Untrue blue
Tony Palmer
I've never been entirely convinced that pornography is as bad an influence as certain leaders of the more fashionable moral crusades would have us believe. So little is known about the actual effects of the written or spoken word, let alone the apparently persuasive image, that it would seem unwise to elaborate complex theories and consequently ill-thought-out laws as a result. What evidence there is merely confirms that more evidence is needed before even the most tenuous of arguments should be advanced. However, notwithstanding the psychological unsureness of our ground, we advance fearlessly, proclaiming that we are possessed of a divine insight which thereby permits us to distinguish with authority that which is harmful and that which is not. Permissiveness is held by some to be the original sin, although it rarely seems to occur to those same people that the Opposite course would lead them toward intolerance.
For example, ,a curious sense of duty sent me this week to see quite the nastiest films I've sat through for a long time. Unfortunately, both display an unabashed innocence of spirit which protects them from the usual self-righteous castigations. Thus, neither could be said to be Pornographic in the sense that they traded anticipation for fulfillment, although the trappings of cheap sexual comedy are there in full — nipples, pubes, masturbation, copulation and lesbianism. Each film Is designed to be full of satirical or social comment or both and each is glossily Produced and expensively dressed, having none of the marks of a quick bash in a backroom and the subsequent under-thecounter sale. If they had, at least one would know what had been intended and therefore what sort of film to expect and What sort of reaction to proffer.
A year ago, I had to attend the second Danish sex fair at Odense where the surfeit of blue films was such that any sympathy one had for the naked female (or male, for that matter) body, was quickly dispelled in a confusion of scratchy prints, dimly lit nudes and chaotically edited action. I mean, if they're going to do it at all, well, they may as well do it properly SO that we can see what's going on.
Which, I suppose, you could say was the one virtue of Camille 2000 ('X '-LondonCameo, Victoria) where the full frontal hero gets his orgasms in twenty-one seconds, nineteen seconds, thirty-two seconds, and finally — wait for it — eight seconds flat. The heroine, meanwhile, all groaning and grasping after the current manner, has it astride a lighted, plastic cube, in the bath, upside down lying on a mirror and backwards while sucking — wait for it again — her knee. However, not only does her sexual positioning demonstrate a comparative ignorance of how it's possible to get it done, it's also (I would imagine) extremely uncomfortable. And in Pretty Maids All in a Row (' X ' Ritz), we are asked to believe that a seemingly endless procession of nubile teenies have it off in every sense with an over-beefed Rock Hudson at the mere drop of a plastic duck (he has them all over his living room). How so much care and technical devotion — not to mention money — could have been lavished by the studios on such absurdities as these is quite beyond me. Presumably, the hope of rapid financial gain spurred them on. Sex rampant has always coined it in, and never more so than now; so let's see how far we can go and stay respectable, it is argued, or anyway stay within the bounds of what is permitted. What we get, therefore, to some extent is what we have permitted and what we deem to be respectable. Naturally, both films are packing them in.
So why do I object to these tatty little entertainments? Precisely that. They are both tatty and little — little in the sense that the small-mindedness of their makers is everywhere apparent — and because they have the pretence of entertainment. They are not. They are just plain boring, and that seems to me the one unforgivable quality in the cinema. You can be outrageous, grotesque, horrible, even pornographic, but not boring. How dare money be wasted, squandered, on such crass banalities, when there is a queue of other film-makers that stretches beyond the blue horizon waiting, hoping, to commit their ideas to celluloid? And does that imply that I believe there to be some ideas more worthy of expression in the cinema than others? Not at all. It is the moral dishonesty of claiming to do one thing, while in fact achieving — whether by accident or design — something quite different, that I find repulsive.
In Pretty Maids, which is Roger Vadim's first (and hopefully last) excursion into Hollywood, there is an acceptable smattering of small talk about the inadequacies of the school system '. The football coach, who is also vice-principal of the high school, believes that school reform is essential to avoid any further wastage of social drop-outs. Thus, he seduces all and mostly sundry and murders ' his dollies when they become too insistent. Apart from passing references to his ' responsibility' towards his pretty wife and son sitting at home, we never begin to understand why the football coach kills off those he has seduced, or why he believes in school reform and to what end.
Other jokes at humanity's expense are to be found in Camille. Marguerite (not the Marguerite, quips one of the faceless and probably nameless characters) has been transplanted to Rome from Paris and thinks drugs is a better way to go than consumption. Zombies all, the characters stumble around in a pot-induced haze searching for truth and beauty in a set that looks like a plastic factory gone potty. Again, the director makes no attempt to understand, let alone explain, these pathetic meanderings and the result is a meaningless charade which can satisfy no one. It cheapens all those involved, whether in the production of it, or the distribution of it, or those stupid enough to pay money to go and see it. In this sense Camille seems to me just like Pretty Maids, and in so far as their publicity and their pretence lie to us, they are pornography.
Again, I am quite aware that most films, if not most human activities, are culpable of one or other of those things to some degree. And I am also aware that there are many other probably worse forms of pornography. For example, the other film I went to see this week was Fright C X ' Studio One), which comes from the same camp as Get Carter, in that it appears to worship mindless violence as a way of life. Further, the censor has refused Camille a general certificate, although not, I suspect, for any of the reasons listed above. Pretty Maids, on the other hand, got by the good Mr Murphy and that is far more damaging both to the audience and more importantly to Mr Murphy's credibility. Permissive as I am, I would not actually ban either film, however; and not being intolerant, I would not even snip away at any of their juicier bits. So it would seem that the most one can do is question the motives of those who sponsored them. What kind of corrupting cinema do they want? With money for film production ever more limited, do they not think they have a moral obligation to the industry as a whole which should prevent them wasting time and resources on such as this? And if not, shouldn't there be some system whereby they could be stopped? Alas, obviously not, as long as degrading films like these can find themselves large audiences. Thus, the primary responsibility is ours, therefore, to boycott such trash and persuade everyone else to do the same. Otherwise, it is we who are the true pornographers.
Previous page
