Friday, June 12

The Poverty of Porn

Porn is everywhere, fairly cheap and big business, a 13 billion dollar a year business. I can watch it in the privacy of my home and without shame. There’s just one problem with all this sexuality liberating largesse.

It’s boring. A genre in assembly line production: cheap, formalistic and plastic. It’s banal and utterly lacking in originality or humor. Well, intentional humor. You don’t have to watch a lot of it to see it glaring shortcomings.

First of all the women are the largest collection of Barbi dolls imaginable. They are big busted models for Fredricks of Hollywood line of lingerie. Why in God names must they all wear those high heeled “stripper” shoes? They are completely impractical not to mention dangerous. God forbid she should be anywhere near a waterbed. (The men in gay porn don’t wear the silly shoes but are inclined to keep their socks on.)

The stage names are always good for laughs: Kandy Kane, Daisy Chain, Lucky Thai, and my favorite Candy Apples. The men are less original but Justin Side and Lance Gear are pretty funny. The men for all their hard work (pun intended) are bored, since they are merely props for the female stars. This boredom is especially evident in gay porn where they are not only silent, but about as excited as waiting in line at the grocery store.

In the old days porn was shoot on 8 or 16 mm film. Now with technical advancements in video any dweeb with a digital camera can make a porn film. I got into a debate with someone who insisted, when it comes to porn, no one cares about lighting, editing or camera work. Well he doesn’t apparently, but poor attention to these trivial matters can ruin any fantasy you are trying to create. Most directors think enough light means everything looks like it was shot in an aisle at Walmart. (this might explain all the overtime employees are forced to do).

In one particularly hilarious vignette the producers went to the trouble of creating a more or less realistic bedroom set complete with a window, a comfortable looking bed and coordinated colors but ruined it with a high angled shot that revealed a board nailed across the two walls and a drop ceiling with florescent lighting. Obviously MILF Productions was shooting in the office after hours.

In a effort to be clever and arty the cameraman will lurch about or tilt the camera at a angle that makes one dizzy. For God Sake, spare us the shot, where the camera is so close it almost becomes a threesome. ( the reason for the lurching is because the cameraman’s suffered a concession after a colliding with someone’s butt.) Unless you are appealing to a gynecologist, we don’t need to see a close up of the genitalia at work. It’s not erotic, it’s clinical.

Who is this formalistic drivel appealing to? The days of the lonely horndaddy buying porn to get his rocks off are over. Forty percent of consumers are women and the demand for porn geared to couples, lesbian and gay viewer ship is increasing.

One of the biggest complaints among viewers and industry is the lack of imagination in story line
(story? what story?). The problem is that porn is geared to the viewers’ hand, not their imagination. Some may say it doesn’t matter how bad the actors, production and directing is, that’s not what people are looking at. That’s exactly the poor reasoning that keeps this genre and industry from being taken seriously.

No comments: