In a great example of media propigating porn hysteria, the acclaimed PBS documentary series Frontline aired a show titled American Porn, Frontline’s own examination of the adult entertainment industry. It received a lot of hype and some pretty titillating pre-press. Articles written by journalists who saw advance copies gave us teasing tidbits that hinted at the documentary’s shocking imagery — just enough to ensure that scores of viewers would tune in. And tune in we did.
On the surface, it was a slick little documentary. Opening with those “viewer discretion advised” warnings that let you know you’re in for something good, it propelled us through image after image of collaged scenes from porn videos pieced together, like a smooth MTV video. And, oddly, this documentary had a soundtrack that included songs from the now hip, once underground Massive Attack. Well-shot and entertaining to the eye, the show from reporter-producer Michael Kirk seemed to be attempting to document porn’s emergence into, and subsequent co-habitation with, pop culture, in both image and word.
Which, in many ways, it did. Again and again, we were made aware of the incredible amounts of money the porn business rakes in, though the reporter never pointed out that it’s because the American consumer is forking over that $4-billion-plus a year. We got to see Kirk follow the money trail from the bottom, where actors are making around a thousand bucks a scene, all the way to the top where cable companies and hoteliers bring it to the paying masses, earning insane amounts of cash.
Larry Flynt worries onscreen about porn’s fringes inviting trouble into the mainstream adult entertainment business, and the inner workings of Danni Ashe’s Danni’s Hard Drive are examined so we can see the simple (and outrageously lucrative) structure of softcore online porn. Also, we were treated to a quick run through porn’s prosecution history by the U.S. Justice Department under recent Republican administrations, complete with shots of Janet Reno and Bill Clinton to illustrate Kirk’s point about the swelling of the industry’s coffers during the Democratic administration. But is that really why we wanted to watch Frontline? No, not really. We wanted behind-the-scenes views, lurid details about shady goings-on, and to see what the viewer discretion warnings were all about — and Frontline, to its detriment, did not disappoint.
Watching Kirk attempt to illustrate the human face of the porn industry by profiling directors and (briefly) actors was like going over a seriously stunted, pre-teen boy’s list of questions about porn. Virtually every stereotypical notion about the adult industry was catered to in segments that represent only the tiniest slices of the genre. Instead of digging beneath the surface of the mainstream porn market to interview the people there (and incidentally where the money’s really being moved around), Frontline focused on the fringes of extreme porn, depicting pornography as a horrid, hundred-faced hydra of exploitation. Considering our culture’s internal struggle to reconcile sexuality with ingrained Puritanical values, portraying porn in a shocking and lurid manner is like shooting fish in a barrel, and this material did exactly that.
Even though the industry brims with incredibly talented, intelligent, articulate and successful female directors, Frontline gave us Lizzie Borden: a woman occupying an infinitesimally small and very dark corner of the porn industry. Borden makes “rape” porn, and tells Frontline that she had an alcoholic stepfather, thus her weird cult films are therapeutic for her. Alarmingly, she continues, saying “…I’m exploiting people, taking all my inner demons and aggressions out on them. But it’s good for me. So I guess that’s all that matters.”
All this segment told us was that there are really sad people out there with video cameras who should probably should have some Zoloft instead. And that those people definitely shouldn’t be speaking for an industry that, for the most part, really wants nothing to do with them. What Frontline missed when they poked at Lizzie’s quivering psyche was that the porn industry as a community has been trying to figure out what to do with the tiny handful of Lizzie’s that are out there, and that this issue has fueled contentious debate on and off the pages of trade magazine Adult Video News for the past year.
The mainstream porn community ends up in the precarious position of not being able to condone or condemn these bottom-of-the-barrel auteurs. Even though most porn consumers and producers are offended by such material, they always run up against the issues of free speech, freedom of expression and censorship — not to mention the slippery definition of obscenity. The question for the porn industry at large is: “What do you do when Lizzie’s your cousin?”
And where the hell was accomplished filmmaker Veronica Hart, feminist director Candid Royalle, and the industry’s other powerful women directors? We didn’t hear from any of the other big guys either, like Paul Thomas or John Leslie, nor did we get a decent look into any actual fetish and independent filmmakers. What’s worse, when Frontline took a quick second to talk to actors, the focus was on just what you’d expect: fresh off the bus eighteen-year-olds that were reluctant, nervous, and “just in it for the money.” That is definitely one aspect of the industry — but it’s only a small part of a very big picture.
Did Frontline play to the sleaze factor in exchange for accurate reporting? You bet. There’s no way of ever knowing just what Frontline was trying to do. Perhaps they were attempting to show too much all at once, depicting a huge industry buckshot-style — or maybe they were covering a subject that they really didn’t want to be dealing with. Or maybe the people calling the shots behind the cameras had an agenda within the message they wanted to send. What is definite is that viewers were shortchanged, robbed of a chance to really find out about the people who work in porn, and the ways in which porn is really a microcosm of that other multi-billion-dollar industry: Hollywood. The people who really got the fuzzy end of Frontline’s lollipop are the regular folks who make most of the porn that’s on today’s market — people who aren’t lurid or stereotypical enough for Frontline. And possibly the most interesting part of the equation was left out as well: who is buying all the porn in America today? That’s me there in the raincoat, and you on the other side of that ominously-flickering computer screen.
American Porn wasn’t about American porn. American Porn was about making us watch Frontline.
