"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 7/31/02: "Bad Girl"

By JOE BOB BRIGGS

Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
 

     There's only one thing worse than intellectuals talking

about pornography, and that's FRENCH intellectuals talking about

porno.
 

     No, I take that back. French intellectual FEMINISTS talking

about porn is worse than having your fingernails ripped out by a

Hessian dominatrix.
 

     And it all started so promisingly. My friend Gary Crowdus at

the Cinema Guild turned me on to this hot new documentary called

"Bad Girl" that was banned last year by Tele-Quebec, the big

Canadian network in Montreal. Do you know HOW sleazy you have to

be to get banned by Tele-Quebec? They include hardcore footage in

the weather report. (Okay, I'm exaggerating.)
 

     At any rate, the idea is that it was a sizzling film about

the new breed of women porno directors and it was Too Bad for the

Quebecois. Actually it's pretty much of a snoozer. I've seen all

this stuff before, but since you may not get quite as much

feminist mail as I tend to get, lemme lay it out for you.
 

     Beginning about 1979, organized feminism started an attack

on pornography as being demeaning to women. Their poster child in

America was Linda Lovelace, who was supposedly threatened at gun

point when she made "Deep Throat" and was subjected to what

amounted to legalized rape--charges she made that were later

proved to be not so accurate. In Canada the anti-porn crusade was

led by a documentary called "Not A Love Story" that set out the

case for porn being anti-woman and resulted in calls for the

banning of it on feminist grounds. (The new film doesn't really

deal with any of these events. I'm just outlining the background

"Bad Girl" fails to provide.)
 

     To give you some idea of how bad it got, I was personally

picketed and poison-penned by feminists twice--in 1985 and 1986--

over my reviews of a slasher flick called "Pieces" and an Italian

softcore drive-in classic called "Gas Pump Girls." (Yes, they had

too much time on their hands.)
 

     And then a strange thing happened. In the late eighties the

lesbian wing of the National Organization for Women decided that

porno was okay. They started blathering about "female-friendly

porno," and the idea was that, if the woman was in a position of

power and she was respected, or if the movie had NO MEN IN IT,

then it was politically correct porno. (This idea actually seeped

into mainstream cinema. Ninety per cent of the R-rated sex scenes

in big-budget movies started featuring the woman ON TOP.)
 

     Then in the nineties, there was a backlash among women who

think of themselves as feminists-but-let's-not-get-crazy-about-

it. And THEY were fans of the old-fashioned porno from the

seventies--man in a position of power, a little rough stuff from

time to time, and even--gasp!--bondage. This set off a debate

within feminism about whether it's possible to watch a scene that

would normally be demeaning to the woman, but, because she's in

love with the guy and he really RESPECTS her, it's okay.
 

     And somewhere in the midst of all this bickering over what

was, let's face it, a bunch of assembly-line skinflicks out of

Van Nuys, women started making their own kind of porno.
 

     That's sort of where "Bad Girl" begins, with a bizarre scene

in which a gorgeous blonde journalist pulls up to the gates of

Zentropa Studios in Denmark, where a cockeyed cackling dwarf

sticks his head out and says "Admission restricted for women."

It's the setup for interviews with Lisbeth Lynghoft, the first

woman ever hired to direct a porno film in Denmark--one of those

artsy blue-light things with a lot of slow motion and dry ice--

and it kind of establishes the irrelevance of the film. Denmark

hasn't been the leader in pornography since the seventies. And in

fact the people at Zentropa make it very clear that they have

nothing to do with the mainstream porn business.
 

     Peter Aalbaeck Jensen, Zentropa's executive producer, says

that when he solicited porn scripts from women, most of them were

"so extremely perverted, so very dirty" that he couldn't shoot

them. He should have! If the feminist line is that the porn

industry reflects a twisted extreme male fantasy, then let's see

the twisted extreme female fantasy!
 

     At any rate, the film soon leaves Denmark and veers off into

the talking-heads world of feminist academics. (The director of

"Bad Girl," Marielle Nitoslawska, is a Polish film professor at

Concordia University in Montreal.) Linda Williams, a professor at

the University of California/Berkeley--where else?--talks

boringly about women "working within the conventions of porn."

Annie Sprinkle, the porn-actress-turned-performance-artist, does

one of her extended monologues about female body parts. A

reference is made to "couples porn," which has NEVER made money

and is sort of a red herring in the industry. And Jane Hamilton,

a director at California's VCA Pictures, talks about how her own

movies are "outside the mainstream" because she uses "no money

shots." (And her movies don't really sell very well, because . .

. they don't call em money shots for nothing!)
 

     But now it's time for Attack of the French Intellectuals. A

French director named Catherine Breillat begins her rant with

"After 2,000 years of repression . . ." and is soon joined by

French writer Benoite Groult, who complains that there are no

good names for female body parts and that "women have been

deprived of expression, language, pleasure."
 

     It's a set-up for scenes from Virginie Despentes' film . . .

well, we can't even use the French title because it's obscene,

but it's a 2000 movie in which, for example, a man makes a crude

sexual suggestion to a woman on the street and is then shot dead

by a second woman with six quick blasts from a revolver. It's

sort of a radical-fem "Death Wish." The film was banned by French

censors--but it shouldn't have been, says Breillat, because women

were forced to make "bitter, violent films" due to the demeaning

effects of 25 years of MALE pornography. (And yet I don't really

recall any male porn films in which women were GUNNED DOWN for

amusement.)
 

     A French male feminist director--that's gotta be one kinky

guy--named Jean-Francois Davy tells us, "We've ghettoized women

for millennia"--right before the scene featuring the Hots d'Or,

the annual European porn awards in Cannes, with paparazzi

swarming around the topless "porn queens" on the beach. The porn

queen, we're told, is a "pseudo-egalitarian disguise" designed to

fool us into thinking women are really valued in porn films. Cut

to . . .
 

     Veronique Lefay! First woman in France to create a porn

website. (I'd like to point out here, for the benefit of the

French intellectuals, that most European "firsts" are predated in

America by at least 15 years.) Veronique's philosophy is, "I love

turning the tables, I get a kick out of it." Apparently she lures

men to her website and then abuses them, because "I hate that

dominated-dominating thing."
 

     As you can see, "Bad Girl" is all over the lot. Thank God

the director finally makes her way to the San Fernando Valley,

which is where 99 per cent of the world's pornography is

produced. Unfortunately, she blows the chance to get good

interviews with several porn legends--including Marilyn Chambers,

Christi Lake, Bill Margold, Nina Hartley, and Russell Hampshire,

head of VCA Pictures--and spends most of her "What does it all

mean?" time interviewing people like Dr. Carol Queen, a San

Francisco "sexologist," and the aforementioned Berkeley

professor.
 

     The best quote in the whole movie almost slips by when Bill

Margold explains to her why she's looking at everything

backwards. The women ARE the stars of porn. The women ARE

elevated in porn, he's telling her, for this simple reason: "The

women are allowed to be the center of our attention because the

men know how to hide behind them."
 

     But she never really follows this up. Instead she goes to

the Adult Video Convention in Vegas and films a lot of footage of

weirdos sidling up to porn stars to get their pictures made, then

makes a quick side trip to Larry Flynt's sex shop on Sunset

Boulevard, then finishes it off with more talking heads.
 

     The funniest interview is with Bernard Arcaud, a French-

speaking Quebec anthropologist who calls for the extinction of

American porno. He says that the sexual imagination should not be

"defined by narrow stereotyped parameters from the American West

Coast," then pronounces, "If I were Minister of Culture, I would

muster the courage to face this challenge!"
 

     In assessing the impact of women on porn, the only film

acclaimed as an "epic" is a silent black-and-white avant-garde

flick from 1967 called "Fuses," in which Carolee Schneeman films

herself having sex while her cat watches. I'm telling you, this

movie will make you long for the complete cinematic works of Yoko

Ono.
 

     And just as the film began with the nonsensical cackling

dwarf, it ends with the French philosopher Luce Iragaray talking

about women's porn being made possible by "the conquest of

contraception," but saying that, sadly, "This is an era of

technique."
 

     I just have one comment on this whole debate. In the films

acclaimed as feminist masterpieces, why are the men

depersonalized? They're either mute, their faces are not seen, or

they're so stylized as to be mere stereotypes of the husky virile

lover. Isn't this exactly what men are accused of doing with

women? But aren't women in mainstream porn actually rather ACTIVE

compared to these automatons? Who's really manipulating the

imagery here?--if you know what I mean and I think you do.
 

     Okay, searching for drive-in totals, we have:
 

     One dead body. Forty-eight breasts. Fourteen talking heads.

Gynecology Fu. Two stars.

 

     Joe Bob says check it out.