Showing posts with label porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label porn. Show all posts
Saturday, December 8, 2018
Friday, December 19, 2014
Hustlers
With the McKinnon-Dworkin Anti-Porn Goofiness behind us, one can see how important porn was to free speech in the United States. Both Al Goldstein's Screw and Larry Flynt's Hustler fought multiple battles against censorship and obscenity laws. That isn't to say Flynt was a saint -- the film does a nice job of laying out all his weird moments, with Flynt himself commenting on his own weirdness with the benefit of hindsight. His completely bananas, muck-raking Presidential campaign in 1984 is probably Flynt's crowning moment as a social commentator.
As the song goes, it's hard to kick against the pricks. Was Hustler important? Yes. How? Well, it de-mechanized the female body in American pornography, following Screw's lead in eschewing airbrushing and other photo touch-ups. It actually ran real investigative journalism. And Flynt was almost fearless. You may not always get the free-speech advocates you want, but sometimes you get the one you need.
Made by the son of one of Hustler's early art directors, Back Issues does fall down in two places. The timeline sometimes isn't clear. And the movie takes vast jumps in time to get to its 90-minute length. But a fascinating documentary nonetheless. Highly recommended.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Blue World
One of the standouts is "Nightcrawlers," filmed for an episode of the 1980's Twilight Zone revival. A Viet Nam veteran walks into a highway diner, and bad things happen. It's an excellent bit of science-fictional horror, and also seems to be the precursor to a novel that never materialized.
Many of the other stories are set in McCammon's home-state of Alabama, generally in small towns you really don't want to visit ("Yellowjacket Summer," "He'll Come Knocking at Your Door," and "Something Passed By."). The latter is an extremely effective bit of Cthulhuesque cosmic horror that dwells on the effects of a dimensional incursion without worrying about the how, why, or who.
"Night Calls the Green Falcon" is another stand-out that would make a terrific movie. An aging, forgotten, and psychologically damaged former star of a children's superhero serial about crimefighter the Green Falcon finds himself dropped into a real-life mystery that he initially has no real desire to tackle.
But tackle it he does, sometimes literally, dressed in the faded remnants of his movie costume. The story strikes a nice balance between the childish idealism of the superhero and the realities of the real world that's much more heart-breaking (and ultimately heart-warming) than the vast majority of adult superhero comics of the last thirty years.
Finally, there's the title novella, a plunge into a hard-boiled world of porn, sex, and serial killers with a Roman Catholic priest and a strangely innocent female porn star as its two protagonists. It verges on hard-core at points, but it's ultimately a story about conventional and unconventional morality set in San Francisco's famous Tenderloin district. McCammon's deft third-person narration is really on display here as the narrative moves seamlessly from the thoughts and actions of one character to another and another and then back again. Recommended.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Porn, Kafka, and Talk Radio
David Foster Wallace was something of a polymath when it came to his interests as both an essayist and a writer of fiction. In this collection, he assesses the American porn industry as a fly on the wall at its annual awards convention; John Updike's solipsism; Kafka; a new volume on Standard Written (American) English; the events of 9/11 as experienced while Wallace was living in Bloomington, Indiana; sports autobiographies; John McCain's 2000 run at the Republican preisdential nomination; the annual Maine lobster festival; a new volume of Joseph Frank's exhaustive literary biography of Dostoeevsky; and a conservative LA talk radio host. Whew!
Wallace may be the smartest man in the room, but he's also humane and sympathetic and often self-deprecating. His cultural insights will make one pause at points, especially his outsider's view of McCain's campaign experienced as a temporary insider on the campaign bus. It's not that McCain and his 'Straight Talk Express' were or were not 'authentic' in a way few politicians are -- it's the complex nature of 'authenticity' on the campaign trail that Wallace investigates both generally and in detail.
Wallace also deploys an encyclopedic array of facts about his topics like a discoverer describing the culture and habits of a new country. I learned more about the nuts and bolts of American talk radio in the early 21st century here than everywhere else; I learned way more than I really wanted to know about the history of lobsters as a foodstuff. Thankfully, I'm allergic to lobsters already or I'd be ideologically allergic to them as a menu item after the title essay.
Do any of the essays suggest the long-standing bipolar disorder that would eventually help cause Wallace's suicide only a couple years after this collection was published? No, not really -- Wallace seems fully engaged with the world, his demons almost completely hidden except for a September 12, 2001 panic attack in an Indiana convenience store as he realized he couldn't find an American flag to buy for his house, American flags having sprung up everywhere after the attacks. Otherwise, though, Wallace's accounts of his interactions with the broad spectrum of people and places in this collection suggests someone intelligent, highly analytical, earnest, witty, and thoroughly engaged with the world. Highly recommended.
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