Amsterdam is a religious city, unlike any other. Not a mecca or an apostolic see, but a city of refuge and fomentation, a city of heresies and holy outrage, literally underground, below sea level, with an historic view up the ass-end of orthodoxy, and so an inspired setting for Suck magazine’s “First Annual Wet Dream Festival,” held there last November.
For if there was one common response among the pilgrims to four days and nights of fuck-films strung end-to-end—beyond deadened buttocks and early boredom—it was the sense of being engulfed in some kind of moral and iconic ceremony. It was like being back in Sunday School again—right down to the hard seats, the self absorption of the priests, the collection plate clink, and the proselytizing fervor of the official creed: “When we are unafraid and free from possessiveness it will make little difference what kind of social organization we choose to live under, because we will be open, kind, and generous. It is sexual frustration, sexual envy, sexual fear, which permeates all our human relationships and which perverts them. The sexually liberated, the sexually tolerant and the sexually generous individuals are open, tolerant, and generous in all their activities. Therefore S.E.L.F. (Sexual Egalitarian & Libertarian Fraternity) wishes to encourage sexual freedom, sexual tolerance and sexual generosity.” (All communicants had to sign this creed to see the films.)
That is to say, the films themselves, with few exceptions, were either pallid home movies or slick sex-shop merchandise, lacking the efficacy of professionalism and holy humility, the projected celebrants for the most part self-conscious charlatans given to fraudulent orgasms; and the Suck organizers were ceremonial bumpkins, clumsy at the arts of ritual fervor, and for all their evident good will, even benevolence, there was a pervading stink of hucksterism and peacocksmanship in the air. And so the prophesied extasis did not descend upon the gathered faithful, nor was Amsterdam suddenly invigorated by a flood of liberating sperm (it was the end of November, and the year continued to sink impotently toward its dark demise). And yet, nevertheless, one was left with the feeling that behind the ingenuous artifices lay a primitive mystery worth a Sunday morning’s contemplation, a mystery that perhaps had less to do with erotic titillation than with one’s consciousness of himself—in short, that pornography, especially in large doses, was good for the soul.
There was some exhibitionist onstage fucking and sucking, programmed efforts at excitation, and one filmmaker (a German, need one add) took a public shit, but the general ambience was one of withdrawal and becalmed emotions. Orgy seemed somehow inappropriate. Watching simultaneous multiscreen projections of a number of indistinguishable pricks thumping away in their anonymous cunts is something like watching clouds pass or leaves fall or waves lap a shore. It was entirely fit that the final night of films was held in “Cosmos,” one of those barren white centers for Eastern mystery cultists, vegetarian, opposed to all drugs including alcohol, skeptical of pleasure, and given to meditative self-abnegation.
The very nature of film, of course, is counterorgiastic. Orgy is communal, and film by itself is voyeuristic, masturbatory, private. It can be used ceremonially, but iconic paradigms and larger-than-life spectacle are after all only minor elements in any total religious festival, especially one that might aspire to “become the annual sexual highlight of Europe and of your life … a four-day get-together … where we can really cum [sic] to know one another.”
But orgy aside, film is extraordinarily relevant to the religious experience, and the Wet Dream Festival partook unavoidably of its sacramental nature. Film—especially silent film, which most of this festival’s entries were (the liturgical chant was taped rock)—is pure gesture, prior to all perception and understanding, profoundly ambiguous, irreducible; yet at the same time it is selective, exemplary, repeatable and yet mutable, illuminative. “Focus” is as religious a word as “revelation.” Editing is as holy an office as administering the Eucharist. And paying one’s tithe at the gates before entering the holy place, whether to watch there a cocksucking, a sacrifice, or a pratfall, does not diminish the implied commitment to transcendence.
Not all the films in Amsterdam were simply about commonplace fucking and sucking, there were a few variations. There was an intensely communicative film, for example, of a girl’s face as she smoked and masturbated: the one undeniably genuine orgasm in the entire parade. A great cartoon of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in which the cottage, during orgy, expanded and contracted like a toilet plunger, a prick popping out of the chimney with every plunge, shooting jism. Anamorphic fuckscenes shot with a wide-angle lens: alas! the receding head, the fattening ass! Some ultimately wearisome experiments with montage, magic markers, bad lighting, and the like. A giggly clutch of what looked like suburban housewives peeing in a beer stein, then (after a clumsy cut) guzzling the contents. A terrific sequence in one film involving the caressing, puncturing, and eating of glossy green peppers, cucumbers, sausages. In another, a bald man grinning sheepishly at the camera while someone above shat on his head. Later, these turds, now lying in the grass, gathered a swarm of flies, and another man (the filmmaker, if I am not mistaken) crept up on them, raised his hand, hesitated dramatically, then slapped his hand in the shit, no doubt the festival’s most memorable single image.
The prizewinning film was, not surprisingly, a barnyard spectacular, a mystical and muddy return to Mother Earth and all her well-hung progeny, in which a vestal virgin fucked or was fucked by every piece of meat on the farm, most unforgettably (because it is so humanoid) by a pig.
But the majority were simple pornoracket fuck-films, and most of the time it was like having to listen, over and over again, to some illiterate preacher hung up on the Tenth Commandment or the parable of the mustard seed. There may be more glory in Christ’s cock or Mary’s cunt than in their bleeding hearts, but even holy unadulterated motherfucking loses its efficacy in time, if unalleviated by subtlety and surprise. These films were mostly adolescent male masturbatory fantasies (the eager, talented, many-orificed slave of whatever sex), governed by the potential of the zoom lens, which all too often burrowed in on sad, soft pricks and dry cunts.
(The zoom lens, extension of the Victorian keyhole, is in fact altering the sex act, since positions that block the camera’s inspection of the copulative organs or throw shadows over them are taboo, and new positions, not very comfortable, are being discovered that allow the most open shots. E.g., the girl lies on her back, heels doubled under her rump, thighs spread as wide as possible; the man lies on his side, below her ass and perpendicular to her, bow-sprung by the press of her thighs; and the camera and lights hover overhead with a perfect zoom shot of the fucking organs, not to mention the stretched muscles and grimacing faces. Arms and legs must be kept out of the way—group fucking is often a necessary expedient to help hold the limbs in awkward positions: has anyone ever thought of using basketcases?—and the actors are often obliged to reach around and spread their own cheeks so the camera can see their assholes.)
But, of course, “adolescent,” “masturbatory,” and “fantasy” are not necessarily and in all contexts pejorative. One may relate to initiations, for example, the others to self-inquiry and to imagination. If these films and these entrepreneurs somehow debased the sacraments as newscasters debase our social life or bureaucrats our communal purpose, that’s not to say there’s anything intrinsically dull or sinister about films or fucking (or even politics, for that matter). The church, as they say, is not to be judged by its sinners. And one should not too harshly judge Jim Haynes and his Suck-mates—first-annuals are always fraught with calamity and misrepresentation, and overshadowed by the threat of repression or disinterest. They seemed to be in love with what they were doing, and as porno becomes the established orthodoxy, the Mafia-priests to come will no doubt make them seem like innocent saints and martyrs.
Perhaps all this high-church talk is too weighty for porno, even in irony. Certainly, a blue movie has more to say to us than Billy Graham or the Pope, White House transients or Rowan and Martin, but then who or what does not? In fact, there’s probably even more to be said for hardcore porno than for, say, Antonioni or Brakhage, or such films as Easy Rider, Chelsea Girls, or M*A*S*H. Still, by itself, there’s not much in the stuff, ten or fifteen minutes of it is a very long time indeed. If porno festivals are to thrive and take over the world, they’ll probably have to learn something—in both individual films and overall festival programming—about pace and timing, honesty and awe, complexity and self-criticism. They will have to be taken out of the hands of bagmen and randy innocents, and given over to filmmakers, environmental artmakers, metaphysicians, and musicians. Rites of passage will have to be distinguished from holy farce, credos subjected to ecumenical debate, clergy and congregation alike led away from the temptation of the simplistic and the regressive. In sum, the second and successive congresses of the High Church of Hard Core will have to be invaded by the sanctifying grace of art and truth, which is not necessarily just another new position.