WWW- "Inside Deep Throat" is a documentary about the making of "Deep Throat," www.xxxdeepthroat.com, and about its cultural and political ramifications. Made for $25,000, the picture went on to make $600 million, though its stars and its director saw none of that money. Along the way, it spawned countless wisecracks, entered the "Watergate" lexicon and became part of the cultural landscape, even for people (like me) who've never seen it.
The documentary does a fine job of capturing the film's historical moment, a moment very different from our own. In 1972, Americans were reeling from a decade of unprecedented social change that had taken the country from Doris Day to Linda Lovelace in the blink of an eye. Even among people who were fairly progressive, there was a sense of a culture spinning out of control in a disturbing way. Mainstream movies had become more explicit, and many believed that Hollywood and the porn industry would eventually join forces -- that pornography was, in a sense, the advance guard. Hence the legal maneuvering over "Deep Throat" had bigger implications, with one side trying to make a last stand against smut and the other side wanting to crash the gates.
In telling the story, the filmmakers interview several dozen people, who collectively give testimony to a cultural divide that, if anything, is as wide today as ever. What's fascinating is how freakish they all seem. On the right, there are prosecutors and anti-pornography activists saying loony things like, " 'Deep Throat' attacks the very core of our being." Prosecutor Larry Parrish says that images from "Deep Throat" are still in his head 30 years later, and he can't erase them. What a privileged glimpse into the censorious mind. At the same time, the people on the left seem like slobs, who either really believe there's nothing morally wrong with having sex on camera for money or who pretend they don't have moral qualms, in the hope of making these standards mainstream.
Both sides deserve each other. Both sides should live together on an island, where they can argue about sex all day, because they have that obsession in common. But heaven help us if one side ever wins the argument, because 90 percent of us would not like the world that either side would have us live in.
"Inside Deep Throat" is inevitably the story of Linda Lovelace (nee Linda Bozeman), who was discovered by porn director Gerard Damiano. With the enthusiasm of a Salzburg concertmaster upon encountering the young Mozart, Damiano recognized in Lovelace's gag-free oral technique the makings of an American classic. The rest is history. Alas, the funding for "Deep Throat" reportedly came from underworld sources. Thus, no one connected with the film ever made any money.
The tragedy of Lovelace's subsequent life is the most arresting part of the "Deep Throat" saga. It's also the one aspect most open to differing interpretations. After spouting the doctrines of free love and happy porn, she became an ally of feminists and an anti-pornography crusader. Then, not long before her death from injuries sustained in a car accident, she posed nude for a magazine. She was broke. She was ideologically confused. She lost jobs when her employes found out her identity. She was the victim, in a sense, of shame. But was this shame intrinsic; that is, the inevitable consequence of her behavior? Or was hers simply the story of a fragile woman who could not maintain her self-esteem in the face of the world's scorn? How you decide that question has a lot to do with how you see the world. I get the feeling Lovelace herself never quite decided. She knew she was a victim. That's about all she had figured out. If this were 200 years ago, Donizetti could do an opera about her.
In contrast to Lovelace, her "Deep Throat" co-star Harry Reems found a way to turn the page by embracing Christianity and becoming a real estate dealer in Utah. He looks sane and healthy and seems to suffer from no ideological confusion.
"Inside Deep Throat" is balanced enough to serve as a cautionary tale that cuts in several directions at once. Few people, upon seeing footage of Times Square in the 1970s, would want to return to the squalid, crime-infested days of pre-Giuliani New York. At the same time, it's difficult to look at the repressed faces of these prosecutors and federal agents and feel anything but misery that they and their ilk are in ascendance in today's America. It would be inaccurate to describe "Inside Deep Throat" as a plea for moderation, but it sure inspires a desire for moderation in its audience.
