Last night's screening of Deep Throat (1972) at Vancouver's Rio Theatre featured a 4K restoration print with enhanced sound. Following that, a panel comprised of sex workers Velvet Steele and Susan Davis; the children of director Gerard Damiano (Christar and Gerard Damiano, Jr.); and scholar Tom Waugh (appearing via Skype). Hosting the panel was theatre programmer Rachel Fox.
I'd seen the film many years ago at a theatre in Los Angeles, where its print bore the usual porn house signs of neglect, much like the film's star, Linda Lovelace, who claimed in her memoir Ordeal (1980) that her then husband/manager Chuck Traynor not only neglected her but exploited her, which I don't doubt; and that "every time somebody sees that movie they are watching me being raped," a statement that didn't deter Lovelace from returning to an industry she once again spoke well of, how it had opened doors for her after her book earnings (controlled by her born again second husband) ran out.
Not surprisingly, given that Deep Throat is a cultural icon, and popular culture being the social media cat toy it is today, the audience was more egghead grad student than man-in-a-raincoat masher. In the break between the screening and the panel people gathered out front (the protesters had left by then) to talk about how the film read not like a violent subjugation of women but a tribute to sex-positive feminism. Not just the film's theme -- a woman unable to achieve orgasm is advised by an older girlfriend to see a doctor who discovers her clitoris is in her throat and who submits to her request that he break the doctor-patient contract in an effort to help her fulfill her desire -- but in its camera work and blocking, its chummy dialogue and musical score.
Prior to the screening, the audience was treated to untitled film footage of the 1981 protest outside Vancouver's Towne Theatre on Granville Street, where Pentecostal minister Bernice Girard (see her remarkable bio here) shames our right-wing provincial Social Credit government for allowing a screening of Bob Guccione's Caligula (1979). In Girard's words, "We're protesting Caligula because it is the first hard core porn film to run in a commercial theatre in Vancouver." Last night's screening of Deep Throat might well have been its second.
Please stop misrepresenting the backlash as reactionary to screening sex itself, and acknowledge that the reason people were upset is because Linda Lovelace said this is her rape on tape, and never retracted that statement in her lifetime. The people protesting this movie were upset that no one seems to care this footage was procured under duress, by coercion, and the trauma it caused the main actress.
ReplyDeleteThat aside, the praise of this movie as some bastion of progressivism and sex positivity is pretty ridiculous. She can only orgasm... by doing an act that the filmmaker himself admitted was uncomfortable? An act that strongly caters to male fantasy, and causes most women to gag and that, in reality, causes zero physical pleasure for women? An act that because of this movie, men expect women to perform for them and has led to misinformation regarding how women derive pleasure in sex? Be real.
Rather than argue over whether she retracted her statement about her rape on tape, there is evidence that she contradicted it later in life, and that's what I'm going on. That aside, if you've seen the film you'll have noticed that after she began to achieve orgasm, she continued with sexual acts where orgasm was not possible (for her). Not all men who have seen this movie came away from it expecting oral sex from women. Are men that impressionable? Maybe you know better than I do.
Delete