Whatever you desire - pornography in movies

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Howard Hampton

I. Nouvelle Vague Hookers: The girl -- first name Carmen, age 20-going-on-12 -- beckons to us, a thumb-sucking premonition of an X-rated universe in the offing: Lolita as Rollergirl. "She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up," shamus Philip Marlowe informs her unsurprised father. This Marlowe's less a private eye than a professional voyeur, a wisecracking tour guide and audience surrogate, navigating a cheerfully sordid terrain where maniacal nymphets pose for blackmailing pornographers calling themselves "rare book" dealers. He will appear in every scene; we will watch the story unfold, or rather disintegrate, through his well-traveled peepers as he traverses this fantasy Los Angeles where sexual availability is inescapable. From librarian types who let their hair down at the slightest provocation to randy, semi-butch taxi drivers, the succession of easy lays rivals a Little Oral Annie loop collection.

"I assume they have all the usual vices," says General Sternwood of Carmen and big sister Vivian, "besides those they've invented for themselves." The Big Sleep immerses us in a Los Angeles of exquisite dirty laundry -- is there another movie so serenely bemused by the nocturnal business-as-usual of confidential L.A., so cavalier about indecency and "sinuendo"? Bogart's Marlowe slips easily into this well-lubricated virtual reality while acting out every moviegoer's fantasy of the observer who can join in the action at will.

Marlowe's surveillance of "insolent and provocative" behavior has nothing to do with the solution to any particular crime. Instead, his work becomes an investigation of deviance-by-proxy, conducted at the expense of coherent narrative. Hence the picture's wholesale replacement of tedious exposition with a string of double-entendres, dissolving the storyline into a series of hard-boiled non sequiturs as promiscuous as its characters. Viewing the unreleased 1944 cut beside the familiar 1946 version, we discern a form of reverse censorship. What wound up being suppressed was conventional plotting and morality, replaced with a wonderfully illicit catalogue of smut-peddling shutterbugs, sexually aggressive women playing pussycat-and-mouse with violent men, and petulant sex-toys who bite the hand that doesn't feel them up.

And it's Martha Vickers' debauched Carmen, whose hobby is posing for then-unspeakable pictures, who offers us a glimpse into the Hollywood of salacious legend. Her glassy eyes are crystal balls revealing a city where life imitates stag films and art fantasizes about the machinations of pornography, where L.A. Confidential's high-class porno-and-call-girl operation -- Fleur-de-Lis, with its motto, "Whatever You Desire" -- blends into the landscape of Boogie Nights. This is the intersection of Hollywood and Vice, where prostitutes are surgically altered to resemble movie stars and movie stars are mistaken for whores, a place where a Shirley Temple lookalike might grow up to become the real-life teenage stripper Candy Barr, immortalized in the 1951 bachelor-party classic Smart Aleck humping a middle-aged sleazeball in a motel room on the road to Hollywood.

Poised midway between Veronica Lake and Miss Bart, a femme as infantile as she is fatale, Carmen's anesthetized gurgle anticipates a little too well the proto-porn stardom of Marilyn Monroe: the dazed ingenue also prefigures darker little figurines like Kiss Me Deadly's Lily, Breathless' Patricia. Put those fragments together and you get Kim Novak as her own body double in Hitchcock's most touching ode to fetish and scopophilia. In dutiful course, Jimmy Stewart would go on to play Carmen's father in an unwatchable 1978 Big Sleep remake, but Vertigo had already brought the pair together by way of an incestuous folie a deux (or is it trois?). Shameful desire and acquiescent role-playing groped its way back to the future of fetish as cinema and cinema as fetish: Carmen had developed into a full-blown archetype, passed from movie to movie just as Vickers' character bounced from man to man.

Carmen assumes her most distilled and ambivalent form as the buried animus inside Godard's parade of inflatable prostitute-dialecticians. Over and over, the archetype again finds herself on the business end of a phallic lens, made up as the perpetual mystery woman-child at the behest of a director who behaves like a cross between post-Marxist private dick and invalid father. She's interrogated by the camera with a sadistic lyricism -- an entranced dismay. Where Eddie Constantine's weather-beaten P.I. in Alphaville combines Marlowe and General Sternwood, on another level Uncle Jean's own exquisite surrogate eye belongs to Raoul Coutard, the cameraman assuming Stewart's role and gaze, tracking successive yet eerily similar objects of romantic surveillance. As The Big Sleep was a preview of the nouvelle vague, the erotic anomie of Weekend's pornographic opening monologue heralds the "end of cinema" as pronounced by the brazen hardcore of New Wave Hookers in 1985. In that trance of eager debasement where pimps turn nice girls into docile prosties by plying them with lame new-wave pop music, the final dissolution of narrative is inscribed with the language of MTV, presided over by the impish countenance of 16-year-old Traci Lords. Those unseen photos of Carmen had finally turned into moving pictures transporting Brigitte Bardot's pout and Anna Karina's opacity into the commodified future Godard prophesied, a seven-day weekend of money shots and orgiastic pileups. In the 21st century's sex-arcade utopia, fucking is spectator sport, a form of window-shopping -- capital made video flesh.