Cinema
Boogie Nights
(18, selected cinemas)
Sex and sentimentality
Mark Steyn
The last hardcore porn movie I paid any close attention to was about 15 years ago at a stag night. At two in the morning, after the ritual strippers and 28 pints, someone slammed in the first of the com- pulsory videos and we all dutifully settled down to watch. I dozed off and, when I came round some hours later, the leading lady was being penetrated simultaneously in every possible orifice on a snooker table (don't ask me why a snooker table — it's one of the unshakeable conventions of the genre). The camera zoomed in for a close- up, which, to the horrified fascination of those of us emerging woozily from the land of nod, accidentally revealed an astonishing collection of monstrous carbuncles in her nether regions. 'Oh, my God,' we groaned as one, and staggered off to the kitchen in search of black coffee and mini-cabs home.
My point is that, even before Aids, hard- core porn was a seedy, unhealthy business whose stars rarely emerged with anything to show for their labours apart from genital herpes and unaffordable drug habits. Yet, reluctant to accept this view of its fellow toilers in the thespian arts, Hollywood is now extending its traditional sentimentality about prostitutes to pornographers. Thus, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, a sunny view of a dark world, in which a company of porno actors is presented as one big loving family.
For Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), it's the family he has never known. It's 1977 and Eddie is working as a busboy in a Vegas hangout patronised by the distin- guished hardcore director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). Jack is in need of a Can- dide type for one of those films in which a young naif is initiated into all the various pleasures of Eros. Eddie fits the bill, not least because of his magnificent endow- ment, and adopts the nom de porn of 'Dirk Diggler'. Jack becomes a father figure to Dirk, and Jack's top star Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) a mom — with the moronic waif Rollergirl (Heather Graham), so called because she keeps her skates on even during sex, fleshing out Dirk's new family as a kind of sister.
From there on, the film gets its own skates on and glides through the coke 'n' disco heyday of LA porn to 1984. The most interesting relationship is between Eddie and Amber, with Miss Moore doing most of the heavy work. She's a serious actress, of course, not a porn star, but her skin has that luminous tingle of sexual allure and her lips are blood red. Her eyes, though, are desperately sad and anxious: there's a whole story in them that Anderson man- ages to ignore. It's the same with Burt Reynolds, who, for all the raffish swagger of Jack, manages to infuse the part with a sense of his own career frustrations. But, for every Moore and Reynolds, there are players like Nina Hartley, a genuine porn star who takes a supporting role and also serves as the film's 'technical advisor'. As a result, the performances are a weird col- lage of subtle, layered characterisations and the kind of endearingly clunky acting you get in real porn films in the bits leading up to the sex where the bisexual countess takes the virginal stable-girl shopping and says, la, that pipphole bra rilly suits you.'
Anderson appears to have scribbled down a long laundry list of quirky thoughts on his subject and then bunged them all in: a homely lardbutt queen with a crush on Dirk, an Hispanic no-talent desperate to break into the business, a producer jailed for child molestation ... But these vignettes don't lead anywhere and, cumula- tively, have a fatal lack of momentum. The sum of all their parts, however generous or cosmetically enhanced, don't add up to a whole.
And then there's the happy ending. Dirk Diggler is loosely based on John Holmes, the doyen of male porn stars who, under the name of Johnny Wadd, was earning up to $3,000 a day in the Sev- enties. But, when his fabled ejaculatory powers began to wane, he turned to cocaine, blew all his dough and died in obscurity, of complications from HIV, in 1988. In simply skipping this sordid decline, Anderson is being deeply dishon- est, both about the period he so lovingly recreates and its grim aftermath. Instead, the film's enduring image is its unveiling (after two-and-a-half hours) of Dirk's star part, which dances across the screen to the accompaniment of 'It's A Livin' Thing' by the Electric Light Orchestra. Anderson has been showered with praise for his use of Seventies pop in Boogie Nights, but it seems to me it stunts the film's potential: you can make some droll jokes with disco favourites, but they're far too simple- minded to bear any true dramatic weight, and eventually they drag the film down to their level. The Ice Storm, also set in the Seventies, has barely a bar of period pop, but its sense of period is far more acute. Life is not a Capital Gold revival night at Hammersmith Palais,
Previous page
