Inside Deep Throat (2005)

  Ok, before anybody freaks out, this is a documentary about the porn film Deep Throat, not the actual film.  I'm not opposed to porn but reviewing it gets a little weird.  It's also even more subjective than non-porn films.

I added this to my queue after seeing a clip of it in another documentary called This Film is Not Yet Rated.  This tells you about the making of the film Deep Throat, sure, with interviews from the director, the male lead, and some of the crew.  The location manager in particular was hilarious.  More importantly, it tells you about the cultural attitudes of the time and what this movie had to overcome on its way to being the highest grossing film ever made.  Because of its popularity and prominence - being shown right in the middle of Times Square - Deep Throat became a nexus of discussion about censorship, morality, and what constitutes art.  It was supposed to be the rallying cry of a new, sexually liberated society.  It managed to squeak by the Nixon-led religious right condemnation only to run headlong into the teeth of second-wave feminism.  It never stood a chance with that one-two punch.  What's more sad is the human cost.  No one walked away from this film a happier person.  Linda Lovelace became one of its most critical protesters.  Harry Reems faced jail time as a scapegoat and saw any chance of a career in "legitimate" film down the tubes.  Gerard Damiano (the director) never saw a dime from his magnum opus.  The only people who profited were the mob and the conservatives.

It's really interesting to me to see how far we've come as a society and yet how short we've fallen in the idea of portraying sexuality.  Damiano intended Deep Throat to be kind of a gateway to mainstream films.  Like, regular films could have hardcore sex scenes that furthered the movie instead of being the point of them.  That still hasn't happened.  You can show someone's head exploding like an overripe melon but you can't show an erect penis.  There was a scientific study in the 70s that showed there were no deleterious effects to watching porn and recommended loosening the obscenity laws to reflect that but the study was repressed by the government because it didn't suit their narrative.  Political agendas once more triumphed over logic and reason by inflaming public opinion.  Everyone talks about how Hollywood is so liberal and maybe the actors are but most studios are extremely risk averse.  Look at any movie up to the 70s and you will see married couples sleeping in separate beds or even separate rooms.  Heterosexual, legally married couples are the gold standard of conservatives and nobody even dared inferring they had sex.  That's more fantastical than believing a pizza delivery guy is going to get boned by a hot housewife for no reason.

This post has already gone on way too long but I have one last thing to say.  Maybe if we didn't treat porn like it was disgusting and shameful (in public, while contributing billions of dollars annually in private) it would achieve a level of legitimacy and stop being horribly amateur and exploitative.  Stop. Being. Fucking. Hypocrites. About. Fucking.  The end.