident, the industry’s already gone pretty far; and with reenacted child abus
e and barely disguised gang rapes now selling briskly, it is not hard to see where porn is eventually going to have to go in order to retain its edge of disrepute. Whether or not it ever actually gets there, it’s clear that the real horizon late-’90s porn is heading toward is the Snuff Film. It’s also clear — w/ all moral and cultural issues totally aside — that this is an extremely dangerous direction for the adult-film industry to have to keep moving in. It seems only a matter of time before another conservative pol sees in mainstream porn an outrage sufficient to hang his public ambitions on. The AVA, after all, is not the only powerful lobby with an interest in social norms. At this point, anyway, porn’s own internal contradictions (e.g., constantly offending mainstream values ——> the billions of $ that attend mainstream popularity) look to be the industry’s most dangerous enemy. (back to text)

  24 (Here yr. corresps.’ suspicion that the AVNA statuettes are bought in bulk, possibly hot, feels somehow confirmed.) (back to text)

  25…and of the ubiquitous smolder that’s so much a part of ’90s commercial culture. Mr. H. Hecuba, for instance, during one of the marathon screenings of Award-nominated videos referenced above in FN 3, pointed out that the relation between a Calvin Klein ad and a hard-core adult film is essentially the same as the relation between a funny joke and an explanation of what’s funny about that joke. (back to text)

  26 Hecuba and Filth, being both familiar with Max and financially independent of him, elect to remain in the suite under the beady and seemingly lidless eye of the Production Asst. (who, by the way, is not wearing a fire-colored MAXWORLD jumpsuit but has evidently been promised one if he completes his probationary employment period in good standing). (back to text)

  27 = fellatio? = very energetic French kissing? (back to text)

  28 (so to speak) (back to text)

  29 Yes, this is it: What’s so unbelievable is not the extent or relentlessness of porn people’s egotism (Jasmin St. Claire’s way of greeting a journalist is to offer him a personally autographed photo; Tom Byron, who is 36 and has precisely one attribute, affects the air of a Mafia don at the Sands’ bar’s nightly porn parties, extending his hand knuckles-up as if for obeisance, etc. etc.). It’s the obtuseness of it. Take, for just one other instance, the 29-year-old Mr. Scotty Schwartz, with whom through the good offices of Harold Hecuba your correspondents had a working supper that ended up being a whole Russian novel in itself. Young Mr. Schwartz, maybe 5'0" in low gravity and platform shoes, is a former Hollywood child star whose performances in Richard Pryor’s The Toy and Darren McGavin’s A Christmas Story were the zenith of a career the abrupt decline of which led — through a flux of circumstances too tortuous to even take notes on — to an acquaintance with the ubiquitous Ron Jeremy and an entrée to the insular social nexus of adult video. Either desperate or deranged or both, Scotty Schwartz evidently decided that the “controversy” of his appearance in a hard-core film would jump-start his legit career (kind of like a rehab or arrest, is Scotty’s analogy; he repeatedly gnashes his teeth over the fact that his old rival Corey Feldman’s career survived a rehab). And the adult industry, only too happy to cash in on the novelty of Scotty’s mainstream celebrity (recall 1994’s John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut, after all), starred Schwartz in Wicked Pictures’ 1996 Scotty’s X-Rated Adventure, a production beset by near-crippling anxiety and epic waits for wood, all of which psychic travails Scotty recounts in a detail that inspires pure empathic horror in yr. male corresps. (FYI, Mr. Bobbitt’s porn debut, too, was marred by serious wood issues — impotence apparently being the Achilles’ heel of nearly all nonprofessional woodmen [the term performance anxiety must take on a whole new hideous resonance in the magnesium glare of a working porn shoot] — but Bobbitt finally submitted to a penile injection of prostaglandin [known in the industry as “instant wood”], whereas Schwartz bravely/cravenly chose to limp through S.’s X-R.A. without medical assistance.)…

  The thrust of the whole long story being that Schwartz, though (understandably) no longer a hard-core performer, has abandoned mainstream ambitions for the adult vortex and is now a budding Gonzo-genre director, and is even this week guiding something called Scotty’s Behind the Anal Door at the C.E.S. (which presumably Max Hardcore doesn’t know about) through a hectic series of Tush ’n’ Bush shoots.

  Anyway, the point is that yr. corresps. were on Thursday night lured to this supper meeting by Hecuba’s reports that S. Schwartz had become sort of the unofficial mascot of the adult industry, and knew absolutely everybody, and was a near-manic chatterbox: We figured that he’d be a good source of background and context and gossip. H.H. had already prepared us for Schwartz’s personal manner (which is ticcy and breathless and neurally irritating in the same way a musical note held much too long is neurally irritating), but what Hecuba neglected to mention was that Scotty Schwartz is also totally incapable of talking about anything other than himself. Two courses and half an hour are spent on Scotty’s mainstream résumé and the fucking-over he got from fate’s fickle finger (alliteration and anatomically mixed metaphor Schwartz’s) and the comparative injustice of the arcs of his and C. Feldman’s careers, then another 20 minutes on Schwartz’s budding and allegedly platonic relationship with a born-again Christian girl he met on the Internet (during which whole initial 50 minutes one of yr. corresps. kept having to put his napkin in his mouth). Nor did Schwartz seem able or disposed to tell any story of which he himself was not the hero. Here — as close to verbatim as stupefaction permitted — is Scotty’s tale of his introduction to Mr. Russ Hampshire, head of VCA Inc. and what Scotty terms “a very very big fish: like this if you know what I’m saying to you here” in the adult industry:

  “So I’m at this party and hanging and schmoozing up the girls and there across the room is Russ Hampshire and Russ catches my like eye if you know what I’m saying and and goes, like, you know, ‘Hey kid, c’mere’ and so I do I go over I mean this is Russ fucking Hampshire you know what I’m saying here and I do I like go on over to where Russ is at and Russ comes over to me and goes, ‘Scotty, I been watching you. I like your style. I’m a good judge of people, and Scotty, you’re good people. I never heard one person say one bad thing about you.’ [Keep in mind that this is Scotty telling this story. Note how verbatim he gets Hampshire’s dialogue. Note the altered timbre and perfectly timed delivery. Note the way it never even occurs to Schwartz that a normal US citizen might be bored or repelled by Scotty’s lengthy recitation of someone else’s praise of him. Schwartz knows only that this interchange occurred and that it signifies that a big fish approves of him and that it redounds to Scotty’s credit and that he wants it widely, widely known.] ‘Kid, I just want you to know you’re fucking OK in my book, and if there’s anything I can do to, you know, help you, anything at all, I just want you to say the word.’”

  …End of vignette, and now Scotty — like Max, like Jasmin, like Jenna and Randy and Tom and Caressa — looks around the table, examining his auditors’ faces for the admiration that cannot possibly fail to appear. What is the socially appropriate response to an anecdote like this — a contextless anecdote, apropos nothing, with its smugly unsubtle (and yet not unmoving, finally, in its naked insecurity) agenda of getting you to admire the teller? The few seconds after, with the vignette hanging there and Scotty’s eyes on your correspondents’ faces like fingers, were the first of countless such moments over the AAVNA’s weekend. How is one expected to respond? It was very uncomfortable. One of yr. corresps. opted for “Gosh. Wow.” The other pretended to have had a brussels sprout go down the wrong way. (back to text)

  30 (Apparent pun accidental… although one of your corresps., on receiving Filth’s overall review in the fleeing taxi, responded that surely we had penetrated as far into the core of Max as any sentient organism could ever want to penetrate. Filth’s subsequent rebuttal, which consisted mainly of a long string of unsubstantiatable Max Hardcore stories, is, for basic legal reasons, here omitted.) (back to text)

  31 Mr. Tom Byron
, by the way, who broke into the industry in the mid-’80s as a young man whose adolescent skinniness and Howdy-Doodyish mien were as compelling and distinctive as his penis, is now having the same weird thing happen to his face that Christopher Walken seemed to have happen to his face sometime after The Dead Zone. It’s not just that Byron’s freckles are now gone or that his eyes have taken on a dead menace — the actual skin of his face has become shiny and sort of plasticized-looking, overtaut in the way a death mask is overtaut. For anyone who remembers what Byron looked like as a kid fresh out of the University of Houston, his face now after thirteen years at the top of his trade is a chilling contradiction of the industry’s claim that it’s all about pleasure and unfettered play. (back to text)

  32 (physical location of this Hall, if any, is unknown) (back to text)

  33 [Laughter, cheers.] (back to text)

  34 Let us note that the slick, full-color 15th AAVNA Official Program is itself an advertiser-sponsored document, its lists of categories and nominees scattered among full-page production-company ads hyping the nominated films themselves. This doesn’t seem beyond the pale — certainly Variety does the same sort of thing at Oscartime. Other ads in the AAVNA Program are for things like Wet Platinum–brand lubricant —