February 17-23, 2005

movies

Crass Act

getting to the bottom: Deep Throat spawned an industry, a crusade and, 33 years later, a crummy documentary.

The brainless Inside Deep Throat manages to cheapen its subject.

by Sam Adams

Is it possible to degrade pornography? Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's smug, glib documentary treats the furor surrounding the 1972 release of Deep Throat as a cultural watershed: the culmination of the sexual revolution, the opening shot in the ongoing culture war, the birth of the adult film industry. But their slice-and-dice editing style, which makes the movie feel like a 90-minute commercial for itself, is so fundamentally shallow and unserious that it trivializes everything it touches. Even in a theater, you keep waiting for the next commercial.

Like any self-respecting sleazemonger, Barbato and Bailey bait their hook with a combination of sex and sensationalism, provided here by the Nixon administration's campaign against the movie and its not coincidentally enormous profits. (An exact total is unlikely, since as one mobbed-up distributor admits, the money came rolling in so fast they stopped counting and started weighing.) Shortchanged, if not excluded, are feminist objections to the movie and allegations that its star, Linda Lovelace (née Boreman), was frequently beaten and held at gunpoint by the husband who helped make the movie. (Bruises on her legs are clearly visible.) Barbato and Bailey, not to mention executive producer Brian Grazer, who commissioned the film, have bigger items on their agenda, namely positioning Deep Throat's director Gerard Damiano as a groundbreaking "independent filmmaker" and convicted star Harry Reems as a free-speech martyr.

Unfortunately, as in The People vs. Larry Flynt, the price of their canonization is an overriding moral idiocy, which isn't helped by the film's reluctance to let any one subject talk for more than a few seconds. (The exception is a particularly nasty trick where the camera holds silently on a subject after they've made a joke, the better to make them look idiotic.) Commentators from Hugh Hefner to Norman Mailer weigh in on the movie's impact, although John Waters doesn't cop to stealing Deep Throat's opening, where Lovelace calmly chats with her mother while she receives cunnilingus, for Pink Flamingos' epochal "Do my balls, mama" scene. But Barbato and Bailey can't grasp the idea that even free speech has consequences. As Dick Cavett puts it, a society once scandalized by a film about oral sex now produces teenagers who don't consider it sex at all.

Fenton and Barbato have produced similarly vapid documentaries on such figures as Tammy Faye Bakker and Monica Lewinsky, who at least had the good fortune to be thrust into the limelight in an era when no celebrity is too small to profit from her fame. Unfortunately, Deep Throat's stars didn't live in such an era: Lovelace rode the merry-go-round for a while, became a born-again anti-porn crusader, and later shot a tame photo spread for Leg Show magazine before dying of injuries from a car accident in 2002. The fact that she wasn't alive to be interviewed is hardly the filmmaker's fault, but her absence leaves a hole no slick montage can fill.

Inside Deep Throat Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato A Universal release Opens Friday at Ritz East