There Will Be Smut

TWO XXX ADU T HITS
EXCLUSIVE FIRST RUN
NEW SHOWS EVE RYFRIDAY
AND TUESDAY

So declares the marquis display of The Forum, a dingy, turd-colored single-floored structure resting at the fringe of twenty blocks of Philadelphia high-rise skyline. It makes a curious welcome to the City of Brotherly Love, but what a welcome it is. Forget the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall; this is history. With the one-two punch of urban renewal—most famously the Disneyfication of Times Square—and the migration of pornography to the truly solitary frontiers of the internet, I had thought the smut theaters of 1970s vintage to have been long ago deposited into history’s trashiest dustbin. And yet here one was, in 2010, no awareness of anachronism. It was like finding a dodo, an extremely horny dodo, which still expects to propagate its lonesome seed. I decided it must be observed.


Notice what the 'R' in 'FORUM' is doing to the 'U'...

It’s Tuesday, 10:40 in the morning. I’ve put this off for three days now, and with only one day remaining I shan’t further delay. I walk up to the box office, which bears a sticker that reads, “ABSOLUTELY MUST BE 18” and is manned by a middle-aged black man.

“What times are shows?” I ask.

“You jus pay.”

“What?”

“Shows run all day. You jus pay an go in. Seven dollas.” I pay up and walk through a single turnstile into an anteroom, wherein one may enter the theater proper. There is a sign on the center door: “No Sexual Activity Permitted on These Premises. Offenders Will Be Asked to Leave.”

Next to this (deep)throat-clearing is a notice about the property’s official capacity: 238 persons. Even in the red light districts’s 70s heyday it’s hard to imagine such an establishment drawing so many people at a time. I suspect the logic at work is an inversion of airlines overbooking planes. In the one, the airlines overbook a flight with the expectation of cancellations, in order to get as many fliers as possible. In this case, the audience is over-seated in order to be as relatively empty as can be and afford the theater's patrons some public privacy while they engage in “No Sexual Activity.”

The chamber I enter is dark but for the sex projected at the front, and frightfully loud, a cacophony of female moans and cries assaulting me from all sides. I am the only person there, perhaps not surprising for such an early time, but still sort of remarkable, almost trivially philosophical: if a porno plays in the theater and no one’s there to see it… But no matter. I step forward into the aisle and into the first row I come to on my right and sit down near the wall. Immediately I stand up. The seat is old and ragged, with a spring protruding through the cushion. I feel the seat to my left, and it’s the same. To its left: the same. The seat two over is less a shambles, and so I relocate there and set my bag on the ground. Moments later I put it on one of the seats, having read about mice on the Forum’s floor.

The projection is easily too large for the screen being used, putting at least a third of the entire picture onto the back walls. On this particular picture is a manic copulation of three: a naked, well-built thirty-something German man with a short-buzzed head and some wiry chest hair, of impressive endowment and much less impressive acting. For the purposes of this write-up he will be referred to by the name Herr Dick, as well as the English translation Mister Thick. His partners are a blond and brunette who are both more or less in a state of undress, with fishnet nylons under a sordid inference of a red skirt. In keeping with the spirit of objectification pervading the movie, the women will receive no names.

A generous definition of pornography is 'a work exclusively designed to titillate, with no otherwise redeeming artistic quality.' Since I’m not the kind of person who could get off on the material under discussion, I thought it more interesting, and fun, to approach the piece before me as one might approach an example of experimental filmmaking. Avant garde artwork is often attacked as pornographic, so why can’t that equation be reversed?

With that reading in mind, the film—let’s just call it Das Butt--being a fantasy, posits a deliberate inversion of everyday reality. In the real world people actually have lives to live out and goals they are trying to fulfill. Moments of sexual intimacy are at best oases among the day’s obligations, and often are short-lived and infrequent. Also, people and events tend to operate with some semblance of internal consistency and motivation and logic. Most narrative cinema operates under these assumptions, and even certain subgenres of porn—especially movie take-offs like Pirates and Womb Raider—do so also, if not as well.

In the Weltanschaung of Das Butt, however, the universe is in a chaotic state of arrested arousal that seems to last an eternity. There is no story so much as a situation, or rather a series of situations, the first being Herr Dick’s dominion over these two hapless vixens, with the blonde occasionally allying with him to aid in the brunette’s degradation. (Perhaps No EXXXit would be a better title.) The sex is varied, but without any discernable reason, pacing, flow; things just happen:

- The brunette is being pegged from behind while the blond spits on her.
- Then they both get down on their knees and Mr. Thick slaps their asses.
- Then the brunette is fellating Mr. Thick and drooling and the blond is catching it.

“It comes from her mouth and lands on your face,” Herr Dick observes. He sounds like he’s stoned.

Occasionally the proceedings become downright baroque. At one point Mr. Thick humps the brunette’s mouth so hard she coughs up some fluid, dark amber-colored and runny.

“What is that?” he asks, hardly seeming to care.

“That’s the Gatorade I drank earlier.”

“I love these maids.”

Without provocation Herr Dick becomes fixated on the ladies’ shoes. “Oh my God,” he mutters, kissing their heels and feet. “Oh my God. Oh my god. That’s what I want.” Later on he calls the brunette “my little dog,” a term of endearment, I’m sure.

Throughout all of this her eyes are glassy and glazed, as if she has entered some kind of Zen trance and is actually at the moment far away. I hope this is the case, for she takes it worse than either of the other two: slapped, spat on, donkey-punched(!). In a particularly tasteless moment the blond plugs her nose during another oral sex session while ordering Mr. Thick to “shove it in her fucking mouth.” The instances of fellatio are perhaps the most discomfiting, due to the brown-haired subject’s trademark gurgling, as if she were trying to keep pace with the flowing concentrations of a beer bong, filled with directed erection.

But then things take an arty turn when Herr Dick begins to chant, “You’re just another slave… Another slave… Another slave… Another slave… Another slave,” as the picture fades out. There is the sound of a heartbeat, a fade-in, and the brunette wakes up in bed. She gets up and smokes a cigarette. The German approaches her, as if nothing had happened.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, with the all conviction of a forced confession.

“I had a dream,” She says quietly, which is porno shorthand for scared and shaken. “I was in a prison, and there were these men all over, and they were trying to touch me and fuck me.” Cue the fade-in to some dank concrete bathroom where the brunette is chained to the wall and then released by some blond female guard, probably the same as before, so she can pleasure various men in handcuffs and sky-blue and white-striped pajamas. The situation smacks of a Kafkaesque authoritarian nightmare scenario mingled with Beckettian nonsequitor:

“Are you a good girl?”

“I think so, yes.”

“I hope you’re thirsty.” And so it all begins again. Spit finger wank fuck suck. Ditto with the blond guard. In a passive-aggressive bid for tastefulness and affection, the film depicts the brunette occasionally showing some defiance and resistance--because we’re supposed to care for her, you see--before she goes and gobbles another man’s choke bird. She even enacts some tawdry revenge on the blond. “Put your face in that fucking toilet,” she says, doing exactly that before squatting over her. “Is that what you like? Huh? Being treated like some piece of fucking meat?”

Before despair at this burlesque feminism can fully overtake me, the real world intrudes: the entrance door opens, and the nearing-noon shine is blinding. Then it’s dark again, and now some twenty minutes since I arrived—twenty? It has to be more than that. Time has no meaning in this place—I am joined for the first time by another theatergoer. He’s a pasty old man of wide carriage, shorts and short sleeves, and wispy, medium-length white hair flowing behind him as he saunters down the aisle and settles into a seat four rows from the front.

Not long after, the door opens and shuts again, and another elderly white man comes in, skinny, wearing a black ballcap and carrying a tote bag, also black. He sees me, and probably my pen and notebook, and decides it prudent to sit down in the row of seats opposite my own. He puffs a cigarette before setting it on the floor and stamping it out. In comes yet another patron, a large middle-aged black. He hangs back near the exit with his arms crossed.

The movie goes on, and on, and on, and one of the women—they’re more or less interchangeable—is being butt-gutted most aggressively, during which her wails achieve a kind operatic vibrato—aaahAAHaaahAAHaaahAAH—in time with the anterior thrusting. The man in the opposite aisle begins methodically rubbing his chest with his left hand, an action he will repeat often. The black in the back opens a newspaper.

The prison segment ends, for no reason but that at some point it must, and then we’re looking at a blond, perhaps the same one from earlier.

Offscreen, Herr Dick speaks to her: “Where is he?”

She answers, “I was choking him—“ we quick flash to black-and-white footage of her choking of a bald-shaved brown man, “and I stomped on his dick with my heel.”We get a flash of that too. So begins another alternate continuity, with events following the predictable trajectory.

One of the first times I ever got high I got really energized, but after an hour or so I started to freak out, terrified that I might never return to a normal state. I’m beginning to feel that way about Das Butt, where sex that should be, even if only on some base level, exhilarating, has become simply exhausting. The performers (to call them actors would be to disparage the occupation of a great many of my friends) would seem to feel that way, at certain points in all their fucking and sucking, slurping and jerking, seeming to relinquish all agency in their characters. Their movements settle into a rapid-fire back and forth in and out consistency of movement that makes it seem like I’m no longer watching human beings, but rather animatronic dummies belonging to some perverted theme park display.

It’s during one of these robotic sexual see-sawings that the man up front shows some activity. Between halting breaths he animatedly and barely audibly snorts, almost like stifled laughter. The black man with the newspaper actually does laugh, quite heartily, when the woman onscreen climbs onto her partner and starts yelling at him, essentially for not sufficiently abusing her. The man rubbing his shirt has since stood up and leaned against the back wall, but he’s still rubbing his shirt.

I had come into this theater, ages ago, thinking I would stay for and document one show. That was when I was still operating under the Aristotelian expectations of storytelling, that there would be some climax, some catharsis, to close things out. But the whole damn movie is climax with no end in sight, and it is now noon. Convinced that nothing is ever going to change, I leave.

The world I rejoin bears little resemblance to that on the screen and in the theater: no darkness, but sparkling sunlight; instead of a constant stream of orgasmic crying, the urban ambiance of Philadelphia. The men walking down the sidewalk to my right are not having frantic sex with nubile twenty year-olds, but are fully dressed in business attire and carrying on a conversation. Perhaps they are asking one another what kind of sick young man would waste his time in an adult movie theater.