Sep. 07, 2011 - Issue #829: Capital City Burlesque and Sex Issue 2011

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Falling down the peephole

Is porn driving film technology ... and more?

Brian Gibson / brian@vueweekly.com

On April 15, a movie opened in Hong Kong that promptly beat Avatar for the top-grossing Friday debut ever in the city, bagging HK$2.79 million in a day and grossing over HK$40-million (US$5-million) in its first two months. The movie? 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, a dimension-bulging, often sadistic and violent (including rape and dismemberment) take on the erotic novel The Carnal Prayer Mat.
Although not quite the virgin entry in our new 3D era's pornmovieverse (a South Korean skinflick beat it to screens by six months), 3D Sex and Zen certainly won't be the last to try tri-dimensional titillation. 3D's pushed by Hollywood studios because it's impossible to pirate (so far); Tinseltown's fearful of suffering the music-industry's burned, leaked and fileshared fate. Still, the technology may find its greatest consumer success in porn, where visual augmentation of certain assets is always a double-D plus.
But what if technology isn't on top of porn, but porn is riding and driving technology? That's the contention of Torontonian Patchen Barss' recent book The Erotic Engine. Barss argues that, to a great extent, the development of nearly every form of recent mass communication was pushed out of the shadows and into the light by smut-seekers.
Super-8 projectors shot into use in the '60s because they proved popular in frat-houses for screening nudie movies. Polaroids developed insta-nudes. The desire for porn-watching privacy at home, far from seedy adult theatres, pushed the cheaper, more convenient VHS videotape format and started selling VCRs. Skipping quickly to favourite sex-scenes made DVD players popular. The pay-per-view channelverse expanded after showing skinflicks in hotel rooms. Dirty-home-moviemakers directed the market for the camcorder in the '90s.
The demand for less commercial smut and even more private consumption and sharing of porn fuelled web engines until the Internet exploded. Mobile communications were pushed by porn. VoIP met a demand for dirty talk. Lusting eyes led to interactive TV and videophones. Pop-up windows and spam? Thank sex sites. Online transactions are safer today because web-porn distributors had to chastity-belt their security. Webcams took off because of people taking things off. And the haptic devices (touch- and texture-sensitive) now being developed by porn-makers may soon be used to transmit, across the world, hugs from a father to his daughter.
You could say that the more things change, the more they're still about sex. After all, the Victorian-era explosion in print saw an explosion in printed porn—pornographers' awareness of the popularity of erotic paintings and novels like Fanny Hill surely horse-whipped the 19th-century boom in both adult and non-adult photos, magazines and newspapers.
But have we, these 21st-century digital days, been dishonest with ourselves about porn slipping so casually into bed with film and film technology? And what if there's not only a seamier feedback loop between art and porn in general—with art often paving the low-way for porn to push its limits—but it's a loop that usually ends up hanging women for display? And what if porn is at the heart of more than just our technology?

Classical sculpture fawned over women's figures. Poetry used the technique of "blazon" to cut up its female subjects into manageable parts. TV and cinema continue to fetishize the female form. French critic Roland Barthes even intellectualized the tradition with his essay "The Face of Garbo," cryptically elaborating on but never criticizing the fan-male attention paid to the actress: "Garbo offered to one's gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually undefined, without however leaving one in doubt."
Hitchcock's Psycho, with its artfully voyeuristic shots of a man cutting into a naked woman in the shower, came out just a few months after Michael Powell's Peeping Tom in England, where a man serially murders women while recording their terror on his handheld movie camera. Psycho, a hit, cemented Hitchcock's stature; Peeping Tom, a flop, sank Powell's career in the UK. But both are now considered classics (Martin Scorsese was especially influenced by Powell's film). Was Peeping Tom simply too disturbingly honest about some men's violently lustful gaze?
It wasn't long before B-movies and porn began pushing the envelope that Hitchcock and Powell had opened. A decade later, slasher films had nightie-clad sorority sisters being slaughtered by masked men and porn had a new on-screen sex-act, Deep Throat, for eager middle-class audiences to watch (Scorsese and Brian De Palma admitted seeing the movie).
These days, unsimulated sex and porn stars have come over into art films. There's an increasingly fluid exchange between porn and Hollywood even as porn has also, according to Barss and others, been driving how we see what we see.
Our discomfort with admitting how much our private pleasures are pushing our public media may have to do with our now un-protectable sense of what's "adult"—the Internet still seems too wide-open to abuse by and abuse of children (surfing 18+ sites, sex and violence clips online for all to see, sexual predators, etc.). The Internet's both too public (easily accessible) and too private (any user can watch almost any content on the sly, then delete the evidence).
But, whether we want to talk truthfully about it or not, the Porndora's box of technology's been opened. Porn's so readily available now, the suddenly old-school porn-movie-making industry's hoping 3D flicks, like Sex and Zen, will raise its flagging fortunes. And the influences of porn are everywhere—because so much TV and film are trying to assault us with desire and need. Porn's visual techniques (soft-focus, catchphrases, clichéd conventions, in-your-face action, money shots) are used to have us fetishize houses for sale, salivate over food being cooked and eaten, admire athletes' bodies grunting and groaning, and much more.
Art and erotica were secretly kissing cousins for a long time, but then came advertising to make things fully up-front and sexual. Now, in these globalization days, the pornification of visual media, from content-delivery to product-placement, from how we see to what we see, has climaxed in an endlessly orgasmic opportunity for the most lascivious, lusting, tireless conqueror of them all—capitalism.