INTRODUCTION: WHY BOTHER TO READ A PORN FILM?
Since the 1980s academic work on pornographic film has moved on from regarding it primarily as a social problem, conduit for noxious ideologies and source of intolerable boredom. Open-minded critics such as Linda Williams, Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith have sidelined essentialist definitions of porn and its ‘effects’ in order to tackle ‘ordinary’ film studies issues such as genre, form and authorship.1 Yet analysing a porn film for its own sake as a meaningful aesthetic object remains fairly unusual, except in the case of art house ‘erotica’ like Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999) and 9 Songs (Michael Winterbottom, 2005). Given the repetition and monomaniac banality of most porn films, singling one out for thematic interpretation is likely to seem both counter-intuitive and a pretentious waste of time. Nevertheless, that is the intention of this essay, which offers an interpretation of A Clockwork Orgy (Nic Cramer, 1995), a ‘hard-core version’ of Stanley Kubrick’s classic science fiction fable, A Clockwork Orange (1971), and something of a personal cult film.2
I shall approach A Clockwork Orgy from three directions: first, as a characteristic example of the hard-core version, one of the most significant sub-genres in contemporary porn production; second, as an adaptation and parody of A Clockwork Orange; and, third, generalising from my own experience, as an incitement to erotic reverie and action. My purpose is to argue that hardcore versions, in spite of their low cultural status, represent a distinctive mode of adaptation. Rather than mere parasites upon their originals, they, like exploitation films generally, are often subversive commentaries on the mainstream’s erotic and ideological subtexts.
HARD-CORE ADAPTATION
Adult film versions of fairy tales, classic literature and well-known movies were first popular in the 1970s, when porn was mostly shown in cinemas. While some porn films drew on the conventions of other genres in a spirit of hybridisation – for example science fiction sex films such as Sex World (Anthony Spinelli, 1978) and The Satisfiers of Alpha Blue (Gerard Damiano, 1981) – others ripped-off one specific film or identifiable group of films. Alice in Wonderland (Bud Townsend, 1976) was ‘an X-rated musical comedy’ version of the classic children’s book; The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger, 1976) was a hard-core take-off of My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), while The Bite (Jerry Denby, 1975) parodied The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) and Talk Dirty to Me (Anthony Spinelli, 1980), Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, 1939). The vampire film has probably inspired the most rip-offs, from Dracula Sucks (Phillip Marshak, 1979) to Intercourse with the Vampire (Paul Norman, 1994), but there exists too a significant body of what Richard Burt has dubbed ‘Shakes-porn’.3
Since the 1980s, hard-core versions of mainstream films have flourished on video, with titles including Ally McFeal (David Brett, Harold Merkin, 2000), Charlie’s Anals (n.d., 2001), and The Ozporns (Anthony R. Lovett, 2002). Unlike their 1970s forerunners, they rarely do more than pun on the titles and lift the basic situations of the original films. A few attempt a measure of fidelity and shoehorn the obligatory bouts of sex into recognisable imitations of their sources’ plots, imagery and themes. The result can be a genuine cross-generic adaptation, in which the original film’s erotic subtexts are seized upon and satirised. Edward Penishands (Paul Norman, 1991), for instance, a take-off of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1991), substitutes the hero’s scissorshands with enormous prosthetic penises, and so wittily literalises the Freudian subtext of the original. With most hard-core versions, however, detailed attention to the precursor text is less important than introducing explicit sex where it is either alluded to or disavowed altogether. Cathula (Phil Barry, 2002), for example, one of the many sex vampire films, represents vampires as sexual predators living it up in polymorphously perverse orgies – not a bad summary, in fact, of the hidden erotic dynamic of the vampire genre itself.
In A Clockwork Orgy considerable effort is made to imitate Kubrick’s film, unearth its sexual subtexts, and echo its themes of free will and political control. It is set in a dystopian anti-sex future (a common science fiction scenario, from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) to the porn film Café Flesh (Rinse Dream, 1982)), in which Alexandra (Kaitlyn Ashley) and her female droogs, Dum (Rebecca Lord), Georgina (Isis Nile) and Patty (Olivia), roam the streets and force themselves on men. Alexandra is arrested, and put through a course of behaviourist retraining that involves being forced to watch sex films. Key scenes from A Clockwork Orange are restaged on the cheap and more or less in the same narrative order, though there are many significant omissions; for example, the murder of the Cat Lady is dropped, there is no equivalent to the fight between Alex’s gang and Billy Boy’s, and the droogs’ assault on F. Alexander (Jon Dough) involves sex only with him and not the rape of his wife. The droogs speak a version of Nadsat, the Russianised teen-lingo of the original film, to which are added some appropriate neologisms (‘gashy-washy’ for vagina, for instance).
FIGURE 9.1 From Alex to Alexandra: the opening scene from A Clockwork Orgy
A Clockwork Orgy also reproduces some memorable camera moves and compositions. The film opens with Alexandra in close-up before pulling back, precisely as in A Clockwork Orange, to a wide shot of all the droogs; Alexandra’s voiceover is a reworked version of Alex’s first monologue, the final word of which, ‘ultraviolence’, has been replaced with ‘ultrasex’. In the next scene the droogs terrorise a tramp (Dick Nasty); but whereas in A Clockwork Orange he is beaten up, here he is subjected to extended and pleasurable sex. Throughout the film ‘ultrasex’ takes the place of ‘ultraviolence’ and the droogs’ attentions are, on the whole, more to be welcomed than feared.
FIGURE 9.2 From aggression to arousal: porn reframes the tramp’s ‘assault’ in A Clockwork Orgy
A key change, of course, is that in A Clockwork Orgy the male droogs of the original are turned into women. This gender switch is common in hardcore versions (for example, in Whore of the Rings II (Jim Powers, 2003), the randy hobbit stand-ins are female) because making the protagonists sexually voracious women legitimises the central fantasy of porn – that the sexes’ needs and desires are harmonious and interchangeable. In A Clockwork Orgy it also helps defuse one of the more troubling givens of the film – the fact that the female droogs essentially rape men throughout. While men raping women is pretty much taboo in mainstream porn, generic convention insists that men cannot be forced unwillingly into sex; Alexandra’s droogs are therefore not so much rapists as liberators of their victims’ inner porn star. Changing the gender of the droogs corrects, too, the sexual politics of A Clockwork Orange, in which women are mostly big-breasted sexual playthings and marginal to the film’s key themes of male violence and homoerotic power-play. In A Clockwork Orgy the women are still big-breasted, but at least they drive what little narrative there is. The homoeroticism of A Clockwork Orange, which is often overlooked, is also highlighted by Alex’s becoming Alexandra.4 In the original Alex is persistently fawned on, pawed over and molested by other men, as when Deltoid, his parole officer, slaps his hand on the ‘luscious young malchick’s’ crotch. In the equivalent scene in A Clockwork Orgy, Alexandra and her (now female) parole officer engage in a full-on sex session; this lesbian sequence, while completely standard in straight porn, makes explicit the homoerotic potential of the original scene.
The relation between the latter film and its source differs sharply from that between Whore of the Rings II and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002), to which clings a thrill of tasteless violation.5 Tolkien’s world so furiously excludes sexual reference that ‘pornogrifying’ it is less erotic sabotage than a salutary corrective and breath of fresh air. A Clockwork Orange, on the other hand, is already imaginatively and generically halfway towards porn; Pauline Kael, for example, called it a porno violent sci-fi comedy, as if made by a strict German professor.6 Gratuitous erotic material and images of the commodification of sex are scattered throughout A Clockwork Orange, confounding the distinction between high art, trash and porn. Teenage girls suck phallic ice-lollies before engaging in high-speed sex with Alex (the result is a mini porn loop in itself); the camera lingers with icy voyeurism as the Cat Woman spreads her legs during yoga; there is an aimless shot of a topless nurse when Alex is in hospital; and, in the film’s most outrageous comment on the creative overlap between porn and great art, Alex commandeers Beethoven and the Bible as masturbation fodder. As Janet Staiger has pointed out, A Clockwork Orange is in many ways a big-budget exploitation film.7 A troubling combination of high style and low content, it foregrounds the exploitative elements and unsettles the boundaries between art as pure form (aesthetically redeeming violent content) and art as incitement (Alex jerking off to ‘Ode to Joy’).8
Linda Ruth Williams noted that Kubrick ‘long played with genre, emulating and exemplifying the pinnacles of trash genres through meticulously rendered works of cinema art’.9 One approach to A Clockwork Orgy is therefore to read it – as a heuristic thought experiment – as the shadowy Other of Kubrick’s film, at once an adaptation of its pornographic subtexts and a commentary on its themes and aesthetic strategies. Analogies exist, for example, between the formal and emotional distancing in both films of sex and violence. In A Clockwork Orgy the tension, inherent in all porn, between documentary and fiction, the recording of pro-filmic real sex and its non-spontaneous staging for the camera, echoes the masque-like performance of violence in A Clockwork Orange. Robert Kolker’s comment on this aspect of A Clockwork Orange applies equally well to A Clockwork Orgy: ‘the bodies in the film are mechanical, by definition unreal, because this is a film, not the world, and because everyone in it acts as if driven by some monomaniacal or inexplicable external force’.10 This is underscored because both films are futuristic science fiction exempt from the usual conventions of film realism. In the case of A Clockwork Orgy, the science fiction setting and imagery are exceptionally appropriate. Pornography is itself a species of utopian science fiction, in whose imaginary ‘pornotopia’ the sexes converge, feminism did not take place, and women want what men want to do to them.11
Alex’s therapy essentially consists of watching porn films that combine violence, sex and Nazi propaganda. The films are designed first to excite and then repel him, so that the films are identified with A Clockwork Orange itself. That film is meant alternately to arouse and disgust us so that we, like Alex, undergo subliminal conditioning. For example, just as the films Alex sees contaminate innocent material by associating it with violence (the treatment accidentally makes him allergic to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), so A Clockwork Orange, quite deliberately, contaminates ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ by using it to accompany rape and sadism. A Clockwork Orgy is similarly reflexive about itself as a porn film.
FIGURE 9.3 Erotic punishments: ‘treating’ the heroine of A Clockwork Orgy
When Alexandra is imprisoned, her treatment involves watching sex videos of the Warden (Jonathan Morgan) and a female guard intended to turn her off sex and transform a ‘nasty little tramp, filthy little whore’ into, as the Warden puts it, a ‘lady you could meet in church on a Sunday morn’. The reasons, again as in the original film, are political: ‘our party has promised to restore decency and morality to make the streets safer for ordinary celibate citizens’; ‘from today sex and promiscuity has become a thing of the past’. But whereas in A Clockwork Orange Alex is reconditioned by a combination of drugs and aversion therapy, there is no mention of drugs in A Clockwork Orgy, and Alexandra, whose eyes are not pinned open, seems merely incapable of looking away from the porn. As she gags and writhes in disgust in front of ‘lovely lovely lovely flesh’, it appears that what is conditioning her against sex is pornography itself. ‘You feel ill,’ the Warden tells her, borrowing lines from the original film, ‘because you are getting better. Sex and violence are horrible things. When we are healthy, we respond to sex and promiscuity with fear, anxiety, shallowness, condemnation and even nausea.’ Bizarrely, rather as in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), A Clockwork Orgy seems to be warning us against watching films like itself. Porn films – even though Alexandra says she has happily watched them before – eliminate her desire and make repulsive even the thought of sex. Yet one assumes this is not how viewers are expected to respond to the explicit sex in the film.
But the film is not too bothered with this kind of narrative consistency. Take, for example, the scene towards the end of the film in which Alexandra, who is now supposedly incapable of erotic feelings, is raped by tramps. She initially chooses to be entirely passive in order not to feel nauseous (‘Better to be nailed by winos than feel that horrible sickness’), but she is soon crying ‘Fuck me harder!’ and ‘It feels good!’ even though, at this point in the story, she ought to be made ill by sex rather than clamour for more of it. The generic requirements of porn override those of coherent storytelling. Women must always respond to fucking and even compulsory sex is unambiguously good.
One last comparison between the two films: both are ‘about’ liberation. The Ludovico Treatment robs Alex of his free will and the moral of the film is that it is better for him freely to choose evil than to have no choice at all. It is far from clear, however, whether Alex can ever truly be free; his initial thuggery was a product of his social environment, while at the end of the film, once surgery has restored his old violent self, he has become the puppet of a fascist government. There is a similar cluster of ironies in A Clockwork Orgy. Alexandra and her droogs represent sex as ‘natural’. Unlike Alex, whose adventures in rape and murder are obviously criminal, they are role models of sexual liberation, heroic propagandists of the erotic deed. Yet they seem clockwork mechanisms from the start: shaved, buffed and silicon-enhanced porn robots driven by insatiable sexual compulsion. At the end of the film Alexandra is returned to her ‘natural’ state of addictive hyper-sexuality, and the government promises to provide her with lovers and other necessities. The final scene is the orgy of the film’s title in which Alexandra, her droogs and the Warden himself get it on in the junkyard. At the end Alexandra turns to the audience and says, ‘I was treated [Alex in the original says, ‘cured’] all right.’ This carries the same ironic implication as in A Clockwork Orange – that her excesses (sexual rather than violent) can be co-opted and exploited by the government.
The film’s celebration of (enforced) sexual promiscuity comes across as mildly progressive in the era of AIDS. All porn is progressive in the narrow sense that it stages the virtues of non-monogamous sex, but in the 1990s, a time when the celibacy movement and religious attacks against porn were gaining ground, A Clockwork Orgy was making a pro-1960s and anti-family values point. (Seeing Bill Clinton on the cover of Spy magazine, Alexandra says she’ll teach him to inhale – she is willing to uphold the counterculture values in which he wouldn’t fully indulge.) As the F. Alexander character says to his comrades on the phone, ‘There are great traditions of sexual freedom to be defended,’ and oversexed Alexandra – like the film itself – is a weapon against a sexually oppressive government. Seen in this light, A Clockwork Orgy is porn with a mission: a historically located intervention in sexual politics and a self-serving but passionately felt argument for permissiveness and anonymous sex.
PORN NARRATIVE
The formal structure of a porn film is easy enough to analyse, because porn’s stark, algebraic quality is such that one film appears to exhaust the formal possibilities of the whole genre – ‘If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.’ Expressive content tends to boil down to allegorical recombinations of gender archetypes. As Joseph W. Slade remarks, ‘porn draws on vast reservoirs of myth, legend, belief, customs, and mores that work both for and against establishing norms of behavior. Obscene folklore … serves as the fountainhead of pornography, a collective cultural id.’12 As to deeper intentional significance, thematic interpretation is less obviously relevant than psychoanalytic and ideological diagnosis (as, for example, by Tanya Krzywinska in an article on Cicciolina).13 Symptom rather than expression, a porn film may indeed add up to a semiotically rich index of cultural representations, but no more so, perhaps, and to no more aesthetically compelling effect, than any other product of low popular culture. This is not to say that films like A Clockwork Orgy do not lend themselves to interpretation in the standard meaning-truffling sense; all films do in proportion to the energy, competence and cultural capital of the interpreter. But it is, first and last, a porn film and, while it is not irrelevant to consider it as an adaptation, its relation to A Clockwork Orange is opportunistic rather than decisive. Parodying this simply made it distinctive (and ‘classy’) in a market otherwise flooded with interchangeable product, as well as potentially lending it some cult appeal.
A Clockwork Orgy certainly has elements of what Gerard Genette called ‘metatextuality’, in that intertextual relations with its source involve a certain reworking and criticism of it.14 But it is likely that many viewers had neither seen A Clockwork Orange nor, if they had, would care very much about whether A Clockwork Orgy was faithful to its style and themes. Parodies usually rely on audiences picking up references, but this one is post-hermeneutic; everything except the sex is disposable. I suspect many viewers’ primary investment would be in whether A Clockwork Orgy fulfilled the generic expectations of contemporary porn; they might even resent the homage to Kubrick using up time available for uninterrupted sexual display – in porn films, story usually gets fast-forwarded.
But it is important to note that A Clockwork Orgy, like Edward Penishands and Cathula and virtually all contemporary hard-core versions, ends up as a series of fairly anonymous sexual numbers. Only in soft-core films, such as those produced by Seduction Cinema, is there much interest in detailed parody.15 Hard-core versions invariably jettison narrative after a while, along with plot, humour and parody, and concentrate on uninterrupted depictions of sex. Although porn experimented with full-length, complexly narrated features during hard-core’s Golden Age in the 1970s, this trend was arrested by the introduction of domestic video. Straight hard-core today is dominated by ‘gonzo’ (first-person documentary-style sex scenes, pioneered by John Stagliano in The Adventures of Buttman (1989)) and other largely pre-classical, non-narrative stagings of raw sexual performance, all of which tenaciously adhere to what Linda Williams called hard-core’s ‘principle of maximum visibility’.16 Within specific categories (teen, oral, anal, mature, ebony, etc.), they tend to advertise exotic activities and fetishes that ‘push the envelope’ towards freakish spectacle, such as DVDA (double vaginal, double anal), bukkake (multiple ejaculations on one actress), spitting and gagging, cream pies (showing the results of internal ejaculation), and A2M (ass to mouth: sucking a penis after its withdrawal from an anus, which must be depicted in one continuous shot). The disintegration of narrative is even more pronounced on websites such as Tube8, RedTube, YouPorn and Pornotube which offer free access to amateur and pirated porn video bites, many of them reminiscent of the gross out ‘body comedy’ stunts of the Jackass TV series and movies (2000–2007).
Moreover, there are aspects of porn which resist integration into the taxonomy of film genres, and defeat conventional textual explication. Appraising porn by the standards of mainstream cinema is highly problematic, not so much because of porn’s transgressive content, as because its prioritising of structure and duration over narrative makes it closer to avant-garde films (Warhol is the obvious comparison, for he was influenced by and contributed to porn filmmaking; Vinyl, his 1965 adaptation of the novel of A Clockwork Orange, draws significantly on the imagery of gay S&M porn). Porn can also usefully be compared with both pre-classical cinema and the alleged ‘regression’ to plotless blank spectacle in contemporary post-classical film. Furthermore, porn has elements of CCTV footage, amateur film, reality TV, found footage, and wildlife and medical documentaries, in which narrative possibilities co-exist with fugitive glimpses of ‘unmediated’ actuality. Associating porn with narrative film may simply be a category mistake, rather like the assumption that video games aspire to the cinematic, when they are an entirely different, visceral and experiential form of textuality. Porn, like video games, might in fact be more usefully aligned with conceptual and performance art, as predicted by the work of Annie Sprinkle and Jeff Koons.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MASTURBATION
This brings me to my final point, which concerns the way that viewers make sense of a film such as A Clockwork Orgy. What is striking about pornography is that it so comprehensively exceeds the usual limits of what is represented that interpretation seems an inadequate trope for readerly response (as opposed to shock, outrage, arousal, laughter…). We do not habitually think of porn viewers as interpreting porn; that activity is associated with opponents of porn, who interpret it primarily to gauge the depth of its corruption. Porn viewers, on the other hand, are said to use it – a loaded word (we do not speak of ‘science fiction’ users or ‘Lord of the Rings’ users) which suggests mindless compulsion rather than self-aware erotic arousal and engagement. At this point, however, we must move beyond issues of representation and its limits and consider porn-viewing as lived experience.
To consider porn without mentioning masturbation is rather like discussing comedy and not worrying about humour. Yet the real-life context of porn consumption is rarely discussed. There are many objections to pornography – concern for the sleaze and exploitation endured by the participants, the overlap between porn and prostitution, the desacralisation of sex, the misogyny of far too much of it – but the disquiet it arouses has much to do with residual ambivalence about masturbation, and the fear that masturbation acts as a kind of mental fixative, reinforcing associations between pleasure and sexual domination.17 Anxieties cluster around porn viewers in ways they rarely do around viewers of westerns and romances; the nearest analogy is perhaps to the similarly ‘sad’ and ‘addicted’ users of violent horror films and video games. The fear is sharpest when the masturbating ‘porn zombies’ (the term used in 8MM (Joel Schumacher, 1999)) are working class.18
Yet a phenomenology of masturbation is precisely what is missing from porn studies, and providing that will require surreally detailed and reflexive accounts of the erotic pleasures of active viewing. For example, discussion of porn often turns on its aesthetic poverty and in particular on its being boring. Peter Bradshaw has called this the ‘acceptable unshockable-sophisticate alternative to condemnation on moral grounds’.19 Nevertheless porn is self-evidently not boring to its millions of happy consumers; this makes sense only when porn’s supposedly ‘boring’ descriptive moments are related to the experience of viewers primarily engaged not in comprehending the narrative of a film but rather in the co-ordinated physical and cognitive task of masturbating to it. The otherwise intolerable sameness of porn is wholly transformed by the act of masturbation; the initial mood of boredom (to take a Heideggerian view on it) proceeds via curiosity and fascination to one of relaxed but focused arousal. Once again the apt comparison is with avant-garde films like Andy Warhol’s, which seem empty and interminable until one invests sufficient mental and physical effort to cope with and acclimatise to their unforgiving stasis and banality. As soon as this frame of mind is achieved, boredom is soon overcome by masturbation’s hypnotic rhythms; and the viewer’s aroused body is, in Linda Williams’ words, ‘caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen’ – a sort of corporeal karaoke.20 Absorbed in the zone of porn description, the stroking viewer watches (or rather witnesses) the film with rapt Zen-like attention, as s/he endeavours to align sexual pleasure with on-screen action. This intense experiential involvement is analogous to the autotelic creative state which the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’, in which ‘there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future’.21 (Admittedly, this is an imperfect, albeit suggestive, analogy. Unlike the absorbing activities that produce ‘flow’, masturbation is often an easy pleasure requiring minimal effort and skill and no real challenges to overcome.22) Instead of interpreting porn along the same lines as other film genres, we can reconceptualise it as the textual focus of a meditative optimal experience.23
It is true that porn is not always watched in so focused a manner, and that it is also watched in company; played as TV wallpaper while one is doing something else; collected, shelved and catalogued; switched off in horror and disgust. Nor is porn always used for masturbation. Understanding a film like A Clockwork Orgy requires more than complacently ‘seeing through’ and pathologising both the film and its unusually active viewers; but, equally, it requires much more than formal analysis and textual interpretation. We must also reflect on the experiences of watching it as a porn film.24 This means bracketing off consideration of A Clockwork Orgy as parody and adaptation and exploring instead how viewers like me integrate the film into their erotic lives.
