Deep Impact

But were they defending porn, or sex? Throughout the film, big-name talking heads like Norman Mailer, John Waters and Dick Cavett tell us a little smugly that the ’70s really did swing. Someone even utters that dreaded phrase: “You had to be there.” For a fleeting moment, claim the experts, porn was just an extension of free love, a great wave smashing down the already-porous borders of propriety. In this “whatever, man” climate, the adult industry edged closer to straight filmmaking than ever before, and ever since: Paramount shot adult films on their back lots and semi-legit director Wes Craven admits he made some blue back in the day (a poorly kept secret, Wes).

But this academic perspective doesn’t quite gel with the version of events recounted by those shady characters involved in the making of Deep Throat. Writer-director Gerard Damiano, now an octogenarian with a crooked back, spins yarns about on-set shenanigans like an old ball player looking back on his glory days. He does parrot the theory that the film was radically about female pleasure, but he’s more convincing when he crows about the money and the fame.

Porn appears to be chic again, as it is every few years with the release of tell-alls from reformed stars like Traci Lords and films like Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. In the new book The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, authors Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne detail the making and impact of Deep Throat, too, using many of the same sources as Bailey and Barbato. Theirs is an entirely behind-the-scenes look, and without the celebrity outsiders to impose political import on the enterprise (John Waters does appear in both projects), the book is much bleaker than Inside Deep Throat. Lovelace’s voice is frustratingly muted in the film, presumably because she died three years ago, but it rings clear in The Other Hollywood, hauntingly so. She claims that as a young woman, her husband, Chuck Traynor, a low-level producer with a mile-wide violent streak, beat her into submission for years, forcing her to make porn. Even the hippie clothes she wore, and her earth-girl posturing, were all at his command.

The film does acknowledge Traynor’s violence and Lovelace’s sad, wafting life – in the ’80s, she briefly aligned herself with the feminist organization Women Against Pornography, though deep into middle-age, broke and destitute, she returned to porn magazines – but it shoots her through a Vaseline lens, unquestioningly accepting the popular tale of innocence lured by predators. In McNeil and Osborne's book, those who were there fire off their opinions in a chorus of contradiction: Linda Lovelace loved to have sex. Linda Lovelace was getting beaten up every night. Linda Lovelace is a liar. Linda Lovelace is a victim.

The book The Other Hollywood and the film Inside Deep Throat are different enterprises, of course, but it’s informing to experience them so close together. McNeil and Osborne's porn historians are criminals and egotists; one starlet after another tells a similar life story about being lonely, abused, looking for love. The film tiptoes around these shadows, presenting most of its sources as quirky, funny even. Bailey and Barbato bill one subject, Lenny Camp, as a “location scout” for Deep Throat. This wrinkly bag of a curmudgeon disses everyone involved through a chest of phlegm. In McNeil and Osborne's book, he’s billed as Lenny Camp, “photographer/convicted child pornographer.” The absence of that icky major detail from Inside Deep Throat underscores the filmmakers’ quiet romanticism towards their subject.

Another missing, but notorious factoid: Lovelace, according to witnesses in The Other Hollywood, performed bestiality on film before becoming a star with Deep Throat. She describes being coerced at gunpoint to be mounted from behind by an unidentifiable breed of dog. Afterwards, she says: “I was in the deepest valley I’d ever been in, devastated, wanting only to die.” Of course, another bystander says: “Linda didn’t seem upset. … Linda just seemed to me like a hippie, free-love chick, you know?” Even if the latter were true, and Lovelace was expressing some kind of personal urge the rest of us are too uptight to tap into – call me repressed – such expression seems a wee bit unhealthy.

And yet, by pointing out that there is something depressing, sometimes tragic, about pornography – its inherent aversion to intimacy, the loneliness of the dark room – I have a feeling that Bailey and Barbato would align me with humourless, asexual cranky feminists like Susan Brownmiller, or sanctimonious pug-nosed right-wingers like prosecutor Larry Parrish (who charmingly announces that he hopes the current government can get those terrorists off the street so they can turn their attention back to the “prostitutes and whore-mongers”). There’s something about the film’s implicit narrative dichotomy – unrepressed swingers vs. anxious censors – that de-complicates porn. But porn is complicated, a difficult dance between a healthy need to answer our desires – no matter how "deviant," no matter how "normal" - and the equally healthy need to refuse the exploitation of another human being.

Inside Deep Throat, like Boogie Nights, seems almost nostalgic for the old days of porn. Certainly, as cameras wander a contemporary adult film convention where the waxed, honey-dipped stars of today wiggle and shake their unshakable plastic breasts like some other entirely unhuman species, Lovelace circa Deep Throat, with her slightly crossed eyes and average-sized chest, does seem like a blast from the real world. Of course, she wasn’t real; her last name was Boreman.

It’s clear what Bailey and Barbato are getting at: We live in a time of perpetual titillation (illustrated by a brief, almost subliminal flash of Britney Spears, lazy filmmaker’s shorthand for all that’s wrong with our attitudes towards sex today), at once free and easy with porn-ish images in advertising and actual porn online. And yet, America (and by extension, as consumers, Canada) remains a prudish, anti-sex culture driven by a Christian right that’s still panicking, a year later, from the sight of an unrequested, covered nipple on network television.

The soothsayers of Deep Throat’s time were wrong; the porn industry (now generating $10 billion US a year, according to McNeil) and mainstream movies didn’t merge. Hollywood films are largely devoid of sex scenes nowadays, and, as newspapers report salaciously every few months, teenaged girls appear to have no problem with, well, deep throating, even if they find intercourse gross (“I did not have sex with that woman!”). Maybe a film that shows normal people enjoying sex would be radical, and welcome, but is that film really Deep Throat?

One of Inside Deep Throat’s most affecting storylines belongs to Harry Reems, who earned $250 for his role as the doctor, and ended up an addict bumming nickels on Sunset Blvd. after the trials ensured he could never gain legitimacy in Hollywood. With this in mind, when Dick Cavett calls Deep Throat “a giggle,” it’s hard to laugh along.

But as if the big, muddled legacy of this seminal film – one worth examining, and well-examined by Bailey and Barbato – isn’t confusing enough, Reems’s coda tells us, definitively, that nothing around pornography is simple: He’s now a real estate mogul living in Utah, and, of course, a born-again Christian.

Inside Deep Throat opens in Toronto Feb. 11, and in Montreal and Vancouver Feb. 18.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.