A nation of peeping Manuels – the future of porn looks raw
Throughout the world, there are plenty of social rules against "staring" and deep-rooted cultural taboos which forbid us from looking too closely at other people. The cinematography experience seems to be a rare exception, being one of the only spaces where it becomes both safe and acceptable to observe the lives of others. While the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, it feeds on us the hope of seeing the more base side of human nature. More recently, the proliferation of reality TV shows proves that such quest for scopophiliac pleasure does not have to be restricted to the two-hour movie experience only: we are now able to partake on the events around someone’s life 24 hours a day, thriving on observing what unfolds before us as if a game which does not depend on our participation or opinion but, at the same time, is being played to please us as audience.
And scopophilia is not a male only pleasure. Reality TV is aimed at a female audience the same way soap operas are, and some might even argue there is no difference between them, not even in terms of fictionalization. According to Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, reality TV represents “a new way of telling a story which [is] half fiction — the producers and creators set up a universe, they give it rules, they make a setting, they cast it according to specific guidelines as to who they think are going to provide good pyrotechnics. But then they bring in non-actors with no scripts and allow this kind of improvisation like a jazz piece to occur.” Psychologically, the popularity of these shows is due to viewer's identification with the ordinary people who are chosen as participants, and viewer watch tantalized by the voyeuristic thrill they get from peeking in.
Voyeuristic pleasure derives from objectifying a character, and narcissistic pleasure from identification with a character in film (HOOFD, 1996). But what happens where there is both objectification and identification? And in a world where the cult of celebrity has already surpassed that of gods, the concept of being able to witness celebrities’ private moments shines like gold. As a result, the once unauthored pornography might be replaced by celebrities’ sex tapes which mirror reality TV in several ways, including the level of fictionalization that is present in such videos. Therefore, by objectifying myself through the image of the other, I am able to embody both the passive and the active agents of sex, this way subverting commonly held notions which establish a said order in what I know as the world. Moreover, if the other in question is a celebrity, there is the possibility of overlapping narcissistic pleasure with identification, therefore creating a new paradigm in which I am aware I am not the other but, nonetheless, I am able to forge a temporary bond in which my own needs for self-assurance will take place on the same figure I refuse to leave, but cannot identify with.
When it comes to pornography, the voyeuristic fetish already so exacerbated takes an even bigger form because what is being watched resembles genuine personal footage, or reality porn. The cinéma vérité set ups enable the audience to elaborate a new level of perception in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred precisely because there is no previous agreement between the audience and the film about what is real and what is not: at the same time it all rings true and false, giving spectators room to pretend (or fantasize) that what they are watching is, in fact, lost footage which was supposed to be private but, somehow, is at that moment allowing them to observe the intimate moments of a porn star.
Manuel Ferrara’s series RAW (Evil Angel) is referred to as the director's private collection: in one-on-one scenarios, Ferrara takes the audience into private and public places in what seems to be uncommitted documentation of real dates, which later translates into unedited scenes resembling informal home videos. Ferrara keeps the camera work to a most basic – gonzo style, his only camera sometimes is on the hands of his partner, who might be filming herself on the shower, a drive to Santa Monica beach, or even talking to the camera as if it was Manuel himself. By mixing POV and voyeur-style shooting (by placing the camera on a dresser, for example), Ferrara makes use of pornographic content and techniques in a way that makes it possible to metaficcionally interrogate porn in its own engine and machinery. RAW does not seek to emulate the style of amateur pornography because it deliberately plays with exhibitionist awareness and gonzo basic features.
It is not “only” porn. It is not a celebrities’ sex tape either. What Manuel Ferrara has inaugurated here differs from the porn we are used to watching because we do not want to feel like we are part of it. On the contrary, the series eliminates entirely the relationship between watching and participating by making explicit that there is no participation of the spectator to what unveils before their eyes. If anything, the spectator might derive pleasure from knowing that "looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as ... there is pleasure in being looked at" (MULVEY, 1975, 200-201), but the commitment between Ferrara and the audience never mentioned this tacit agreement. Instead, it ignores the audience entirely to achieve a form of linguistic pornography that it able to critique the genre itself, without eliminating any of the elements we as audience expect to find in this sort of production.
Manuel Ferrara’s RAW series is initiating a new poetics of porn: one which delivers an exquisite and unique pornographic experience enclosed in a feature with lack of zoom, no anatomy lesson shoots, no forced vocalization, very little camera movement during sex. The realism Ferrara is able to conjure is unprecedent, and there is no doubt he is filming more than just his sexual encounters, but what starts to take form as the future of pornography.