It was common in those days for films to be created using surreal concepts like a trip through hell (in which a painful excess of various forms of sex was the not quite convincing punishment), vampires more concerned with screwing than drinking blood, mental asylums in which all the patients were very attractive, naked and singularly focused on hooking up…and so on.
This was also the time that director/photographers like Andrew Blake made curious porn tableau in which sleek women and well muscled men, filmed through blue tinted lens filters at eye-catching locations such as multimillion dollar Hollywood Hills mansions and European castles, posed to display their Olympian beauty before settling in for *artistically* filmed coitus.
You could probably sum that era up – a result, in many ways, of the arrival of consumer video tape devices and video rental stores that broadened the audience and increased revenues by an astounding amount – as the dot com moment for porn; a brief interlude when it seemed the genre had achieved escape velocity from its sticky floor theater past and was acting (at least, in the minds of its intellectual cadre – people like Nina Hartley) as the vanguard of the continuing struggle for sexual liberation in the US.
But an interesting thing happened along the way towards artistic greatness and bodily fluid exchange nirvana and again, as always, both technology and the capitalist imperative were in the driver’s seat.
By the mid to late 1990s, a new group of *gonzo* porn makers (for example, Jamie Gillis) had arrived on the scene and were eager to show up the pretensions of their loftier minded colleagues. Several factors converged to make their *amateur* films possible and successful:
• A wider availability, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear and are well worth exploring, of a vastly expanded pool of young women willing to participate in the biz. • The maturation of the video tape market (a huge percentage of the population had access to cheap VHS player/recorders) and arrival of a new and even more powerful method of marketing and distribution: the Internet. • The explosion of niche markets for extraordinarily specific tastes and fetishes made possible by the Internet (an example, perhaps, of Zizek's **plague of fantasies**).
*Gonzo* directors cleverly realized that customers were just as likely to pay to see a *normal* (i.e. non pro, non-surgically altered) woman have sex as they were a porn’d out rock star like Jenna Jameson. And women with web savvy and a willingness to, at the very least, get naked and at the furthest extreme do the full porn monty, realized they could use images of themselves as content to attract customers. It wasn’t long before amateur websites, and *caught on tape* amateur style films began squeezing more ambitious (if not necessarily *better*) products off video store shelves and out of the minds of both customers and foes.
The non-glamorously explicit products now streaming to millions of PCs and displayed via DVD and VHS are rarely anything more than films featuring unknowns who gather together in hotel rooms, apartments and houses to have remarkably non-sexy sex in front of cameras and crew (there are, as always, exceptions but they're tough to find).
It’s difficult to see, at this moment, what liberating value (beyond the obviously necessary masturbatory relief) a typical 21st century American porn film might have.
.d.