Inside Deep Throat

My roommate Chris asked the obvious question when I told him I had just seen a documentary called Inside Deep Throat:

"Porn or Watergate?"

Of course, the answer is porn. I don't care nearly as much about the identity of Woodward and Bernstein's secret informer, if he/she even exists, as the making of the first really famous, mainstream sex film.



And, indeed, for most of its running time, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's film does exactly that: presents the story, in as matter-of-fact fashion as possible, of the making of and aftermath of the first truly well-known X-rated movie. Deep Throat was the product of low-budget filmmaker Gerard Damiano, a former hair dresser working with about $25,000 of the mob's money.

His film is, by his own account, terrible. A meaningless, silly jumble of a story about a woman (infamously played by Linda Lovelace) with her clitoris tragically located at the back of her throat. You can probably figure out the rest from here. Amateur (and, indeed, amateurish) actor Harry Reems portrayed Linda's advisor, who teaches her all about the pleasure of, well, deep throating.

Inside Deep Throat works best in these early sequences, interviewing Damiano about his filmmaking technique (or lack thereof), and gaining a little insight about how this primitive porn industry came together. Dennis Hopper's narration bounces us around in a dizzying tour of 70's Los Angeles, from the porn film sets where future professionals like Wes Craven learned their craft to the offices were District Attorneys plotted to shut the film down to the "happenings" counterculture types gathered to smoke dope, watch Deep Throat and feel rebellious.

Once the government brought the hammer down in a big way, the story becomes depressingly familiar. The "stars" of Deep Throat, who once had greatly prized their sudden noteriety and fame, found themselves rejected by society, unable to find work and, in the case of Harry Reems, even prosecuted and convicted on obscure conspiracy charges. Reems' conviction was eventually overturned, and he became an alcoholic an drug abuser. Indeed, the government's entire case, of course, became a pyrrhic victory, with the rates of pornography consumption growing exponentially in the time since the release of Deep Throat and films of its ilk.

All of these sequences are handled, if not masterfully, in a fast-paced, brisk and entertaining manner. Interview subjects like porn innovaters Hugh Hefner (of Playboy Magazine), Al Goldstein (of the somewhat less dignified Screw) and Larry Flynt (of the not-at-all dignified Hustler) provide some much-needed perspective on what else was available in terms of smut at the time. And clips from public health videos, television shows and other pornography of the time provide essential context as well, without overwhelming the film or making it feel overly nostalgic. The 70's music is all terrific, as well.

But at around an hour in, the film loses its way. Bailey and Barbato are entirely adept at presenting the history of Deep Throat, but not at all clear on what they have to say about it, or why it even matters. They spend the last half hour of the film utterly at a loss about where to go, what to do with this information.

Their film speaks out strongly against censorship, yet sneers at the feminist critics of pornography as silly, misinformed or straight-up liars.

Linda Lovelace came out years after the filming of Deep Throat, claiming to have been sexually abused during the film's production. Her interviews, including one appearance on the "Donahue" show along with fellow pornography critic Gloria Steinem, makes it sound as if she was a sex slave. All Bailey and Barbato supply in the way of counter-evidence is an interview clip with director Damiano, denying that Lovelace was coerced into performing. Surely there is something more that could have been done with this topic? Are Bailey and Barbato saying that the importance of Deep Throat as a cultural piece overshadows any possible cruelty towards Lovelace that may have gone into its production?

This is but one glaring contradiction. The film argues in favor of the liberating sexual revolution, glamorizing a time when people really believed that the mainstream and the sexual underground would fuse into a new, more free, more open-minded mainstream America. And now that this fantasy has become a reality, the film snipes that we're too open, too free with sexuality, and that our freedom has cheapened it. One particularly lame sequence filmed at the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas recently has the filmmakers asking a variety of porn stars if they have seen Deep Throat. They have not.

But who gives a shit? It's just a porno. Isn't that the whole point? That it doesn't matter? It's just sex? Inside Deep Throat becomes overly enamored of its subject, forgetting that the movie isn't what matters, it's the freedom to watch the movie! Deep Throat is whack off material. That's it. Now, we should be able to have whack off material, of course! And that's an important argument to make. But Bailey and Barbato seem to really believe Deep Throat to be something more, to have some deep significance, such that contemporary adult stars should have studied it. But why?

They're not helped by a panel of whiny Baby Boomer intellectuals like Camille Paglia and Norman Mailer, arguing as they always are in documentaries about how their generation was bold, different, interesting and revolutionary, and everything since has been boring and rotten and stinks.

Mailer's a smart guy, right? He used to be a good writer with things to say. Doesn't he realize that he has become the same curmudgeonly, closed-minded old timer he used to hate when he was a young man? Doesn't he realize the silly hypocracy of claiming that Deep Throat was really great, but porn now stinks and isn't sexy and young people have ruined sex forever and it's not exciting now like it was in 1971?

The fact is, porn hasn't really changed. It's on DVD's now, sure, and you can show a lot more penises going into the same few holes, sure, but otherwise it's pretty damn similar. Bad acting, cheap cameras, amateurish lighting, fake breasts, fake orgasms, hairy guys with large, swollen members...You get the idea. It hasn't changed. So why does Inside Deep Throat yearn for porn's bygone era? Why do I have to sit through yet another lamentation of the invention of the videocassette, that forever killed off the Times Square porno theater?

Come to think of it, why is anyone ever at any time nostalgic for porn theaters? That's not the relic of a more innocent time! It's way more scummy than what we do today! Today, I can pop in a porn DVD, cue up the part I like, masturbate in privacy in my own home, clean up and put the movie away. Why would anyone prefer a time when you had to put on a raincoat with nothing underneath, head down to 45th Street and jerk off with a bunch of other guys, sitting in a seat where a bunch of other guys have pleasured themselves that day? Ewwwwww....gross.....

Anyway, this is kind of a pet peeve of mine. I love a lot of stuff about my parent's generation - The Beatles, smoking pot, the Grateful Dead, French New Wave movies, lava lamps, casual sex without condoms.

But what I don't love is their self-involvement, and the way my generation has totally bought into it. We've been raised with this idea that everything in the 1960's was pure. Youthful rebellion was this brand-new concept. Music had never existed. Sex was just being discovered. And every Baby Boomer has been spouting this crap at us since for so long now, even we've started to believe it. So filmmakers of around my age are making a movie like Inside Deep Throat, shedding crocodile tears for a bygone era that paved the way for our time, but wasn't neccessarily any better or even any different.