Of Prurient Interest or Shoot the Projectionist: An Introduction

THOMAS R. ATKINS

AFEW miles south of Roanoke, Virginia, where Highway 220 winds through rocky foothills leading up to the Blue Ridge mountains, is a small drive-in theater that shows mostly X-rated movies and has a notorious reputation as a flesh pit. I discovered this seedy little theater about three years ago when, driving back home one night from North Carolina, I rounded a bend and suddenly saw a giant half-naked woman rising above the treetops. Somewhat stupefied by several hours at the wheel, I didn’t question the actuality of this vision but watched as the woman, looming over the countryside like a female King Kong, unhooked her bra and flung it into the darkness. I pictured the huge bra crashing through some sleeping farmer’s roof. Then, as the figure bent to remove the last stitch, it dawned on me that I was seeing a movie—an illusion flickering across an outdoor screen.

Last summer when I went to this drive-in a couple of times to see some Russ Meyer movies and Fritz the Cat, I found that the place lives up to its lusty reputation. The offscreen activities, in fact, were generally more interesting and often louder than those on the screen. The patrons, a truly mixed and boisterous crowd of all ages and shapes, from Roanoke and the surrounding hill country, come in convertibles, pickup trucks, vans, jalopies, hot rods, and motorbikes. Children run wild up and down the car lanes, which are littered with popcorn boxes, beer cans, and an occasional discarded condom. The evening air is sometimes laced with the faint odor of pot drifting from some of the cars. Many autos are jammed with giggling teenyboppers (the manager never asks for anybody’s age), while other vehicles, with rolled-up steamed windows, show no visible signs of life. Bull bats swoop down in front of the screen, and once I spotted a fat brown rat slipping past the concession stand, a hangout for country rubes gawking at teenage girls or getting into drunken brawls. Whenever a fight breaks out, the manager restores order by summoning the police on the speaker system. And there always seems to be a deputy sheriff or some representative of the law in the audience.

Like many of the early penny arcades and nickelodeons, this drive-in is a noisy, earthy place “ministering to the lowest passions” and frequently arousing the wrath of the area’s moral custodians. Despite regular efforts by several local preachers and citizens to have it shut down, the theater stays open all year, closing only during the most severe snowstorms. The manager was not even discouraged when last winter, during a showing of Women in Cages, somebody fired a shot into the projection building. The bullet, apparently from a rifle a great distance away in the hills, made a large hole in a window and ricocheted around the concrete walls, finally coming to rest in the floor between the projectors. There are several theories about why the shot was fired, but the version I prefer is that a zealous mountaineer, enraged by the iniquitous images he saw emanating from this miniature Sodom and Gomorrah, registered his protest by trying to shoot the projectionist.

In its peculiar and often hilarious fashion, this drive-in on the fringe of the wilds of Appalachia is a good illustration of some of this book’s major concerns— the inherent sensuality of movies and moviegoing, for instance, as well as the close relationship between screen content and audience mores. The audience parking under the stars to see skin flicks on an outdoor screen is not too different, in basic needs and hungers at least, from the first peepshow customers paying their pennies to watch May Irwin and John C. Rice kiss or Fatima do her “coochee-coochee dance” or slightly later movie patrons marveling at Méliès’ amply-endowed chorus girls from the Folies-Bergère. And the gunslinger in the hills who attempted to end the drive-in showing of Women in Cages is a close cousin, in his moral indignation if not his method, to the earliest censors who accused the moving pictures and the dimly-lit places where they were exhibited of having a “prurient” influence on the public.

Long before the appearance of drive-ins, the movies already played a significant part—far more complicated than mere influence—in the sex life, real and imagined, of the American public. The drive-in was simply a practical and profitable merging of two of our most popular forms of recreation—the movie and the automobile—both imbued by our culture with an almost magical erotic power. The moviegoing habit, as it spread across the country during the first few decades of this century, became closely associated with certain widely accepted social customs and rites, particularly those determining sexual identity and behavior. For many Americans the difficult rites of passage from adolescence to maturity, from sexual ignorance to awakening, are intimately linked to moviegoing. Just as baptisms, marriages, and funerals traditionally occur in churches, the darkened interiors of our movie theaters frequently provide the setting for other ceremonies, less formalized but equally defined by repeated gestures, signs, and signals, celebrating various stages of sexual discovery and initiation.

The familiar routines and attitudes of a group of small-town teenagers in the early fifties during their regular Saturday nights at the movies are beautifully captured by Larry McMurtry in his novel, The Last Picture Show, which was filmed by Peter Bogdanovich. The picture show, on Main Street near the poolhall and the all-night cafe, is the repository for the adolescents’ romantic dreams about life as well as the place where they ritualistically pair off in the darkness to hold hands, kiss until their lips are numb, pet above the waist, and settle into an “osculatory doze”—all of which is often a kind of foreplay to more intense passion and exploratory activity later in parked cars and pickups.

During Storm Warning (changed to Father of the Bride in Bogdanovich’s film) Charlene, a stocky and homely girl who reads fan magazines and lives for movies, gets worked up into a fit of “cinematic passion” by imagining that her date, Sonny, resembles Steve Cochran. Afterwards parked by a lake Charlene lets Sonny remove her bra and feel her breasts but, because of her sense of propriety (a portrait of June Allyson sits on her dresser) and fear of pregnancy, won’t allow him to go further, even though Sonny has discovered after repeated necking sessions that “there really wasn’t much of permanent interest to do in that zone.” In contrast, Jacy, a pretty blond who has perfected the role of a playful tease, enjoys necking with Duane in the rear of the football team bus where the other kids can watch because “being in the public eye” makes her feel “like a movie star.” Sometimes encouraging Duane to do “even more abandoned things to her,” Jacy uses her sex like a commodity to manipulate his feelings and have her own way.

The roles played by Jacy and Duane and the other young people of Thalia, Texas, in their sexual games and even the sensations they feel are mirrored, shaped, and to a degree sanctified by the fantasies they see each Saturday night projected on the screen at the picture show. When events in their lives distress them by not working out according to their movie-oriented expectations, they feel that somehow, as Jacy says, “Life just isn’t the way it’s supposed to be at all.” At the end of the novel, the closing of Thalia’s theater implies their coming of age, the inevitable fall from the blind innocence of adolescence into the pain, suffering, and boredom of the real adult world.

The relationship between a supposedly mature adult and the movies is explored in Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, set in New Orleans in the late fifties. A twenty-nine-year-old stock and bond broker, the hero needs movies and movie-houses to escape from “the grip of everydayness,” a despairing state in which he feels like a ghost, invisible and lost to the material world. The marquee on the theater in his neighborhood reads: “Where Happiness Costs So Little.” All movies, even bad ones, bring him happiness, for they possess a heightened sensuous and physical reality far overshadowing and even capable of transforming ordinary life. While seeing Panic in the Streets, which was filmed in New Orleans, he experiences a phenomenon he calls “certification” whereby a movie can confer upon a location its certified meaning or existence. “Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him,” he explains. “More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

Binx, the hero of The Moviegoer, also finds that movie stars have a “resplendent reality” which can save ordinary people from the malaise of everydayness. In the French Quarter he watches a chance encounter between a plain young couple on their honeymoon and actor William Holden who is in New Orleans for the filming of a movie. Threatened by strangers surrounding him and embarrassed by the contrast between himself and the big star, the young husband manages to give Holden a light without showing his feelings. They stroll along together, talk briefly about the weather, until Holden gives them a pat on the shoulder and walks away. Suddenly the couple’s honeymoon is redeemed from banality and boredom, for the young man “has won title to his own existence, as plenary an existence now as Holden’s, by refusing to be stampeded like the ladies from Hattiesburg. . . . All at once the world is open to him. Nobody threatens from patio and alley.” His bride responds with renewed affection, putting his arm around her neck, because she “feels the difference too. She had not known what was wrong nor how it was righted but she knows now that all is well.” Holden turns a corner “shedding light as he goes.”

Binx carries on imaginary discussions with one of his movie favorites, Rory Calhoun, lamenting the failure of “flesh poor flesh” in an affair with Kate, his aunt’s stepdaughter, and contrasting his own behavior with what Rory would have done in the same circumstances. In the depths of the malaise when flesh fails to live up to desire and he cannot even manage “to sin like a proper human,” Binx’s chief solace is moviegoing. On a compulsive and disappointing trip to Chicago he and Kate “dive into the mother and Urwomb of all moviehouses—an Aztec mortuary of funeral urns and glyphs, thronged with the spirit-presences of another day, William Powell and George Brent and Patsy Kelly and Charley Chase, the best friends” of his childhood. In the romantic darkness of the old theater, Kate holds his hand tightly while they watch The Young Philadelphias.

In both these novels, moviegoing is characterized as a ceremonial act involving a great deal more than just looking at moving pictures. Movie theaters have their own special atmosphere and environment to put the participants in the right mood, as well as their particular rites and rules of behavior prescribed by repeated usage or custom. One of the unwritten but generally accepted rules of moviegoing at the Thalia theater, for example, is that necking must stop after the lights come on. When Jacy breaks this taboo, the other teenagers are shocked. Before entering a new movie-house in a strange neighborhood, Binx is always careful to “touch base” by chatting with the ticket seller or the manager, a rite which prevents his becoming lost inside, getting “cut loose metaphysically speaking.” As a habitual moviegoer, Binx is aware that the ritual inside the theater is potent—that it deals with basic matters, such as sex and identity, and promises secret knowledge and happiness for the faithful participants, clutching their soft drinks and popcorn.

This book aims to give a general picture of the treatment of sexuality in a wide variety of different kinds of movies, from the 1890s to the present, with special emphasis on the social and cultural context in which the movies were created. Throughout the volume, the complex evolution of sex on the screen is examined in relationship to the changing, often ambiguous values of the movie-going public. The majority of the essays here are new works written specifically for this book. Several others, in different form, appeared originally in my publication The Film Journal; and a few come from other periodicals. As the contributors’ notes demonstrate, all the writers bring unique qualifications and insight to their particular subjects. Together they provide a lively, varied, and comprehensive analysis of movie sexuality from early shorts such as The Kiss and Love in a Hammock to contemporary landmarks like Cries and Whispers and Last Tango in Paris.

The first essay in Part One, a section of essential background and theory, explores the fundamentally sensual nature of the film medium, while the next deals with the appearance and influence of various censorship codes, laws, and groups that helped shape the content of American movies. To complete the censorship study a critic, who has served as an intern on the rating board of the Motion Picture Association of America, offers an inside view of the workings and problems of the current movie classification system. The remaining essay enlarges the perspective by clarifying some of the issues involved in understanding the complicated relationship between film aesthetics and moral values.

After a discussion of sexuality in certain key Hollywood features of the past two decades, Part Two concentrates on important film genres and categories in which eroticism has been either the central focus or a crucial element. Skin flicks and hard-core pornographic movies are evaluated, as well as the frequently disguised but powerful sexual ingredients of the classic horror movies. This section also includes an investigation of movies dealing with homosexuality, including recent hard-core treatments, and a critical comparison of the different ways in which sexual subjects have been depicted by influential European directors.

Part Three culminates the entire study with appraisals of six representative movies of the late sixties and seventies. In addition to being extremely popular or widely debated, each movie discussed is a landmark in its portrayal of sexuality. I Am Curious—Yellow is important to film history, for instance, as a legal break through for freedom of the screen. As the first hard-core porno movie to receive wide acceptance by legitimate theater audiences, Deep Throat is primarily a cultural event. Movies such as Midnight Cowboy, Carnal Knowledge, and Cries and Whispers are major artistic achievements that have not only extended the boundaries of acceptable screen content but provided creative examples for other directors.

In The Moviegoer, Binx points out that all movies are associated in our memory with a time and place, a certain neighborhood and season. I happened to be in Paris during the dead of winter when I first saw Last Tango, which was drawing crowds at a small movie-house just off the Champs Elysées. The theater staff served coffee to the spectators lined up outside in the cold. Inside the packed house responded energetically, keeping up a constant flow of chatter and laughter throughout the movie, right up to the moment when the dying Brando sticks his chewing gum under the balcony railing.

The next time I saw Last Tango was on an afternoon in mid-fall at the Terrace Rocking Chair Theater in Roanoke County where, except for an occasional giggle or whisper, the audience was almost totally silent. On the following day the county commonwealth attorney, with several deputies, descended on the theater, informing the manager that because of a citizen’s complaint, they were going to look at the movie and decide whether they should seize the print and prosecute him on obscenity charges. Immediately the manager withdrew Last Tango and substituted another movie. Although Last Tango eventually returned to the city of Roanoke and stayed for a while, without legal interference, the initial moral uproar—not too different from furors around the country over Carnal Knowledge and other controversial movies—made one sometimes wish for the kind of surrealistic poetic justice that Fellini devises in his short movie The Temptation of Doctor Antonio, in which a gigantic, voluptuous Anita Ekberg steps out of a billboard advertisement to torment and mock a censorious, misguided reformer.

This week the drive-in on 220 is advertising a double bill of X-rated horror movies guaranteed to provoke moviegoers out of their senses. In the evening paper a letter to the editor describes the movies as “prurient garbage” and “satanic filth.” The publicity will undoubtedly help to attract festive crowds of dating couples, families, tourists, teachers, and a few police officers. And perhaps tonight somewhere in the hills near the drive-in an angry mountaineer will study the screen images, raise his rifle, and take aim at the projectionist.