That post by Nina is actually about Lovecraft and Kant, the limits of knowledge, and transcendental horror; as such, it is entirely relevant to the Critiques of Science thread.
But I'm sure, perhaps, you meant this post instead,
Towards A Humanist Pornography.
" ...
less howling, more giggling." LOL!
As Nina writes,
"
A recent collection of silent pornographic films mostly made in France between 1905 and 1930 and collected by French director Michael Reilhac as The Good Old Naughty Days, astonishes and appeals for several reasons. The first thing you notice is the sheer level of silliness on show: sex isn't just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville. Men pretend to be statues of fauns for curious women to tickle; two seamstresses fall into a fit of giggles as their over-excited boss falls off the bed; a bawdy waitress serves a series of sexually-inspired meals to a man dressed as a musketeer before joining him for 'dessert'. This kind of theatrical role-play pre-empts many of the clichés of contemporary pornography, of course: nuns, school-mistresses, the 'peeping tom' motif, and so on. But the beauty of these early short films lies in the details, the laughter of its participants and the sheer variety of the bodies on parade: the unconventionally attractive mingle with the genuinely pretty; large posteriors squish overjoyed little men ..."
Yes, and this form of film porn [whether simulated or unsimulated] actually continued right up to the late-1960s/early-1970s [even in European art-cinema eg Felini's
Amarcord or Pasolini's
Decameron], from 1974], before the onset of
le passion du real in the form of banal porn and its ideological cousin, Reality TV. As Nina shows, a certain symbolic and fantasmatic distance was evident in early hard-core pornography. Such films may indeed have been graphically explicit, but the narrative frame which provided the basis (even if often mere pretext) for predictable sexual encounters was invariably ridiculously un-realistic, idiotic, stereotypical, stupidly comical, analogous to the 18th century
commedia del'arte in which the actors explicitly do not play "real" people, but simple one-dimensional types - the Miser, the Cuckold Husband, the Promiscuous Wife, the examples Nina mentions above. It could be said that such a compulsion to render the narrative comical is actually a healthy gesture of respect: everything may be shown, the images may be grapgic, but exactly for that reason the participants want to make it clear that it's all one big silly joke, that the actors are not really (viscerally) engaged.
So what happened, why the move to today's visceral, brutal banality and the cult of
le passion du real?
"
From the 1950s, social psychology varies endlessly the motif of how, in public life, we are all "wearing masks," adopting idenities which obfuscate our true selves. However, wearing a mask can be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask than in what we assume to be our "real self." Recall the proverbial impotent shy person who, while playing the cyberspace interactive game, adopts the screen identity of a sadistic murderer and irresistible seducer - it is all too simple to say that this identity is just an imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from his real life impotence. The point is rather that, since he knows that the cyberspace interactive game is "just a game," he can "show his true self," do things he would never have done in real life interactions - in the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated."==Zizek.
Today's pornography, as with Reality TV, in its eagerness to "get real", to abolish the place of appearance, falsely obfuscates the line that separates fiction from "reality": it is all still fiction, all still staged, all the players are still acting, even when playing themselves, all their behaviour now reduced to the most brutish, flat, and cynical of social conventions. [And this practice has ruined the European art film: movies like Patrice Chereau's
Intimacy and Lars von Trier's
Idiots crudely attempt to combine the "serious" narrative cinema with the "hardcore" depiction of sex].
It seems, though, that porn, whether underground or mainstream, did not suddenly jump from the (modernist) former to the (postmodernist) latter: there was also a transitional narrative form, very prominent in the 1970s [and now taken for granted in Hollywood as elsewhere] even as the Emmanueles and Deep Throats leeched there way to the surface: soft-porn that was framed by a moral narrative, usually in the form of vengence/revenge, reflecting a token acknowledgement of feminism's contemporaneous influence, but which actually was crucial in legitimising the move to the present "getting real" porn pathology. Characteristic of this genre, examples of which include
Salon Kitty,
Catherine & Co, is that the sex is portrayed "realistically" but the women get even, exact some form of retribution on their sexual oppressors, for the indignities caused, the latter ironically justifying the films' soft-porn in the cause of "getting real" ...
Addendum: Forgot to mention the most famous and notorious of the transitional movies above, soft-porn in the cause of realism, Bertolucci's
Last Tango In Paris [Marlon Brando is not killed by Maria Schneider in the film's, er, climax, for reasons of sexual oppression, but for reasons of class, rendering the film pro-porn and anti-feminist despite critics claims to the contrary. Indeed, one of the only
genuinely anti-pornographic films of the past decade was Kubrick's
Eyes Wide Shut (ironically, a number of scenes from the film were censored/digitally airbrushed in the U.S. release of the film on pornographic grounds!), unflinching in its dispassionate analysis and portrayal of the destructivenes of patriarchal sexuality under the seamless ideology of late, post-feminist capitalism.
