Pornography: A Thriller
Directed by David Kittredge
“You like to watch?” Yeah, Pornography, kind of pretentious, is one of those movies. Kind of amazing, too, it’s also the Citizen Kane of gay porn ghost stories. Told in three distinct and uroboric acts, it revolves around the years-ago disappearance of a male-porn star (Jared Grey) and its present-day effect on a Brooklyn writer (Matthew Montgomery) and an L.A. adult film icon-turned-adult-film director (Pete Scherer). The first is working on a Social History of homosexual pornography, the other a screenplay that looks a lot like the first third of the movie we’re watching: that is, Pornography‘s last act concerns the creation of its first—by a character with a tangential role in the second—which might explain why, for its first few reels, it self-consciously mimics the stilted line readings, hard-working dialogue and contrived set-ups of a dirty movie refigured as straight-to-video horror-noir.
Horror-noir indeed—obsessed with David Lynch, the movie overtly and obliquely alludes to much of his oeuvre: Twin Peaks (instead of hallucinated characters making revelations in a roadhouse, it happens at a gay nightclub), Lost Highway (a character opens an envelope that contains a photo of himself looking at the photo he’s looking at!), Inland Empire (“don’t make this movie! It’s cursed!”) and Mulholland Dr. (besides the same-sex sex, the same actors play different characters in different storylines). But Pornography emerges as more than just a queer riff on the Missoula Eagle Scout’s canon; it uses his aesthetic to explore its own gender-neutralized, post-Mulvey, orientation-refocused concerns about The Gaze with characters resentful of their characterdom and (male) viewees ever-conscious of their viewers (us!): if, like me, you become conscious at any point throughout the movie that, despite all the gay sex on screen, you haven’t seen a single penis, the film chastises you directly in its final moments before vindictively sticking a dick in front of your face.
But Pornography‘s concerns extend beyond such issues of metacinema. Obviously, any gay-themed ghost story is also going to touch on that heftiest specter of all haunting the gay community. Montgomery has nightmares about a snuff film that turns out (possibly) to be real: in it, Grey is strapped to a gurney, gagged, screaming muffled cries for help; the setting looks like a nightmarish take on a hospital, provoking thoughts of, say, St. Vincent’s in the 80s. That the story of a lost porn star hangs over strangers fifteen years later suggests how, in the After-AIDS gay community, the past still looms particularly heavy over the present.
Opens April 16