There’s a soft-porn cable series titled Lingerie that airs on Cinemax. The promo claims it’s the adventures of “beautiful people who design and model lingerie in New York.” Hung is another cable series—the story of “a disillusioned gym teacher who decides to make a living as a male prostitute”—that recently concluded its first season on HBO. After watching both with minimal enthusiasm, an idea began to unfold that maybe, somewhere between the two, lies a clue to one of the causes of adult entertainment’s current woes.
It’s easy to blame hard times in the porn industry on the dire economy, or on communication technology that is expanding so fast business models can’t keep up. That’s only part of the story. A contracting business needs to do more than blame the externals. It must look to its own product and ask questions. Is it enough simply to be producing fundamentally more of the same?
The cynic might say that, in porn, the body parts stay the same; only the hair and makeup change. In hard times the audience can always recycle. Despite the hype, Lingerie is old-school cable porn with minimally improved hair, makeup and cinematography; it’s big on non-explicit sexual couplings with smooth skin gift-wrapped in lace, leather, stockings and heels, but the plotlines are just as nebulous, and—beyond moaning and looking good—the cast totally falls into the soft-porn tradition of drama-challenged.
On HBO they go for quality rather than quanity, even where sex is concerned. Hung comes from a newer tradition of cable shows, like Queer As Folk, The L Word and The Tudors, in which drama or comedy is punctuated by erotic sequences that verge on soft porn but seem acceptable to a prime-time audience. The Hung budget runs to established actors like Thomas Jane, Jane Adams and Anne Heche—and most probably a full corps of body doubles—and Hung is promoted on billboards in major cities. The distinction is made: While Hung may be risque, it’s legitimate. Lingerie is just late-night soft porn.
And here’s the rub (so to speak). Because a show like Lingerie is dismissed as porn—albeit soft—nothing smart is expected. The rudimentary plot, the banal writing and the laughable acting are all tolerated because the show assumes its audience is only looking for easy shots of erotic excitement for long winter evenings or solitary hotel rooms. The crude assumption is that porn need not be smart or inventive. It’s made for a single function, so why strive for creativity?
Porn can, in fact, be extremely creative, but because of this lack of legitimacy—and even possible illegality—creativity has taken some pretty tortuous paths. Storylines have been eliminated in favor of abstract bodies on bodies. Most original thinking has been about permutations, action and an explicitness that can verge on gynecological. A lot of kink content has evolved into exploring just how far human bodies can be folded and spindled onto strange and highly imaginative pieces of equipment, and then subjected to everything from clothes pins to high-pressure hoses.
A near fetish has grown up around acts of extreme degradation, and producers of shows featuring bukkake, gangbangs and cross-species weirdness have seemed bent on graphically detailing what could hardly be imagined, until the genre began to resemble the Saw series of horror movies in that their major component was shock—although to deliver a sexual jolt as intense as the Saw films would probably land one in jail.
To be creative in a landscape that’s already a minefield of dwindling profits and shrinking capital is far from easy. Risqué but supposedly legit product like Hung and the movie Secretary invade the soft-porn nursery slopes, but to get to jiggy at the heavy extremes is still to invite federal prosecutors with arrest warrants. Yet to keep on just keeping on with a predictable formula is to risk even more market shrinkage. When times prove hard, the only way out may be for the smart to start thinking even harder.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
This article originally ran in the November issue of AVN.
