Pornmodernism, or “It is a porn Bauhaus out there”: parodying the fuck out of your films
"A Parodie, a parodie! to make it absurder than it was."
Ben Jonson, 1598.
What generates the amount of porn parodies that are out there nowadays? They are everywhere and range from The Avengers to The Smurfs: believe me, there is more under the sheets than porn parodies let out. Rather than being a blunt statement on the end of creativity in porn, it actually mirrors an industry which is, at best, suffering the setbacks of online piracy but is still able to subvert what is known and established, raising havoc that promotes its own permanence.
In a Jamesonian analysis, to whom "postmodernist art forms were peculiarly expressive of the logic of the contemporary economy" (JAMESON, 1984 apud DENTITCH: 2000, 155), having the adult industry duplicating a recontextualized version of a movie only reflects an economy in which the means of production are based on the copying and distribution of copies – we have the Bauhaus movement to thank for that, for starter, and a globalization which has as basis the massification of culture and goods, more often than not at the cost of local, subaltern cultures. On this light, a recovery and reevaluation of a film under the scope of pornographic art is explained as the mere reconfiguration or redistribution of assets, if those could be measured in terms of cultural and economic values. An adult parody version of a movie does not propose to be the movie itself, but an allusion to it – even if the box cover sends us to the non-adult version of the feature, the separation from the original is made explicit in the title – with all puns intended. It is what Gérard Genette sees as reprising a known text and giving it a new meaning (GENETTE, 1982: 16) Thus, following a Marxist line of thought, the production of parodies is the result of an economy which thrives not at creating, but at recreating assets and values, in an attempt to mimic the revenue produced by the original – something we, as postmodern beings, cannot rant about; after all, we are all consuming replicated goods and ideas ad nauseum.
On a more interdisciplinary approach, the appropriation of common cultural elements and their rewriting under a new light – in this case, as the object to which pornography must be applied , not always at the expense of the object being imitated nor trivializing an original work - implies a more politicized approach to art itself. In this repetition with critical vision without necessarily maculating the original work of art, the political characteristics of postmodernism jump to the eye: it is subversive, questioning, and blatantly outrageous for it defies established values. By opening spaces for social critique through a parody that deconstructs official, culturally accepted discourses, porn parodies are able to bring to light the debate on its position inside the same society it imitates and retorts. It is “this kind of wholesale "nudging" commitment to doubleness, or duplicity” pointed out by Huctheon (1989) that underlies the entire proposal of a porn parody. After all, who would have thought the Smurfs have a sex life?
According to Docker (1994) parody does indeed characterize postmodern culture, having its source in popular culture now validated by the collapse of the elite commitments of modernism. This way, it is parody what sociolinguist Mary Louise Pratt identifies as one of the "arts of the contact zone" through which marginalized or oppressed groups "selectively appropriate", or imitate and take over, aspects of more empowered cultures, (PRATT, 1991), parody and its power to locate the adult film industry inside the mainstream, non-adult film universe by approximating realities which, in fact, are more similar than different.
So what makes porn parodies so distinct from other kinds of movie parodies?
The fact that it eliminates the boundaries between what is socially acceptable and what is not. When Duchamp painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa, the debate generated concerned art, validity, mockery. It was a matter of having tinted the classic, of ridiculing a social construct which was valuable for its own format – a painting by Leonardo DaVinci, maybe his most prominent one. But when the adult industry takes, for example, a cartoon – something which would hardly receive high consideration by normative social institutions - and transforms it into an adult film, it cannot be accused of corrupting or diminishing established icons or paradigms, leaving it in breach of any moral laws. Nevertheless, the playing with current cultural elements promotes the perpetuation of said elements, something which only gives force to anything fighting the ethereal and transitory aspect of postmodern culture, allocating a differentiated value to the element in question. It is as if The Avengers gained more power because there is The Avengers XXX: something which corroborates with positioning The Avengers inside a society which tends to forget as fast as it consumes. The protest of non-conformists just reinforces a parody as a "relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice" (DENTITH, 2000: 37), to say the least. At its best, it can multiply the visibility of the adult version of any film, be it through generating discussion, be it by means of forbidding. And we all know what happens to forbidden fruits.
Ironically, this has not been noticed by the non-adult film industry yet. And the reason there should be no fighting or screaming, no combating the adult parodying of mainstream movies is because the validity of the adult version of a movie lies precisely on the juxtaposition with the non-adult value of it. In what Hutcheon would dub as taking "the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining statement" (HUTCHEON, 1989), an adult film parody of a mainstream film is aware of its position as parody and as marginal production – and I use marginal here in the original meaning of the word, which is non-central. It does not propose to be equaled to the non-adult version of the film it dubs, but the other side of it. Or one more side to it.
The belief that there is such a thing as a neutral or non-ideological position does not fit nowadays society anymore. To assume porn parodies are not political statements or just plain mockery is naïve and superficial. Or this is what they want you to believe, while you watch – amused – a porn version of the Cosby show.
- Published June 07, 2012