Lecture 10: L.A. ’ s Other Film Industry

1. Lecture 10: L.A.’s Other Film Industry Professor Michael Green Boogie Nights (1997) Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

2. This Lesson L.A.’s Other Film Industry How to Look at Pornography Boogie Nights andHollywood’s New Porn Aesthetic

3. L.A.’s Other Film Industry Lesson 10: Part I

4. Why Should we Study Porn? • The porn industry is centered in L.A – this is an L.A film class. • Porn is hugely profitable/popular. • Porn is culturally important. • Porn is ever more public and accessible. • Porn is inextricably linked with media technology.

5. Huge Popularity • Pornography grosses about $13 billion a year in the U.S. • Produces about 20 times the content of mainstream Hollywood studios – 12000 titles in 2006. • 400 million porn websites (about 12%) of total usage. • At least 40 million U.S adults regularly visit porn websites.

6. Cultural Importance • Pornography is a lightening rod for debates about values. • Porn usage yields insights into what we “really” care – and don’t care – about. • Porn is a prime text for the study of the representation of race, class, gender and sexuality – partially because it means to be transgressive and provocative.

7. Technology and Public Access • In the 1970s, porn was available only in certain movie theaters, which limited its audience and availability. • The 1980s home video revolution changed and hugely expanded the porn audience. • The Internet has expanded it even further, opening it up to all audiences. • The porn “aesthetic” has crossed over into mainstream entertainment.

8. Documentary • Go to the Frontline documentary on the PBS website linked to the syllabus and the lesson. • Watch a few of the short segments from the program, “American Porn.”

9. How to Look at Pornography Lesson 10: Part II

10. Porn is about Us • According to Laura Kipnis, author of “How to Look at Pornography,” porn should interest us because it is intensely and relentlessly about us. • She argues that pornography is central to our culture, that it “exposes the culture to itself.” • “Audiences constitute themselves around things that matter to them, and stay away in droves when no nerve is struck.”

11. Porn as Political Philosophy • Kipnis argues that pornography has less to do with sex thanpolitical philosophy. •  Writes Kipnis, “When writing about the pornography of the past, whether visual or literary, scholars and art historians routinely uncover allegorical meanings within it, and even political significance.” • Historians have made the case that modern pornography operated against authority as a form of social criticism.

12. Porn is Defined by its Opponents • Porn was defined less by its content than by the efforts of those in power to eliminate it and whatever social agendas it transported. • Writes Kipnis, “Those who take porn seriously are its opponents, who have little interesting to say on the subject.” • She wonders if they understand porn as metaphor, irony, symbolism or even fantasy. • Marquis de Sade • Lenny Bruce

13. Example Justine (1787) Written by Marquis de Sade

14. Pornographic Transgression • Pornography holds us in thrall to the theatrics of transgression, its dedication to crossing boundaries and violating social strictures. • It’s greatest pleasure is to locate society’s taboos, prohibitions and proprieties, and transgress them. This means knowing culture inside and out. • A culture’s pornography becomes a map of that culture’s borders – which, whether geographical or psychological, are political.

15. Aesthetic Transgressions • Kipnis writes, “Like the avant-garde’s, pornography’s transgressions are first of all aesthetic. It confronts us with bodies that repulse us – like fat ones – or defies us with genders we find noxious. It induces us to look at what is conventionally banished from view.”

16. The Edges of Culture • Writes Kipnis, “The edges of culture are exquisitely threatening places. Straddling them gives you a very different vantage point on things. Crossing that edge is an intense border experience of pleasure and danger, arousal and outrage.” • “We don’t choose the social codes we live by, they choose us. Porn’s very calculated violations of these strict codes make it the exciting and nerve-wracking thing it is.”

17. The Public/Private Divide • Kipnis says that porn’s most flagrant border transgression is the complete disregard for the public/private divide. • She writes, “Flaunting its contempt for all proprieties, it’s this transgression in particular that triggers so much hand wringing about the deleterious effects on society of naked private parts in public view.” • Standards of privacy are a modern invention, tied to the rise of the middle class and the equating of sex with shame and disgust.

18. Porn and Class • Kipnis says that pornography dedicates itself to offending all the bodily and sexual proprieties intrinsic to upholding class distinctions: good manners, privacy, and the absence of vulgarity. • “Questions of social class seem to lurk somewhere quite near all this distress over pornography, [which] . . . takes on all the associations of a low-class thing.”

19. Class Discrimination However, writes Kipnis, “The arguments about the “effects” of culture seem to be applied exclusively to lower cultural forms, that is, to pornography, cartoons, or subcultural forms like gangsta rap.” Kipnis says that the researchers don’t bother to measure the effects of the misogyny or violence in Shakespeare.

20. Class Stereotypes Kipnis argues that if porn is complex and meaningful, then the presumption that only low culture causes “effects” is a stereotype about its imagined viewers and their intelligence or self-control or values. She believes pornography isn’t viewed as having complexity because it audience isn’t viewed as having complexity. Porn is never far from any political argument about culture.

21. Boogie Nights and Hollywood’s New Porn Aesthetic Boogie Nights (1997) Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Lesson 10: Part III

22. The Movie • Written/directed by Paul Thomas Anderson • Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, There Will be Blood • It’s cast and subject gave it “indie” appeal. • Movie was critically well-received. • Three Oscar nominations • A major example of the 1990s crossover of porn into the mainstream. • Explores aspects of the Los Angeles film industry not normally seen in feature films. 22

23. “Disco Daze” According to Robert Sickels, Americans tend to romanticize eras in ways that don’t necessarily agree with the historical facts of the time period in question. Sickels argues that the 1970s are enjoying a public re-evaluation that often overlooks things such as Vietnam, Watergate and the failure of the E.R.A. He says we instead revel in the clothes and the joy of Disco, and revere the “freedoms” of the sexual revolution.

24. 1970s vs. 1980s • Sickels argues that Boogie Nights primarily emphasizes the corporate decay of the 1980s • He writes, “[Boogie Nights] is an insightful and scathing fable of corporate decay in the 1980s. Anderson’s film depicts the price of the 1980s cutthroat financial mentality as far more costly than that of 1970s moral laxity.” • Sickels argues that Boogie Nights is not a realistic portrayal of the porn industry. • Pause the lecture and watch clips #1 and 2.

25. Porno Chic • According to Sickels, the success of Boogie Nights is an example of the rebirth of what in the 1970s was known as “porno chic,” which had to do with a brief moment in history during which people discussed some porn films as if they were art films. 25

26. Crossover to the Mainstream Given porn’s enormous profitability it’s not surprising that porn-related subjects are slowly but surely beginning to appear in more mainstream venues. Over the last ten years or so, porn-related subjects have appeared more often in the mainstream, in documentaries, fictional films and television shows, among other venues. Of course this is predominately manifested in terms of the representation of women. 26

27. Examples Zach and Miri Make a Porno The Girl Next Door Documentaries How to Make Love like a Porn Star (Jameson) Brittany Spears Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian sex tapes Soderberg’s The Girlfriend Experience Megan Fox in Transformers Pause and watch clip #3 27

28. Example Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) “Directed” by Michael Bay 28

29. Example 29

30. End of Lecture 10