Porn valley- In the competition for original prestige programming, Showtime never seems to catch the wave, let alone close the gap with HBO as the premium cable-market leader. In current rotation, Showtime’s spearhead series Dead Like Me hardly measures up to Six Feet Under, and, in recent TV history, its AIDS drama The Red Door, while laudable, was soundly trumped by HBO’s Angels in America.
Now, Showtime looks to improve its reputation with the heavily promoted This Girl’s Life, hoping to make waves with a hot-topic movie by appealing to the national fascination with pornography.
America has a highly ambiguous but totally obsessive relationship with adult entertainment. Pornography is an outlaw, a pariah, but also a monster-revenue industry right there in Chatsworth. Porn is consumed in billion-dollar bites, but many remain puritanically loath to admit it. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a sea of what would appear more pressing troubles, continues to wage his Christian War on Smut, while global super-corporations like AOL Time Warner make sure we have porn-on-demand on our cable menus, our hotel TVs, and the Web. Top porn stars like Jenna Jameson appear on Entertainment Tonight, Paris Hilton can parlay a “bootleg” sex tape into a celebrity career on Fox, but suburban NIMBY moms continue to picket lap-dance joints and adult video stores and petition the FCC about Howard Stern and Buffy.
No question that all of the above is solid grist for a feature movie. Boogie Nights proved this with its 1997 re-creation of the late-1970s coke ‘n’ ‘ludes golden age, and still left plenty of room for subsequent filmmakers to dredge the porn pool. On paper, This Girl’s Life has the ingredients: a cast that includes James Woods, Michael Rapaport, and newcomer Juliette Marquis as porn queen Moon; and a sterling mission statement – “a unique and honest inside look into the adult film world/sex industry, as seen through the eyes of a female adult star.”
The problems start when director/writer Ash (huh?), a supposed refugee from indie films, neglects essentials like plausibility, subject research, and plot. The film proved so comprehensively incoherent, I needed a constantly evolving, charitable theory of what-was-going-on to follow its meandering progress.
I first figured we were inside the mind of Moon. Nothing made sense, because the porn star was a predictably disturbed creature. The hand-held, “reality” camera work certainly suggested dementia, but, when we were launched into Queer as Folk-style, skin-smooth, softcore lesbo action, the illusion crumbled. Woods was totally wasted as Moon’s Parkinson’s-ridden daddy, merely providing a reason for Moon to terminate each inexplicable scene to rush home and tend to him.
A backup theory then presented itself. This Girl’s Life was a throwback to those old ABC movies of the week – She Did Porno to Support Dying Pop! But, no. Moon nixes that idea with a confusing monologue about how sexuality is her means of self-expression and porn is her medium. Then self-expression turns into an HIV near-miss and a gratuitous editorial on gang-bang horror, before launching off into a third subplot too dopey to recount.
I was ready to dismiss This Girl’s Life as a salutary example of what garbage can be greenlighted, and how James Woods will sign on to anything, but then I caught a half-hour oddity on Trio called Good Clean Porn. It’s the vintage Debbie Does Dallas with all the sex edited out, so only the goofy setups remain. And damn me, but I was instantly reminded of This Girl’s Life. The cinematography was radically different, but the two works shared the same surreal pointlessness. My final theory was that Ash might be perpetrating some strange and esoteric porno joke, but, if that were the case, he killed it in the execution, and This Girl’s Life should be quietly laid to rest.