David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

14 Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.’s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.’s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box’s return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective — 60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy — was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: “In real movies, it’s all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.”

Hecuba’s detective’s explanation is intriguing, at least to yr. corresps., because it helps explain part of the deep appeal of hard-core films, films that are supposed to be “naked” and “explicit” but in truth are some of the most aloof, unrevealing footage for sale anywhere. Much of the cold, dead, mechanical * quality of adult films is attributable, really, to the performers’ faces. These are faces that usually appear bored or blank or workmanlike but are in fact simply hidden, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who’s giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy — he denies us true expression. (You can see this very particular bored, hard, dead look in strippers, prostitutes, and porn performers of all locales and genders.)

But it’s also true that occasionally, in a hard-core scene, the hidden self appears. It’s sort of the opposite of acting. You can see the porn performer’s whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blankness (in most males) yields to some genuinely felt erotic joy in what’s going on; the sighs and moans change from automatic to expressive. It happens only once in a while, but the detective is right: The effect on the viewer is electric. And the adult performers who can do this a lot — allow themselves to feel and enjoy what’s taking place, cameras or no — become huge, legendary stars. The 1980s’ Ginger Lynn and Keisha could do this, and now sometimes Jill Kelly and Rocco Siffredi can. Jenna Jameson and T.T. Boy cannot. They remain just bodies. (back to text)

15 Whether the framers of the US Constitution might, in their very wildest imaginations, have been able to foresee things like Anal Virgins VIII or 900-666-FUCK when they were thinking of expression they wanted to protect is obviously a thorny question and outside this article’s purview. (back to text)

16 (set previously in 1994, by one Amber Chang, at 251 males) (back to text)

17 According to Dick Filth, the imbroglio started when Hecuba crashed the party and was spotted by Ms. Nici Sterling, about whom Mr. Hecuba had said in a recent film review that it was “unclear whether she’d win any beauty contests, but she sure could suck cock.” It was apparently the beauty contest crack that had hurt Ms. Sterling’s feelings, and on seeing H.H., and suffering the relaxation of social inhibitions for which entertainment parties of all kinds are famous, the starlet made a beeline for Hecuba, uttered two high-volume expletives, and attempted to strike the print journalist with an open-handed right cross, whereupon H.H. had the presence of mind (aided perhaps by the six-inch heels that made Ms. Sterling’s balance precarious and forced her to telegraph the blow) to grab her hand before it could knock his trifocals off. Whereupon in turn Ms. Jasmin St. Claire, seeing Harold Hecuba clutching the upraised hand of an agitated and off-balance Nici Sterling, performed a set-pick off the three-foot width of Ron (“the Hedgehog”) Jeremy and leapt on Hecuba’s back and deployed what Filth averred was a pretty authentic- and impressive-looking LAPD-style chokehold, prompting Hecuba to whirl 360º in an effort to dislodge Ms. St. Claire while he still had the cerebral oxygen to do so, inadvertently whipcracking Ms. Sterling into Randy West and mussing Mr. West’s coiffure for the first time in industry memory and (to the best of Filth’s recollection) simultaneously dislodging H.H.’s special autotint trifocals and sending them out in an arc across the room and into the forbidding décolletage of Ms. Christy Canyon, never to be recovered (the glasses) or even seen ever again.

Filth also reports that the Sterling Incident had been just either the iceberg’s tip or the camel’s straw so far as Jasmin St. Claire and Harold Hecuba were concerned. H. Hecuba had evidently also conducted a recent interview with J. St. C. in which she had confided that she was taking the rather staggering amount of $ she was making from World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2 and investing it in a (pretty dubious-sounding) string of pornographic gumball machines all up and down the CA coast, and Hecuba had chosen to include this confidence in the published interview, and Ms. St. Claire was reportedly furious that Hecuba had publicized her “secret investment strategy,” believing that now everyone and his brother were going to want to get into adult-themed-gumball-vending and it would glut the market, and so Jasmin St. Claire had had it in for Harold Hecuba for some time, and may well have viewed the Sterling Incident more as a convenient excuse than as the rescue of what appeared to be an endangered colleague — D. Filth says that debate over the motives behind the Chokehold-360º-Hair-Cleavage fiasco has been vigorous and multiform for 20 months now.

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)

18 Mook 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).