6. The Sex Genre:Traditional and Mordern Variations on the Flesh Film

WAYNE A.LOSANO

IN THE past, the flesh film was a comfortable genre, unassuming and predictable. It was a very tightly constructed type, working within narrow confines. In his essay “Twenty-Six Propositions about Skin Flicks,” Fred Chappell points out that the flesh film has traditionally been characterized by poverty of the imagination.¹ Perhaps we couldn’t always guess just what would come next, but we were, for the most part, a shot or two ahead of the film. Certainly nothing occurred that we had not expected.

The films’ plots, if in fact they had plots, were always extremely simplistic, never corrupted by imagination. Like the 16mm sex films now being distributed from the West Coast, about the only prologue to sexual encounters was a ringing doorbell. We knew, after all, the real reason for the telephone man’s visit. Even from the beginning of the sex film, when films were always silent, inevitability was central to the plots. What else could be expected after the masked villain sneaked into the bedroom of the sleeping heroine that first time back in the early thirties classic Masked Rape or the villainous dentist administered ether to his desirable patient in the 1920 Slow Fire Dentist but that the uncourtly male would, in true melodramatic fashion, have his way with the young lady? In Contemporary Erotic Cinema, William Rotsler lists the classic sex film plots:

PLOT 1. A woman alone at home becomes aroused by reading or by handling some phallic-shaped object. Masturbation follows. A man arrives, is invited inside, and sexual play begins.

PLOT 2. A farm girl gets excited watching animals copulate. She then runs into a farmhand or a traveling salesman, and sexual play begins.

PLOT 3. A doctor begins examining a woman and sexual play begins.

PLOT 4. A burglar finds a girl in bed and rapes her or vice-versa.

PLOT 5. A sunbather or skinny-dipper gets caught and seduced.²

Rotsler’s list, while not fully satisfactory, does indicate the genre’s basic simplicity, although we perhaps should add the automobile-pickup plot (Pick Up, Nude in a White Car, Midnight Plowboy, etc.), the costume-adventure-epic-orgy films (O.K. Nero, Sins of the Borgias, deSade, etc.), and one or two other basic formulas in order to get the full flavor of the genre. Arthur Knight and Hollis Alpert summarize the conventions quite nicely: “When a female steps out of the house in a stag film—whether it’s a date for dinner ... or an afternoon appointment with her doctor—she’s certain to wind up in a sexual adventure.”³ (Of course, it’s not necessary that she step out of the house.) The frequent complaint against the genre, that everyone in these films must “get laid, blown, fingered, buggered, or tolled off,”⁴ that there can be no mystery, is certainly a valid one. Once we see a character, we know that character will play some role in the film’s sexual adventures. When the camera focuses on two women sitting alone (as in The Animal, 1967), we know a lesbian scene will ensue; if a secretary or a nurse appears, we know she will participate somehow. If, as in Meyer’s Vixen or in The Sweet Body of Deborah, a character decides to take a shower, we know he or she will be quickly joined by a lover—a far better experience, we must agree, that Janet Leigh had in her Psycho shower.

Russel Nye says that the popular audience needs predictability in its entertainment,⁵ and the plots of the sex films answered this need. In its characters also the sex film was predictable. The male characters, most often relatively unimportant figures and easily replaced by various devices or creatures, tended to be indistinguishable from each other. They generally fell into two types; either, in the catalog description, “good-looking young studs, well-built and well-hung” (romantic heroes) or aging, paunchy, hairy, and unattractive sorts (demonic heroes). They were, say Knight and Alpert, usually “lower socioeconomic types— pimps, drifters, and the like. . . .”⁶ and unattractive men appeared regularly. The same portly male appeared in over thirty stag films of the forties and fifties (Night School, Black Market, Varsity Girls, etc.).⁷ The women in the flesh films were also predictable. We pretty much knew what they would look like and we knew they wouldn’t be able to act. They may not always have been the battered and tattooed women Chappell describes,⁸ but we suspected they weren’t the “fabulous Continental models” they were billed as. Their bored faces were heavily made up and their preternatural bust development made them seem often of mythic stature. Most of us fondly remember June Wilkinson (43-22-36) in The Playgirls and the Bell Boy, and older fans or those who have seen Graffiti Productions’ History of the Blue Movie (1970) will remember Candy Barr in Smart Alec. Bust size, rather than acting ability, was the primary criterion for stardom. Russ Meyer, in his many sexploitation films, was particularly skilled at unearthing pneumatic women for his films. Erica Gavin of Vixen (1968), Uschi Digart and the other women of Cherry, Harry and Raquel (1969), and the amazing Lorna Maitland of Lorna (1964) are all Meyer creations, calculated to cloud men’s minds. The sex film heroine’s lack of acting ability, her evident lack of involvement in the sexual machinations through which she was going, further strengthened the sense of unreality conveyed by the films. These women were clearly “professionals” in the game of sex and thus, for most of the audience, outside of the normal stream of experience and, of course, clearly recognized as evil women.

Along with their plots and characters, other aspects of the sex films were rigidly predictable. Their settings, for example, became so familiar as to seem downright homey, although most of us try to keep a better house than the films portrayed. We knew, however, that the couch they were using or that slightly sagging bed was one we had given to the Salvation Army some years before, our little touch with fantasy as it were. Although we could fantasize more exotic settings, the touches of decay evident in the one-room settings of most of the stag films placed them outside our reality in a world which merely to enter was somehow sinful. We were clearly slumming, observing an environment and a pattern of behavior much below us. Meyer’s Common Law Cabin (1967) and Lorna(1964) and the many hillbilly films like Tobacco Roady and Southern Comfort vividly depict stylized poor-white Southern environments. With the old farmer’s daughter jokes firm in our minds, we expect such environments to produce a variety of sexual perversions.

Watching these films, with their low settings, allowed us to keep a certain distance between ourselves and the action. We could delight in what we saw, utter the customary “tch, tch” of disapproval, and return to our own world which was untouched by such evils. I remember one film—the titles of sex films are often difficult to remember—shot entirely in a cheap motel room, a universally recognized metaphor for sexual evil. The spread which covered the room’s small bed went through a marvelous metamorphosis during the course of the film. It started off well enough, clean and faded as we would expect, but each sexual encounter took its toll and by the end of the film the spread was wrinkled and stained, perhaps metaphorically reflecting the audience’s experience with the film. We were able to view evil, get a bit soiled, but be cleansed by a return to our relatively pure world. In general, our experience with sex films paralleled the experience of the Victorians with their underground literature. The films provided an illicit pleasure but were sufficiently separated from everyday reality that we never lost our balance, our ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, good and evil.

Along with unimaginative plots and familiar characters and settings, the flesh films offered correspondingly unimaginative and ordinarily sloppy cinematic techniques. All of the one-reel stag films we watched would be scratched or otherwise marred; if there was dialogue it would be out of synchronization. More often, there was simply annoying silence or, worse, an irritating voice-over narration. About ten minutes into Love Me, Please one begins to wish the sound would fail so the heroine’s inane narrative will cease. Listening to the audience’s embarrassed coughing or heavy breathing was usually preferable. Watching the films’ lighting effects was always fun; the screen would now be blindingly bright, now obscured in darkness, without regard for any of the symbolic values of light and dark nor for whether the scenes depicted were interior or the rarer exterior ones. Catching a glimpse of the cameraman’s shadow was, of course, a great coup, and trying to handle transitions between awkward editorial cuts was a continual challenge.

The content of the traditional sex films was also familiar stuff and, given the possible permutations, surprisingly predictable. There was, course, familiar heterosexual love-making in a variety of positions, and we nearly always saw the anticipated lesbian scenes complete with the expected artificial devices. Foreshadowing today’s great interest in small-group dynamics, stag films such as Pajama Game, Love Nest, and Wild Night early featured sexual encounters among three, four, or five people. Bigger budget films—say several thousand dollars— offered orgy scenes of more or less epic scope. More ambitious films offered greater variety: Teeny Tulip offered a woman trying to copulate with a horse, and dogs had their roles in several stag films (e.g.,Pumping Pup), if seldom in commercial movie houses. Fetters and fetishes added extra spice.

Until fairly recently, most of the sex shown in commercial theaters had certain strange limitations, such as a fear of showing male sex organs or actual penetration. As late as 1967, Alpert and Knight were able to complain: “The ultimate dream of most pornography fanciers—a professionally produced featurelength stag film in sound and Technicolor—probably exists only in fantasies.”⁹ The short stag films shown to men’s smokers audiences have, of course, always been hard-core, but commercial films have customarily ranged from X-films (relatively cool films lacking sexual explicitness) to XX-films (sexploitation or simulation films).¹⁰ Russ Meyer’s films, for example, have been predominantly in the XX category (Vixen, Lorna) as were I Am Curious—Yellow, Love Camp 7, The Godson, The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood, and innumerable others. In these films there was much nudity but we saw no erections or penetration. Films such as Last Tango in Paris, Camille 2000, deSade, Without a Stitch, and Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls received but one X.¹¹

The overall result of the limitations of these commercially shown films, and of the very private screenings of the stag films, was to increase the sense of evil experienced by the audience. We could see some real sex if we saw it in someone’s basement or nudity and faked sex in a downtown theater. Lesbian love was acceptable in a moderate way and it opened up pleasing Freudian fantasies, but the rest was kept secret. Some of the genre’s greatest artistry, in fact, resulted from its efforts to suggest but not show intercourse. In Carmen Baby the camera pans slowly down and up a row of colored bottles behind which Carmen and her lover are supposedly making love. This artiness, as bad as it is, is still superior to the several thousand close-ups of supposedly passion-ridden faces we were given in lieu of being shown intercourse or fellatio. With all of its readily apparent flaws, however, the faked sex had its role in heightening the sense of evil surrounding the films. If even these worldly and corrupt filmmakers refused to depict sex fully, reasoned the audience, there must be something terribly evil involved.

The result of all these genre restrictions was not surprising. The films had limited appeal to a highly specialized audience. Unconcerned with the niceties of filmmaking, this audience saw nothing wrong with flawed camerawork and faulty editing. It was there to view an evil world. This was the simple fact: the world depicted had to be presented as and was recognized to be terribly sinful. Chappell criticized the audience of the sex films for being a fearful and suspicious lot,¹² and his criticism was just. Attending sex films was a private, furtive experience. One was always uncomfortable when the theater lights went on; the immediate reaction was to glance around to discover just what strange types would attend such filth.

Things have changed now. The old audience, stereotyped into raincoat carrying old men, has been replaced by a more varied group. Young people, women, and respectable-looking middle-aged couples are appearing with increasing frequency. Film critics have recently delighted to list the respectable big names who have attended Throat. These same critics have hailed Throat as a “sociological phenomenon.” Ralph Blumenthal sees it as engendering a kind of currently fashionable “porno chic.” The New York Times Magazine has devoted an entire article to the phenomenon and Playboy ran a lengthy special on it (August 1973). In the Times article Blumenthal avers with apparent pride that members of the Times news staff went en masse to see Throat during their lunch hour. During the courtroom proceedings surrounding Throat, experts like Arthur Knight and John W. Money of Johns Hopkins University praised the film for expanding the audience’s sexual horizons and producing healthier attitudes towards sex. Although Throat is by no means the first of the “new" flesh films—the change has been coming about for several years now—it has become the best known, perhaps the most famous sex film of all time, and the attitudes toward it reflect the more open attitudes towards the flesh film in general. In addition, Throat is representative of the new “type” of sex film in its highest development.

Working in a particular genre imposes certain definite limits on the artist, no matter what medium he may be working in. To be successful in the genre, the artist must observe its limits and work within them. Any variations must stay within the genre’s boundaries and the challenge comes in seeing how much freedom one can achieve within these boundaries. As in Ilse Aichinger’s story “The Bound Man," the artist is often freer because of his restrictions. The familiarity of genres establishes certain expectations in the audience and these expectations must be fulfilled. Once the genre’s limits are transgressed, the product becomes something else. This is, I think, what has been happening to the flesh film. Films such as Throat, Mona, The Nurses, Dynamite, and Meatball have moved into another genre, a genre which was, perhaps, heralded by the films of Russ Meyer.

In general, these new films are well made, with more than passable camerawork and editing. One is, in fact, frequently amazed at the camera angles used to depict more graphically the sexual activities. There are fewer jarring editing flaws and the films often flow along smoothly. The actresses in these films—and indeed there is frequently some pretty fair acting—are far different from the familiar heroines of the traditional sex films. These new girls are considerably less shopworn and often wholesome and fresh looking. Linda Lovelace of Throat and the heroines of Mona and Dynamite, for example, look like any number of typical American coeds. Tamie Trevor of High Rise and the much-seen Tina Russell (Whatever Happened to Miss September, All in the Sex Family, The Whistle Blowers, etc., etc.) are as wholesome looking as Sears-Roebuck catalog teenagers. Bruce Williamson, in Playboy, suggests that Marilyn Chambers of Behind the Green Door and Resurrection of Eve is “indisputably pornography’s answer to Miss America.”¹³ These new heroines are certainly not bored but seem to relish their chores, participating body and soul in all possible sexual activities.

Of course, the most significant difference between these newer films and their commercial predecessors lies exactly in that depiction of “all possible sexual activities.” These new films all receive the XXX rating for their graphic portrayal of actual sex; real organs and real intercourse, with actual penetration both vaginal and anal, fellatio and cunnilingus, and, of course, the required “cum shot” to prove that this is not simulation.

And these fuller sexual activities do not have to be performed in cheap onenight hotels. Throat begins in a sumptuous modern ranchhouse and moves to a fully-equipped doctor’s office. The Nurses takes place in a believable hospital setting. High Rise uses the ultimate in modern apartment dwellings. Furthermore, these new films are often plotted, however tenuous the premise on which the plot development rests. Mona’s desire to perform fellatio on every man she meets grows out of her father’s forcing her to do this to him when she was younger and on her mother’s insistence that she remain a virgin until married. The misplaced clitoris in Throat, forcing the heroine to seek happiness through fellatio, is by now well known. In Meatball a scientific experiment gone awry—a premise familiar to fans of horror films and science fiction—provides the impetus for the series of sexual encounters which make up the film. High Rise and Dynamite are picaresque tales along the lines of Tom Jones. Whatever Happened to Miss September is built on an imaginative idea, the search for a magazine centerfold playmate, and in true detective-story fashion traces the hero’s search through multiple levels of depravity until he finds the girl.¹⁴

All of these changes toward greater artistry—Throat even has a reasonably entertaining musical score—have contributed to the death of the sex film as it was once known. Now that the films are well made, with more respectable and elaborate settings and more attractive and wholesome actresses, the experience is no longer that of descending into a new and evil world. Rather than giving us an opportunity to see how we should not live, the films set out to show us how to live more fully. A sub-genre of this new form, the sexual documentaries such as Teenage Fantasies and Students, no longer emphasizes the evils of the erotic world but tries to educate the audience so that it will be better able to participate in fulfilling love-making activities. So now we sit for an hour or more, watching fellatio or cunnilingus or various sexual positions completely removed from any sort of fictional environment, while a “doctor” lectures us on matters of technique or on the general all-around benefits of performing such acts.

The key to this new genre is not in the explicitness of the sexual acts depicted; most of them would be termed hard-core pornography but they are generally less erotic than most of the earlier sex films which practiced more restraint. Nor is the present moral climate totally responsible for the emergence of this new genre, for many things still strike us as evil. What distinguishes these films from their predecessors is their tone, their attitude toward their subject matter. Mona openly approaches a lad on a lighted street and asks him if he wants her to perform fellatio on him; in The Nurses a nurse has intercourse with a patient so that she may obtain a urine specimen after the act; in this same film another nurse has intercourse with a patient while giving him an enema; in Dynamite the peripatetic heroine is screwed in the back of a bouncing panel truck, seriously disrupting the following traffic; in Meatball the hero unfailingly gets an erection every hour and reinforcements must be brought in to spell his tiring nurse. Some contemporary “pornographic” literature has been using the same light approach— Ed Martin’s Busy Bodies and Akbar del Piombo’s Who Pushed Paula? are excellent examples—and the effect is to make sex just good clean fun.

A heroine who goes door to door selling sex articles for a film called Yvonne Calling or a hero with a perpetual erection may be good fun, but they’re not good pornography. Watching a couple screw to the Pepsi theme song is not calculated to arouse an audience—erotically, anyway. Seeing an eye peering at you from a girl’s vagina (Pillow Party) is surprising but not sexy. What we have now is irony, not eroticism. Evil is gone and laughter fills the theater. During some of the earlier efforts in the new sex film there was often some tension between the old audience which was still trying to see low people perform low acts and the new audience which came to enjoy the fun. Now the old audience is in danger of disappearing completely. Our experiences with these films parallels our experience with screen violence; we found we could laugh at violence, now we find we can laugh at sex. Sociologically, this is all very good and speaks well for our increasing honesty and freedom from puritanical restrictions. Artistically, however, the effect may be less positive for in adopting an ironic approach makers of flesh films have so drastically altered the nature of the genre as to produce an entirely different thing. When they do take the material seriously, the result is something like a documentary advocating freer practices and preaching the need for sexual fulfillment but totally sterilizing the film through an overly clinical treatment.

If the sex film is to continue as a viable genre it must somehow recapture its lost sense of evil. In this it could take a lesson from the Victorian underground classics and from some of the more lowly modern pornographic literature. In both forms the sense of evil is highly developed. In Man with a Maid, for example, the hero creates an elaborate plan to avail himself of the charms of the women he desires. His den is filled with various rigged chairs, couches, chains, and pulleys, all designed to hold a woman captive while he “has his way with her.” This trap ensnares its primary target and is used successfully several more times. In the novel’s final episode, the hero captures an aristocratic woman and her spoiled daughter and forces the ladies to make love to each other. Both women feel fully the evil of what they are forced to do but both succumb to their passions, thus heightening their—and the audience’s—feelings of guilt.

The erotic successes of the hero of Romance of Lust are based on the desires of various older women to corrupt the young and seemingly innocent hero. Contemporary pornographic literature is very big on depicting the forced or partially-forced corruption of staid older women who in some way represent the establishment. Society dames, teachers, and librarians are all forced to participate in sexual activities. In Teachers Pet the virginal and prudish teacher is repeatedly raped by her bosses, students, and parents of students, until her civilized defenses are destroyed. In Piano Teacher the “heroine” is raped by her students on the stage during the musical recital. Such common literary motifs fulfill our wildest fantasies and allow us to re-experience some of the more guilt-ridden moments of our youth.

For sex films to be successful within their intended limits, they must present themes and motifs which we can see as evil. A recent film, Sleazy Rider (the title is unfortunate), borders on being a truly erotic sex film. In one scene we see through the bathroom window the sheriff’s daughter furtively locking the bathroom door and listening to determine if anyone is nearby. She then takes out a muscle magazine and, using the magazine’s illustrations as a fantasy-stimulus, masturbates to orgasm. Of course, auto-eroticism is common in flesh films but in this scene was clearly presented as wrong (a feeling which many of us share in spite of loosening restrictions) ; the situation and the behavior of the character heightened the pleasure. In this same film the motorcyle gang around which the film centers breaks into the sheriff’s home, ties up the sheriff, and rapes his daughter. The audience can recognize rape as evil and the girl’s struggles heighten the scene’s eroticism. However, the film fails to capitalize on its own depiction of evil since the daughter too quickly becomes a willing participant in the orgy following her rape. Similarly, the mother puts up no real resistance to her rape and after about a one-minute token protest she heartily joins in the orgy, thus destroying any sense of evil which could attach to her violation.

The key to an effective sex film is not the amount of flesh on display nor the graphicness of the sexual activities depicted, but rather the moral stance from which the subject is treated. A film such as Frank Perry’s Last Summer is highly erotic in its sense of evil, and the build-up to the ultimate rape scene is highly developed. Such development and accompanying involvement with characters would also seem necessary if the sex film is to survive. The writers of erotic fiction have long been aware of the importance both of elaborate plot development and involvement with characters and of the need to create a strong sense of evil.

Sex filmmakers have, for the most part, ignored both important features of the art. They have opted for instant gratification and have thus failed to develop a truly erotic climate, and they have allowed the sense of evil to atrophy. In a recent New York Times interview, Luis Bunuel declared that, to him, religion and its accompanying sense of sin is necessary for the full appreciation of sex: “Sex without sin is like an egg without salt.” Ken Russell’s The Devils is our most vivid depiction of this religion/sex juxtaposition, and the sex films would do well to try to capture some of Russell’s tone.

The plot of a recent big sex film, The Devil in Miss Jones, rests on the heroine’s being given a brief life of lust to make up for being unjustly damned as a result of her suicide. Here again there is unrealized potential, a failure to develop an erotic climate, for there is no build up to the heroine’s sexual encounters: she goes from total innocence to total involvement and, in the wild parade of sexual activities which follow, the “sinfulness” of her acts is lost. This particular film is, however, saved somewhat by its serious tone and by its powerful ending, strongly reminiscent of Sartre’s No Exit, in which Miss Jones’ lustful acts intensify her eternal torture.

The sex film, as we once knew it, was a private, somewhat tainted, and exclusively male experience. I would not like to see a return to the timid artificiality of earlier sex films, but some revitalization of the sense of evil and a desocialization of the genre—back to its originally private, particularly male nature ¹⁵ — seems essential if the sex film is to survive.