Pornumentaries and Sexploitation
9
abuse and violence. In reality, sex only becomes dangerous when it turns into a
business, for it drives its actors—never better said—being associated from the
very start with a barely legal and definitely immoral enterprise, to push the laws
to their limits; bourgeois morality is above all a matter of appearances, which,
with the help of a few good lawyers, can be perfectly accommodating with any
profitable industry. And smut is no exception.
Wonderland follows the same model as the films mentioned above;
however, its complex narrative structure, which switches points of view and
presents the story under different angles, makes it an aesthetically successful
film which could maintain the same narrative authority without the character of
John Holmes at the very center of the plot. It is not a film dedicated to exploit
the life and times of the first big international pom star, but a well-directed
thriller that interprets the tragic killings of Wonderland. However, it implicitly
shows that a socio-economic history of the multi-billon dollar triple X industry,
the most exemplary' exploitation of sexual repression, remains to be established.
It appears that the establishment began losing interest in pursuing smut
peddlers after the eighties, most likely sensing that the business of pom would
produce large revenues in terms of licenses and taxes. Indeed, pornographic
movie sales and rentals about tripled throughout the nineties, jumping from 1.6
to 4.2 billon dollars. Our incapacity to face sex not only prevents us from
articulating a healthy and aesthetically satisfying sexual narration, it also allows
the pornographic industry to thrive, for it answers a primordial need, albeit in a
perverted way; in this, modem pornography and traditional catholic iconography
are surprisingly similar, although it could be argued than straight pornography
from the golden age of porno-chic is probably healthier than penetrations from
nails or arrows.7 But the night is young and the new means of visual
reproduction, including the Net, are most promising in terms of perverted sexual
narration, which is why Penley’s position is hardly acceptable when she states
that “Every single thing that you can see in a pom film today, they were doing
right back at the beginning of pom.’'8 sfie argues her point mentioning the
presence of spanking, sex toys, and putting on rubbers in the porno d'epoque
(twenties, thirties, forties) insisting that the latter was just as hardcore as it
today. As if by some miracle, the dirty pictures industry had escaped from the
changes necessary for the survival of any business within the capitalistic
system—even the Vatican had to revise its financial policies in order to remain
competitive in the commerce of sainthood—it’s fair to assume that the great
smut peddlers did just the same. Furthermore, the visual representations of
sadomasochism, extreme bondage, and pain, as well as water sports and
coprophilia, are bom out of the late seventies and early eighties, when the era of
pomo-chic ends and video appears, alongside the possibility for virtually anyone
to manufacture and distribute smut.9 Video technology, and more recently,
digital transfer, also allows individuals to welcome pornography into the
comfort of their own homes rather than having to frequent theaters, therefore
minimizing their contact with the real world of pornography and saving their