WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
This promises to be dangerous ground for us both, dear reader. See, I used
to bleed all over the page for a living - and those unfortunates
recognizing the byline will know I'm being nothing but literal in my
appropriation of that lame cliché. Let's just say there's a few hot goth
psycho-bitchs out there who know the taste of me through more than one
precious bodily fluid ...
As a weekly columnist for SCREW magazine and then a monthly rabble-rouser
at the SPECTATOR, I turned my life in New York City and San Francisco into
the gasoline for igniting reams of newsprint into endless bleats, rants and
manifestos. Scooping and snooping my way into the most interesting - and
educational - situations the sexual underworld has to offer earned me a
certain amount of notoriety. Many wild and grim parties later, I even
imagined myself owning the wisdom of Dante.
Then I moved to L.A., and learned, baby, learned (Porno Inferno).
Four years into this incredible voyage, this nerveless deathmarch, I have
overcome that all-too typical smug East Coast native's naïve superstition
that the city of Los Angeles is Soul Death; in all fundamental spiritual
matters, indeed Hell on Earth.
No, after 48 months of nothing but forced research into my immediate
environment, I have come to my own independent conclusion: Los Angeles is a
moral, intellectual, and creative black hole, sucking the very life force
from any man, plant or animal foolhardy enough to exist on its cursed soil.
And oh yeah, it's Hell on Earth, as well.
You might say I'm wallowing in the perspective of the blind man yanking on
the elephant's tail and pronouncing it a snake, what with immersing myself
in the Valley-based porn video industry. "Of course it stinks when you're
squatting in the outhouse, dummy," you might say. "You have to wipe your
ass and come out into the living room with the proper folks!"
I ain't buyin' it. Common wisdom out here is that the only difference
between the low standards of behavior over there in the "Big Town" (I love
it - one aspiring Robert Evans doing time peddling DVD mastering services
to the porn hoi polloi actually called it that in front of me) and the
tawdriness of the porn industry is this:
Where in Hollywood the Sharks That Be will gladly sell your mother, their
mother, anybody's mother to a drug-crazed cannibalistic white-slavery cult
for the sake of "earning" many hundred-thousands and even millions of
dollars, their counterparts in the porn industry will commit the same deed
for the sake of, oh, a hundred bucks. We're a heinous lot, people, and it
can't be whitewashed.
The PBS series "Frontline," in their latest breathless "expose" on the porn
industry, doggedly skimmed the surface of our distastefulness, preferring
the eye-rolling melodrama of the Spanky and Our Gang Play Manson Family
antics of one flash-in-the-pan company that specializes in cartoonishly
marketing childish shock antics to the less obvious but far more pressing
issues dealt with every day by performers, shooters, graphic artists,
warehouse workers, etc ... Hey, Frontline, how about a little
data-gathering on the Redwood Forest of bad paper that gets passed to
hard-working Jacks and Jills who are nearly always already working under
the radar of state and federal fair employment laws? Or the flagrant
subculture of bootlegging and "backdooring" that pops up like acne on a Max
Hardcore starlet's face?
Believe me, as a former daily newspaper reporter, I know the answer. Not
"sexy" enough. That's actually the trade lingo, you know, for determining a
topic's commercial news value. Kind of puts the hypocrisy of the corporate
information industry's stance on our little "Playpen of the Damned" in
proper perspective, doesn't it?
Of course, I'm still a long way from being a defender of this industry.
Having been exploited and humiliated by the same bottom feeders as many
other naïve wannabes, and then having been exploited at arm's length by the
ostensibly respectable big boys of corporate porn (but hey, at least their
checks usually clear!), I find myself these days almost exactly where I
began during my early days shooting art-fetish porn in San Francisco -
doing it myself, the lowly smut equivalent of a struggling independent
filmmaker with Something to Say that frightens the horses, as well as the
limited imaginations of the Bean-Counting Porn Republicans.
Having made the transition from critic to director, I'm here to sell you
the manifesto of a New Wave in porn, akin to the quantum leap made by
Truffaut and Godard the day Jean Seberg went before their cameras in her
pixie-cut and striped boatneck, hawking American newspapers and a romantic
state of perpetual political, personal and sexual rebellion. This is the
female muse I seek to have stripped bare by her grooms, even. Not your
machine-made victim of a post-corporate sexuality, as defined my former San
Francisco roommate, artist Rev. Steven Johnson Leyba in his amazing new
book, COYOTE SATAN AMERIKA (Last Gasp Press):
"False advertising has abstracted sexuality into some distorted commodity
to sell commodities. The sex drive is one of the strongest instincts, but
the proprietors of government want us to be frustrated by the sex we can't
have. Sexual unattainability helps keep the world economic machine going as
we attempt to buy what we are told is a better way, life, style, etc. ...
Pornography is constantly monitored and policed, not out of moral concerns
but out of economic concerns ... All sexual images in the media are only
used for economic strategies ... Sex and its image are policed to maintain
an apolitical use. Any depiction outside of fucking seems to be a societal
threat."
Whether the honesty is casual or profound, the only difficult thing I
demand of my performers is the truth of their sexuality and the spirit
behind it, whether for documentary purposes or to portray a character
which, if I have my way, is usually scripted to reflect the performer
portraying it. I don't need a cadre of bored "professionals" in front of my
camera or at my back, milling about as part of an overpaid mercenary army
of crew serving mostly to bolster some faux auteur's notions that he is
indeed the General Domo of his own banana republic: there's no room for
journeymen, snake-oil salesmen or bored traffic cops on this adventure.
Hey, believe me. I made the half-hearted attempt to sell out, for the sake
of a comfortable niche, and a regular salary. In my last curtsey to
corporate porn, I offered around a project earlier this year that is
inarguably the best porn feature I've ever thought up. Which, considering I
wrote the screenplays for 2001's three most-nominated corporate porn
features, might make the naïve think I'd be knee-deep in Cuban cigars and
Tokyo whores right now, finally preparing to shoot something with a decent
amount of sheckels in the kitty.
But: Nah. This is the Porn game, fools, where anybody who thinks beyond the
self-imposed box is immediately considered a threat to Life As We Know It.
If they can't suck you in and housebreak you, they ostracize you - while
reassuring you to Keep In Touch, especially if you have any new ideas to
appropriate - ah, be pitched, that is ...
But that's okay. Revolutions are born out of disenfranchisement and
repression, and so comes Serious Mirror Productions, not a belching factory
of anonymously splattered revolving flesh, but a craftsman's workshop,
where porn can be addressed as the true funhouse reflection of our society
and souls that it is, whether in the sweat spots tumbling delicately off a
slut's ass to explode against the floor, or the hypnotic, throat-gulping
snake-dance of a deep-throat queen swallowing "sin"that tastes like life
and perhaps anchovy paste, and offering some otherwise unenlightened mook
back the blind, infinite joy of orgasm.
Funny, how when I first began shooting hardcore here in the valley, my
Fagin-esque mentor admonished me against decorating my set with so many
mirrors, since it slowed down the conveyor-belt pace of factory porn. I
think maybe he was also afraid to pass in front of one, and reveal to those
of us he was exploiting his own lack of any visible reflection.
Even funnier, when earlier this winter I discovered a novel by Ryu
Murakami, the Tokyo author and filmmaker whose film TOKYO DECADENCE first
convinced me a decade ago that the serious metaphysical issues ruling my
own life could be addressed in erotically engaging, sexually explicit art.
Visiting Suzi Suzuki, the first professional porn star I ever shot, and her
husband in San Francisco for New Year's, I discovered that another recent
movie that changed my life was based on a Murakami novel, AUDITION
(Directed not by Murakami but energetic pulp director Takashi Miike,
AUDITION is a delightfully droll, disturbingly hilarious black comedy I
recommend to anybody truly interested in the unsolveably brutal nature of
art, exploitation and desire; skirt-chasing directors suffering from
martyr's complexes are particularly advised to watch and learn.)
Suzi gifted me with an extra copy of the author's notorious-in-Japan first
novel, ALMOST TRANSPARENT BLUE. Riding a Greyhound back down into Porno
Inferno, I was so bemused and energized to read the narrator's grandest
vision while sitting in the back of Burger King on the rest stop that I was
almost stranded when I didn't hear the driver's all-aboard call:
"So I'd like to see a movie that cut out a little bit of the palace or the
city in my head, like cutting up a cow, I think it really could be done.
"I think it would be a movie like an enormous mirror, a huge mirror,
reflecting everyone who saw it, I'd really like to see that movie, if there
was a movie like that I'd see it for sure."
So then, the gravity of serendipity has offered a final stamp of approval
on this glorious pipedream. It's Serious Mirror time, ya'll. Don't look if
there's something in you that you can't stand to see. This is nothing less
than a true outlaw porn manifesto we're constructing, with the aide of
collaborators you'll meet in future dispatches. Our work - never "our
product" - is based neither on shock tactics and thoughtless brutality, nor
psuedo-sophisticated marketing techniques. There's no room left for that
sort of shit even in porn, now that as a race we have all actually entered
into what could be the final struggle against the multinational corporate
Illuminati (For real, chumps!).
In the chaos of sex and art the potential for revolution can never be
extinguished, try and repress it as censors will, try and ignore it as
greedy hacks might. The brutal, intimate truth of sex denies the lies we
build fascist societies on, renounces the hypocritical values of an
extinction-driven culture. It's the first peep of defiance and the last act
of individualism. It's our damnation and/or our salvation, depending on
which way we steer.
If you can't hang with that, click back to the press releases. Now.
-David Aaron Clark
