03:15 pm: Inside Deep Throat
I've never seen
Deep Throat other than the clips in this movie and don't expect to see any more, but it was an interesting movie. I always went along with the facts that porn doesn't incite violence, but I was never very interested in it myself.
The movie starts with an "art" movie where a man recommends Linda Lovelace because she can do deep fellatio and we see some of that. It goes on to talk about the political, criminal, religious, and social groups who try to get porn, particularly
Deep Throat, because it made so much money, out of the theatres. I was surprised that the prosecutor still thinks porn is bad, but I suppose I shouldn't have been.
Partway through, Linda says she was constantly threatened and abused by her then-husband. That was hard to beleive considering how she acted when she was away from him and being interviewed. She doesn't mention it in her first two autobiographies. Then she's co-opted by Susan Brownmiller and Feminists Against Pornography and writes two more autobiographies, which is where she brings up the abuse. Wikipedia says there are witnesses, but many people don't beleive them. Near the end of her life, she claimed that both the porn film makers and the feminists screwed her because they didn't help her financially.
The motivations and mechanisms of the porn industry, and everybody against them, made this a very interesting movie.
Tags: dvd
| From: |  markiv1111 |
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| Date: | August 20th, 2009 08:47 pm (UTC) |
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| | "porn is bad...." | (Link) |
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Part of the problem with this particular loaded topic is that there are so many good people who are emphatically on one side or the other. I can't honestly refer to myself as pro-porn, but am definitely anti-censorship. But when a woman is 100% convinced that she was raped only because the man had been reading porn (and I am thinking of one particular friend of mine WINOLJ and I believe is generally politically liberal), and you weren't there, what are the counterarguments? What does one expect people like Reed Waller and the late Kate Worley to say to "the prosecutor"? And if I were to come back with, "And what about tens of thousands of women who were never raped because the men who might have assaulted them were at home harmlessly reading pornography," and someone else were to say, "That is a totally bizarre religious belief on your part, Nate, and you have no facts whatever to back it up," the "someone else" is factually correct. What you wind up with is a totally polarized perception of the porn industry, and quite likely, people on both sides of the issue who are not interested in watching the movie you reviewed because (as far as I can tell) it provides a balanced view of the controversy and gives voices to people on both sides -- so that the people who oppose either side will be furious that the movie was not slanted in their direction. Is the world a better place because this movie was made? Almost certainly. But there will be far, far too many people who, rather than enjoying the details of the motives and mechanisms of the porn industry, will be deeply upset because it is not a diatribe supporting their side -- or the other. Thanks for the review, in any event; I would probably never have heard of this movie otherwise.
Nate
