In a 1995 episode of MTV’s Beavis and Butthead (Mike Judge) the flatulent, nose-picking adolescent duo take their usual spot on the couch and watch a music video by an alternative rock band called The Meices, providing their usual derisive commentary. The video stars an overweight, forty-something man with a disobedient tangle of curly brown hair and scraggly moustache smearing food all over himself in a convenience store. Beavis and Butthead snigger and guffaw at the man’s unsightly body, his sagging paunch, his drooping jowls. Then Beavis remarks, ‘Hey, that’s the guy in the naked movie at your uncle’s house!’ And Butthead replies, ‘You were watching the guy?’
“The guy’ in the movie is Ron Jeremy, and he is a very famous man: a thirty-year veteran of the ‘adult’ film industry and arguably its most recognisable male icon. He has either directed or starred in over a thousand pornographic features, and made a series of tongue-in-cheek cameo appearances in a number of mainstream studio films (52 Pick-Up (John Frankenheimer, 1986), Killing Zoe (Roger Avary, 1994)) and television shows (Nash Bridges; Just Shoot Me). Jeremy also served as ‘consultant’ for Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1998), the documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (Scott J. Gill, 2001), and is the recipient of numerous Internet fansites that register every allusion and cultural reference to the porn star that its custodian finds.
During an interview with Susan Faludi for a New Yorker article on male porn actors, Jeremy shows Faludi a videotape of the Beavis and Butthead segment where the pair ridicule his flabby body and, while consuming a plate of lox and bagels, enthuses, ‘Isn’t this great? I don’t care what people say about me as long as they spell my name right.’1 While other male performers in the adult film industry certainly achieve fame, theirs is a celebrity entirely confined within the limits of that industry’s own tireless productivity, churning out one performer after another. The young actors get older or less attractive or less reliably erect, and there are always more fresh young men waiting to take their place. Ron Jeremy, on the other hand, seems not to change much over the years, either in popularity, physique or persona, and the nuances of this consistency afford him a unique intertextual presence in contemporary popular culture. Consequently, the fact of Jeremy’s stardom – however marginal as compared to celebrities who consort less with ‘low’ culture – and, more specifically, the apparent incongruity of his physical appearance in the pornographic archive pose critical challenges to the dominant discourse on pornography in film and image studies, in particular the assumption that pornography is generically motivated by the desire to arouse male viewers by the objectification of the woman’s body.
Like Hollywood, the adult film industry promotes ‘stars’, but the icons it generates are mainly either the female performers of ‘straight’ porn or the male stars of ‘gay’ porn, and the bodies they exhibit directly conform to normative models of sexual attractiveness. Ron Jeremy, on the other hand, stands as the obverse of these ideological constructions: overweight, unkempt, the anti-aesthetic of the inferred pornographic fantasy, an atypical erotic hyperbole that translates into none of the customary stereotypes. It is important to consider Jeremy not as the exception to the rule, as some marginal figure that really has nothing to do with the real circuit of viewer desire, but in fact part of a substantial tendency of visual culture to provide its perversities with scapegoats, and scapegoats whom we can, in fact, love, and by whom we love to be disgusted.2
With his disorderly body and boisterous lack of ‘taste’, Ron Jeremy bears an affinity to a long tradition of corpulent and physically reckless male comics, from Fatty Arbuckle to John Belushi to Chris Farley.3 (Somehow it comes as little surprise to discover that Jeremy was a failed Catskills stand-up comedian before he started acting in porn.) His insalubrious comic style, replete with potty-mouth verbiage and the broad winks of old vaudeville, adheres to the ‘lower stratum’ humour of the bawdy joke, the limerick, the saucy comic strips of Hustler magazine and the dirty jokes of popularly-denigrated ‘gross-out’ films such as Porky’s (Bob Clark, 1981).4 The merry, degenerate Falstaff of porn, Jeremy’s very attendance at the porn spectacle simultaneously parodies and epitomises the outrageous bodily gymnastics and physical implausibilities of the genre, which by its very nature must frame itself cinematically in order to do two things at the same time: to reveal to plain sight and, less obviously, to obfuscate from view the ‘fact’ of pleasure.
Its use of laughter is not so much disruptive as ambivalent; as in Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the rituals of carnival, laughter functions in porn as a permissible rupture of hegemony in order to signify crisis, and to prod structures of authority into renewing themselves. Its transgressive potential is always carefully circumscribed, and adheres to a strict economic structure; as Patricia Mellencamp describes in her study of television comedy, ‘in contrast to the supposedly “liberating” function of jokes, humorous pleasure “saves” feeling because the reality of the situation is too painful’ – or too dangerous.5 Ron Jeremy is important to porn, I contend, because he is both big enough for his viewers to hide behind, and small enough to fit into the tiny fissures of their fantasies – or, as Angela Carter puts it with inimitable directness in her description of the pornographic text, ‘a gap left in it on purpose … just the right size for the reader to insert his prick into’.6
In this essay I would like to pose a series of questions about Ron Jeremy, as a way of coming to terms with the question of pornography’s solicitation of viewer desire. How can we account for Jeremy’s presence in films where his physical like is nowhere else to be seen?
We have already heard from many critics how violence plays a role in pornographic representation, but what about how comedy operates within pornography, and for what purpose? And how does a consideration of comedy and Jeremy’s visually and extra-textually highlighted presence complicate an understanding of porn and the viewer’s presumed desire, especially when we recognise Jeremy’s primary fan base as young heterosexually-identified males? Here I argue that he functions as pornography’s most beloved symptom: an inflated personification of disavowal, a hysterical index of homosocial pleasure and libidinal panic that can only be soothed by overfeeding. It is my contention that pornography has a far more complex relationship to displeasure than is commonly acknowledged, and that its investment in laughter, as a neutered re-direction of pleasure, delivers rich spectatorial rewards for what I will argue is its most preferred consumer: not the male viewer, but male viewers.
RON COM: REDEFINING THE BOUNDARIES OF SEXUAL PLEASURE
Pornography – like that other culturally-disparaged institution of egregiously popular smut, the tabloid – cannibalises the culture industry, subsisting on its detritus and throwing a kind of iconographic Jungian shadow across Hollywood glamour. In presenting itself as a fantasy entirely besotted with the pleasure of the image, pornography depicts itself as a glimpse of the ‘hard-core’ sleaze behind the air-brushed products of mainstream studio publicity, doing nothing to disguise the bruises on the legs of its hairsprayed starlets, nor the rather obvious signs that the beds on which all this sex is taking place aren’t on studio sets, but in Los Angeles motel rooms. An industry which grosses approximately three billion dollars a year, pornography independently produces, markets and distributes its products entirely outside of the dominant Hollywood system.
It is for this reason that, contrary to its traditional classification as a film genre, I prefer to categorise pornography as a discrete system of representation itself internally comprised of a variety of genres, depending on the ostensible viewer to whom it is marketed: gay, straight, bisexual, bi-curious, transvestite, transsexual, lesbian, ‘couples’; those desiring scenarios featuring all black, Asian or Latino actors; S&M, fist-fucking, and bondage enthusiasts; even the contested ghost-genre of child pornography. These genres themselves further divide into a series of sub-genres that increasingly narrow the sexual focus according to whatever the viewer allegedly wants to see.
All of Ron Jeremy’s films fall under the rubric of ‘straight’ pornography, but his uncredited performance in a video entitled Never Say Good-Bi (1987) will be the subject of this essay’s close reading, which takes aim at the presumption that mainstream ‘straight’ pornography fundamentally caters to an unconflicted heterosexual desire. What is Jeremy doing in this film? What kind of audience did the producers have in mind when they made it? While he grounds himself firmly in the realm of the ‘straight’ genre (unlike crossover porn actors such as Randy West or Jeff Stryker who perform in both gay and straight films), Jeremy’s filmography exhibits his unparalleled ability to traverse the range of ‘straight’ sexual particularities. After all, in pornography, preference is genre; not even heterosexuality gets figured as monolithic, and in porn, genre is both obsessively circumscribed and confoundingly elided. A cursory glance at Jeremy’s list of credits – and the porn section of any video store – reveals a striking number of films with anally-fixated themes (Mistress Hiney: The Beverly Hills Butt Broker (1993); My Anal Valentine (August West, 1992)), ‘gang bangs’ (in one annual series, The World’s Biggest Gang Bang (John T. Bone, 1995) Jeremy appears as the Master of Ceremonies and traditionally ‘closes’ the event by being the last man to have intercourse with the woman), and also with fat fetishism (Let Me Tell Ya ‘Bout Fat Chicks (Guillermo Brown, 1987); Fatliners (Joe W Brown, 1990)). While these films appear to address their viewers’ specific predilections with un-ambivalent directness, most adult video stores tend to lump all of their ‘straight’ titles together in no discernible order, not even alphabetical.
Although it is impossible to say for sure at this point, I am inclined to believe that Never Say Good-Bi was originally located on a shelf amongst a number of ‘straight’ videos, and that its titular promise was not intended to appeal to a ‘bisexual’ or even a ‘gay’ viewer, though I am sure it also found its fair share of those. Instead, I contend that Never Say Good-Bi, while perhaps more articulate about the inner workings of pornography than many other texts of its kind, is exceedingly typical of the ‘straight’ film’s synthesis of the confirmed heterosexuality of its presumed male viewer and the ineloquent homoerotic curiosity that invisibly sutures him to the text.
Ron Jeremy most frequently appears in, and is most generally associated with, a genre which I will call the ‘pornedy’: a hybrid mode that signifies the pornographic lampoon of a cultural staple such as a popular film, television show or media event. Examples include the notorious Jeremy-directed John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut (1994) featuring the famous amputee’s surgically-reconstructed and obstinately flaccid penis, and Divine and Sunset (1996), a parodic self-billed ‘doc-Hugh-drama’ dramatising the 1995 Hugh Grant/Divine Brown prostitution scandal. A flamboyant interpenetration of the class-coded dialectic of high culture and mass culture, flawlessly illustrating Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque politics in the Rabelaisian inversion of popular forms, the ‘pornedy’ enters the sacrosanct space of the popular narrative and re-tells it uncensored.7 What the original version was compelled to sublimate, the pornedy renders explicit; whereas the much-beloved television show The Honeymooners could only ‘speak sex’ through clever innuendo, The Horneymooners (Irving Weiss, 1988) (in which Jeremy portrays Ralph Kramden, wearing his bus-driver’s hat even during sex – ‘I’m a bus driver first’, he tells one of his partners when she asks why he doesn’t take it off) literalises the erotic subtext. More cartoon than critique, the pornedy is an animated pun, an extended raunchy sight gag, and the joke is always on heterosexuality, its mating rituals and romantic myths, its hypocritical reticence to show what it tells so relentlessly. The punning of the porn film title has become almost mandatory by now, and if titles are meant to advertise the product on display, it often presents a rather different picture of what the viewer may desire from it than has been traditionally painted: a regressive strain of infantile, anal-stage humour inextricable from lawful carnal desire, the mischevious pleasures of being ‘in’ on the vaguely nostalgic cultural reference, the slyly beckoning finger of the hermeneutic key of the naughty joke. A sampling of Jeremy’s pornedy titles make clear this fusion of the frisky and the farcical: Desperately Sleazy Susan (1985), The Raunchy Porno Picture Show (Walt Jizzney, 1992), Generally Horny Hospital (Jean Pierre Ferrand, 1995) and Terms of Endowment (A. C. Simpson, 1986) to name just a few.
CARNAL AND CARNIVALESQUE: RETHINKING THE MALE PORNO BODY
The issue of pornography’s carnivalesque political engagement with hypocritical morés has been wonderfully argued by Laura Kipnis and Constance Penley, who in their respective works contend that pornography subversively de-bunks and degrades bourgeois mythologies of sexual hierarchy, and exists as a site of turbulent cultural contention that interrogates rather than affirms dominant ideology.8 On the other end of these arguments, critics from Andrea Dworkin to Nancy Armstrong to Susan Gubar – their assaults on the genre, admittedly, pitched at varying degrees of polemical and emotional intensity – insist that pornography represents patriarchal dominance more explicitly than any other cultural form, and affirms in relentless repetition the symbolic violence of heterosexual subjugation.9 Due to the work of a number of scholars such as Kipnis, Penley, Linda Williams, Susan Stewart, Thomas Waugh and others, it is now possible to enter into the critical discourse of pornography without being required to address the now rather overdetermined question of ‘value’.10 The conversation has finally shifted to issues of the potentially subversive – or, at least, potentially complex – semiotics of visual porn, and is now more attentive to the cryptic opacity of pornographic iconography rather than its previously presumed transparency.11 It is in this vein that I suggest we take the critical discourse on pornography a bit further, and pressure this issue of iconography as a means of exploring that liminal territory between more familiar ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments. While I agree that porn undeniably contains subversive content, I also believe that it depends for its very existence upon a deep and silently confirmed sexual conservatism. The graphic display of the hard-core spectacle codes more than it de-codes, and my purpose in isolating the mode of comedy is to ask how comedy mystifies, and not how it illuminates the specular sexual ‘fact’. Because this mystification ends up producing those very images of super-banalised heterosexuality that appear so generically self-evident on-screen, we might ask ourselves just what, in fact, we are ‘really’ looking at, what pleasures pornography ‘really’ promises, and what it actually delivers. Pornography, like any other mode of entertainment, asks us to measure it not so much against an aesthetic of verisimilitude but in terms of fantasy, as an elaborate anti-realism.
My greatest difficulty with criticism that defends pornography is that by privileging the hard-core spectacle as a site of compulsive Foucauldian truth-telling – as signified by the mandatory narrative closure of the ‘money shot’ – such theory figures the pornographic image as transparent and unmediated, a fantasy of pure cinema that delivers the ‘Real’ free of aesthetic or ideological contamination. Why should we assume that pornography, more than any other cinematic mode, tells the truth? Obviously I do not deny that porn compulsively translates everything, no matter how mundane, into ‘sexual’ (i.e. visual and corporeal) terms – an operation which Ron Jeremy himself embodies in his overstuffed, over-determined form – but to me the more pressing question is, what does it not show? For what un-representable content does the pornographic image so obsessively overcompensate? As it stands now, porn is theorised as that cinematic genre that exists purely to arouse the viewer, and which in its most mainstream form relies upon the objectification of the woman’s body and the privileging of male orgasm as an inscription of ‘truth’ and the linchpin of visual pleasure. If pornography exists purely to arouse, why then the imperative of laughter? Most critical writing on porn highlights the visual primacy of the woman’s body and imagines the male sex performer as somehow invisible, incidental to the scene, while paradoxically insisting upon the visual revelation of male orgasm as the compulsory display in the entire scenario. If the porn film by its very nature directs the male viewer’s gaze inexorably to the female body, then how do we account for Ron Jeremy’s stardom? For the presumed male viewer to ‘see’ Jeremy in a porn film at all contradicts the terms the discourse on porn has in play right now.
Another problematic assumption in the writing on pornography is that of the privacy of viewing. Admittedly, pornographic film left the movie theatres of the 1970s and colonised the home-video market in the 1980s, but this shift of venue does not represent a privatisation of pornographic consumption, but in fact merely enables its publicity in and under the cover of a mainstreamed and safely domesticated pseudo-private sphere. In order to fully come to terms with the means by which this is achieved, we must consider the impact of the home-viewing market’s expansion on the production of pornographic film, and undertake an analysis of porn in terms of its televisual as well as its cinematic aspects. In doing so, we can begin to form a new understanding of the conditions of reception for the pornographic film and the crucial importance of the ‘scene”’ of spectatorship. As Cindy Patton explains:
The structure of erotic experience now enmeshed with rather than opposed to routine consumer activities and domestic rituals; a couch potato do-me ethos replaced the nomadic activity that once characterized the XXX cinema … People consumed pornography in the same space, on the same machines, where they had watched the news, their favorite TV series, or the Weather Channel only hours before.12
Patton’s analysis adroitly illustrates how pornography’s colonisation of the home-video market signifies both a cultural transgression of symbolic/spatial boundaries and a normalising and domesticating of the ‘genital show’ on the TV screen. In this vein, I am interested in examining how the transfer of the pornographic film from the public space of the theatre to the private realm of the home assists in privatising what I consider to be a pleasure essentially public in nature. From its earliest beginnings, pornographic films were watched socially: at stag parties, frat houses, masonic lodges, or in the back rooms of bars or taverns, gradually moving on to big-screen exhibition. While now the masturbatory potential of porn seems to have been fully realised with the advent of video, it is my argument that porn has not changed from something watched in groups to something now watched alone, but that it has internalised in its very structure what I will call the ‘compulsory homosociality’ of its viewer address. One of its most important strategies is the omnipresence of porn legend Ron Jeremy, who, with his raunchy comedic style and parodic body, seals the social contact between the viewer and the movie by reassuring him that he is, in fact, not alone. Doesn’t comedy always presume a group reception? And does it not feel much stranger to laugh alone than to, well, do other things? As Jeremy himself has said, ‘People can’t laugh and get a bone on at the same time. That’s what they say.’13
In order to further investigate pornography’s roots in a distinctly social mode of exhibition, one important direction for porn studies to take would be to go back to the very beginning, to the earliest days of photographic and cinematic media. The most relevant starting point, I believe, would be Tom Gunning’s exegesis of the early ‘cinema of attractions’, his provocative counter-theory to the hegemony of narrative cinema, outlining a film genus characterised by a specific mode of address that differs from the primary spectator relations set up by classical cinema: monstration, not narration. A plotless series of displays or transformations rather than a progressive sketch of narrative continuity, whatever story exists at all acts merely as a pretext for effects, just as the narrative in porn is commonly understood as merely establishing a time and a place for the sex to take place. This early ‘cinema of attractions’, Gunning argues, does not vanish with the advent of narrative film but rather ‘goes underground’, into avant-garde practices and in genres of spectacle, such as the musical. Gunning does not mention pornography, but I think it certainly belongs in his analysis, particularly as additional evidence against the archaic developmental model of cinema. Gunning wants to consider the ‘cinema of attractions’ as a mode in its own right rather than a primitive phase or precursor of the more sophisticated machinery of classical narrative.14 Another crucial aspect of looking at such early films is the element of the non-integrity of the diegesis; as a number of scholars such as Linda Williams, Miriam Hansen and Noël Burch have argued, such films do not elaborate a hermetic diegesis precisely because they want their viewers to remain firmly oriented in the social scene of exhibition. Rather than addressing the shifting points of internal identification that operate in cinematic narration, the ‘primitive’ film confronts its audience directly rather than abstractly introducing it into the space of the film.15
I would like to take a brief anecdotal digression here, as a way of providing some evidence that I cannot just footnote. A male friend of mine who identifies himself as bisexual often frequents adult movie theatres that feature ‘straight’ films. He never goes near the gay movie houses, he says. ‘What’s the point?’ Inside the theatre, where there is never a woman to be seen except on the screen, men cruise from aisle to aisle, stopping to masturbate each other or engage in oral sex. My friend told me a story about a man who once got up from his seat during the film, walked down the aisle towards the front of the theatre, faced the screen and ejaculated in time with the money shot. My friend has been to these ‘straight’ theatres all over the country, and he invariably witnesses and participates in scenes nearly identical to this one. Tales like these beg a series of questions, not the least of which concerns what the pornographic viewer is really watching – the film or the audience? And who is he most interested in looking at – the woman or the man? And if pornography is indeed transgressive, as we are so invested in claiming, then what prohibited content does it really represent? While researching this essay, I spent a lot of time trying to track down a copy of Never Say Good-Bi, which I had seen in college when a friend rented it as research for a paper he was writing on porn and Jean Genet. ‘Who the hell is that guy?’ I asked when Ron Jeremy came on the screen; it seemed so absurd that someone of his ‘type’ had been cast in a movie like this. My friend told me he had been in just about every porno movie he had ever seen. Years later I had a lot of difficulty finding Never Say Good-Bi to review for this essay. In one adult video store I mentioned to the manager that Ron Jeremy had appeared in it, hoping that this would help to focus the search. He rolled his eyes. ‘Are you kidding me?’ he said. ‘Ron Jeremy’s in everything!’
With his anti-aesthetic physique and tasteless hilarity, Jeremy’s simultaneously incongruous and ubiquitous presence in the porn film serves, quite like the woman’s body, as the alibi for the male viewer, who, through his engagement with Jeremy’s comedic antics and derision of his generically-inappropriate body, can both indulge and disavow his desire to view the male body, and to view it in a social rather than anti-social context. Jeremy’s intertextuality and cultural diffusion, symbolically coded by his physical largesse and the corresponding rude extroversion of his performance style, disclaims for the male viewer the solitary ‘queerness’ of the scene of spectatorship. He may appear to be the visible exception to the rule, the adipose anomaly among a series of tight muscular male bodies, his formidable prevalence revealing him to be a virtual manifestation of pornography’s inner censor. Pornography, in effect, dreamed Ron Jeremy, providing through the operations of condensation and displacement what Kaja Silverman describes, in her explication of the secondary processes of repression, as ‘acceptable representations for unacceptable wishes’.16
HUMOUR AND ‘HETEROSEXUALITY’: WHY RON NEVER SAID GOOD-BI
Ron Jeremy is a main character in the mass-marketed porn video Never Say Good-Bi, but his name does not appear on the videocassette case, nor in the film’s credits. It begins, as do many porn films, with a kind of preview of coming attractions: a series of brief clips from the forthcoming sex scenes over which the minimal opening credits are superimposed. An incongruous ‘Duelling Banjos’-esque theme song accompanies a montage of men having sex on a sofa and a woman penetrating a man with a strap-on dildo. Immediately the juxtaposition of soundtrack and image sets up the film’s heavily ironic and self-subverting modus operandi: it establishes a systematic cooperation of the comic and the sexual. The narrative begins with a medium shot of two young men sitting on a couch eating chips, dressed in vaguely athletic garb: one with a towel around his waist, the other in a tank top, shorts and tennis shoes. Their conversation reveals their names to be, respectively, Tony and Neil. Tony is detailing for Neil a recent sexual encounter with his friends TJ and Samantha. ‘How did it all start?’ Neil inquires with interest.
The film then cuts to a close-up of Tony’s face, and as he begins to tell the story the image slowly goes out of focus, signifying the change of scene from the mise-en-scène of the present to the setting of fantasy. Then the film jump-cuts to an outdoor swimming-pool. Tony (still wearing only a towel) and TJ are depicted sitting on the diving-board, debating in numbingly repetitive dialogue whether or not Samantha will ‘show up’. (‘I don’t think she’s going to show up’; ‘How much do you want to bet, man?’; ‘I don’t know, man, I don’t think she’s going to show up’). Finally, late-1980s porn star Samantha Strong materialises: a buxom blonde in a bikini, deeply-tanned and sporting a mane of stiff blonde curls. A brief conversation devolves into an interminable ménage-à-trois which finally concludes with Tony and TJ simultaneously masturbating themselves to orgasm as Samantha impassively watches.
Though Ron Jeremy doesn’t appear in this scene, I discuss it for several reasons: its explicit employment of the woman as a pretext for the erotic encounter between two men, an encounter which systematically writes her out of the scene; the double nature of the money shot which, it could be argued, directly mirrors the masturbatory homosocial union of the extra-diegetic viewers, either literally sharing the viewing space (as do Neil and Tony) or in an unavowed fantasy relation; the way the film edits Samantha Strong’s performance (‘Oh, it’s so hot out here, one could just die’, she intones archly during the small-talk preceding the sex) to highlight her utterances of sarcasm and irony, boredom and impatience. This clever codification of Strong’s performance rhymes with the traditional comic framing of Ron Jeremy, quite economically distracting and unpleasurable, and provides a tantalising view into the crucial importance of the disruptively-reflexive moment to pornography, of the rapidly accumulating instants when the viewer is made aware of that genital event as staged and the actors as ‘faking’. (‘Tony, I asked you if you liked my cock’, Samantha – who is penetrating Tony with a strap-on dildo – later demands in a deadpan tone we can now interpret as subtly sardonic; ‘maybe if you took his dick out of your mouth you could answer me.’) Within this spectacle of three-way sex, the presence of Samantha Strong enables the fiction of derisive non-(homo) arousal, not only functioning as an erotic distraction, but as a frankly comic object.
For the first several minutes of the scenario, Tony and Samantha take turns fellating TJ, who remains conspicuously non-erect; the shots of his flaccid penis are intercut with one recurring shot of TJ crooning, ‘Oh, yeah, nice.’ The persistent repetition of TJ’s face ‘speaking’ pleasure and its juxtaposition with shots of his non-erect penis perform a crucial dialectic: between a language of pleasure and a spectacle of impotence that contradicts the presumption of porn’s valorisation of male sexual potency, an image of displeasure that disavows its corresponding shadow of homoerotic gratification. Additionally, the repetition of this particular shot and the way the scene doubles back on itself in other ways – its compulsive return, for example, to a moment when Samantha hands TJ’s limp penis to Tony and says, ‘Tony, why don’t you suck his cock?’ and then sighs, almost imperceptibly rolling her eyes, effects a temporal slippage which marks the scene as nothing but scene or setting, as pure fantasy: removed from real time, constructed, designed, and not for real. And this isn’t an entirely pleasurable fantasy, either, but a fantasy about a man who won’t get hard, no matter what, who is half in and half out of the scene, only partially participating.
The film also makes what appear to be senseless editing choices that seemingly break the erotic spell. After the long fellatio sequence, the film abruptly cuts to a long shot of Tony bending over the diving-board as Samantha stands behind him wearing a strap-on dildo, lubricating him with baby oil. TJ sits idly at the other end of the diving-board, rubbing what appears to be suntan lotion on his thighs. Tony, eagerly stroking his penis, issues some audible sexual command to Samantha, who replies, ‘Hey, I’m getting a hard-on over here, will you chill out?’ Instantly the three of them dissolves into giggles. Then she inadvertently drops the bottle of baby oil, which prompts more laughter. After picking it up Samantha pushes gently on the small of Tony’s back and says, ‘Get down farther, babe; I gotta get a good angle with my cock.’ At this point the actors start laughing again, even harder this time, looking just beyond the camera, presumably at the also-laughing crew. As Samantha sticks the tip of the dildo between Tony’s buttocks, Tony turns his face toward the camera, screws up his face in exaggerated ecstasy and exclaims, ‘Oh!’ Samantha stops and looks down at him. ‘Did you say ‘ow’?’ Tony turns around and replies calmly, ‘No, I said, ‘Oh.’ And the actors fall to laughing once again, this time for several moments as Samantha jumps around and claps her hands to her knees in delight.
Conceivably, this entire sequence could have been edited out, and the scene could have just started at the moment when Samantha penetrates Tony with the dildo. While we might just write this off as a further sign of the filmmakers’ ineptitude, I still think it constitutes a choice, and therefore something that is meaningful. Additionally, the choice of including a single male/female encounter, the participants of which never engage in ‘bi’ sex later in the film, seems equally important; every other character in the film has at least one sex scene with another character of the same sex.
The entire film seems to set up Ron Jeremy’s character for a sexual ‘fall’: he spectates at a series of male/male encounters, in which the film intercuts shots of the sex with shots of Jeremy standing in the doorway watching, rolling his eyes in disbelief and craning his neck to get a better look. ‘Is everyone gay but me?’ he reflects to himself as he eats pizza in the kitchen. ‘Maybe I’m missing out on something.’ From his first scene, it is clear that Ron Jeremy literally polices the ambi-sexual activity in the film, patrolling the tenuous boundary between straight and queer sex. At the conclusion of the swimming pool three-way fantasy, the film returns to Neil and Tony sitting on the couch; Neil is rubbing his crotch and saying, ‘Man, this is turning me on big time.’ Suddenly, a loud off-screen voice announces jovially, ‘Hey, guys, I’m here!’ Neil quickly removes his hand from between his legs as Ron Jeremy appears in the frame, wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt that reads, incredibly, SECURITY. (In their conversation he tells friends that he works as a security guard at ‘the Bonanza’.) Apparently they all went to junior college together, and are meeting up for a class reunion. The men slap hands and Jeremy helps himself to the bowl of chips on the table before looking at his two friends and remarking, ‘Hey, you guys are sitting awfully close there, aren’t ya?’
At this point Tony asks Jeremy if he’s had any ‘wild fantasies’ lately. Jeremy nods and replies, ‘Yeah – Bobby.’ Neil and Tony look at each other, raising their eyebrows, and eagerly encourage Jeremy to tell them about it. As Jeremy begins to describe the memory, the camera moves in on his reflective face and loses focus, abruptly cutting to a shot of a pair of legs. The camera travels upwards in what is a hilariously straightforward Freudian play-by-play of fetishism, slowly revealing that the legs belong to a woman. The long scene depicts Jeremy and ‘Bobby’ having both oral and vaginal sex in a variety of positions, alternately in ‘real time’ and slow motion, before returning to the college reunion. At the conclusion of his story Jeremy finally says, ‘Man, she was hot’, and Tony and Neil look at each other in surprise and disappointment, finally dispelling the fantasy for them that Jeremy was describing a male/male scenario. This is the only scene in the film in which Jeremy’s character actually has sex, though he appears in nearly every scene. This in and of itself is not exactly remarkable: he is rarely the sole ‘lead’ of his films and generally plays featured ‘character’ parts in some kind of ensemble. Unlike younger ‘straight’ (and more conventionally attractive) stars such as T. T. Boy or Peter North, Jeremy is also rarely shown on the cover of his films’ videocassette cases, though his name almost always appears above the title. It is almost as if he is there, but is not quite there, just as the viewer vascillates inside and out of his spectatorial situation. Bounding on and off the screen with Benny Hill-like fleshly mischievousness, Jeremy is the star behind the scenes, serving a purpose not entirely (or merely) sexual in nature, but palliative and conservative.
By appearing on the scene of his male friends’ fantasy, Jeremy both interrupts and enables the homoereotic encounter. In furnishing his two male friends with a new fantasy, he unwittingly provides himself as the necessary third term to the triangle that completes the porno-specular arrangement, just as TJ and Tony could not fool around until Samantha Strong ‘showed up’. In her intensely Lacanian analysis of the semiotics of pornographic magazine photographs, Berkeley Kaite describes this triangulation of desire as a necessary inference, that ‘men in these images never touch or penetrate each other, except in a signifying chain: i.e. “A” (male) touches “B” (female) who touches “C” (male)’.17 And in so doing, Never Say Good-Bi reveals the seemingly straightforward male/female sex scene to possess a queer dimension, and reveals the graphic display of sexual fantasy to be coded, not natural. As a fantasy diegetically directed to a homosocial audience, the Jeremy/Bobby sequence exists in an implicit relation to the ‘original’ queer scene – especially considering its placement in the identical setting of the swimming pool and its employment of the same synthesiser soundtrack – and by erasing the second male from the erotic figuration, translates the homoerotic spectacle into a hermetic, quintessential pornographic fantasy of heterosex. Additionally, Jeremy’s more general narrative function as the repressive suturing thread among the tableaux of sexual variety, his positioning as the incredulous spectator who remains uncontaminated by the queer sex he watches with such avid interest, allows the ‘straight’ viewer to watch in equal safety, to feel comfortable and ‘at home’, pacified by the snack-like empty calories of Jeremy’s comic intercessions.
Never Say Good-Bi is both an anomolous and typical text in the Ron Jeremy filmography. Considering the vast number of films he has made, I have seen only a relatively small number of his films, and among those and the others of which I am aware there is not another one explicitly ‘bi-sexual’ in nature, except, of course, for the rampant ‘lesbian’ scenes ubiquitous in adult ‘hetero’ cinema. It is structurally impossible to read the female-on-female scenario within the schema of homosociality – not to mention untenable in nearly every other respect – but I would venture to suggest that its semiotics are, in fact, not so different from the ones I have been describing in this essay. The scene of two women having sex in the straight porn film could not have less to do with ‘lesbian’ sexuality, or even female sexuality for that matter; the electric charge of the scenario is in its consolatory sublimation of the homosocial element to an image of homosexual (and, perhaps even more importantly, deliciously prohibited) sex. The man’s elimination from the scene is not threatening, as ‘real’ lesbian sex would be, but in fact rather reassuring: he is watching from a safe distance a scene of same-sex sex in which there is nary a man to be seen. To me this further supports my impression of pornography’s true perverseness: not that it represents sex, but that in pornography sex represents something even more disorderly, chaotic and potentially threatening to the order of things. Ron Jeremy, whether he be portraying a Jerry Falwell-esque televangelist in Deep Throat 2 (Larry Revene, 1987) (who is one minute preaching to the cameras about the sins of pornography and the next minute having sex with two women at once on the very same stage), or randy incarnations of a host of lovable buffoons like Fred Flintstone or Al Kramden or Mario from Super Mario Brothers illustrates pornography’s canny ability to dilate the form of the icon to its furthest limit. In pornography, the sign of sex is nothing but just that, a sign that constantly plays with its own subversion, exploiting its innate realism to produce a realm of remorseless fantasy.18
In her book Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, Laura Kipnis uses the example of the porn genre of fat fetishism to illustrate her thesis that pornography compulsively exposes for political and sexual effect those culturally abject bodies and practices which have been banished from the mainstream. ‘Isn’t fat always sort of pornographic anyway?’ Kipnis inquires, pointing out that a magazine like Dimensions, which features soft-core photographs of overweight women in lingerie, can only be purchased in adult stores, thus suggesting that the visual disclosure of the fat body enacts a form of corporeal truth-telling similar to pornography.19 In Ron Jeremy’s case, the overweight body does not provoke the erotic anxiety of a transgressive pleasure so much as it soothes and normalises a less conspicuous disquiet. The visual investment in Jeremy’s body fills a symbolic gap in the scene of spectatorship – even, in a sense, the space between the viewers on the couch – and assuages in its embodiment of surfeit a tension that mimics hunger, providing a pleasure that can be experienced in the body, but safely: that of laughter, which manages the threat of contact while providing a less dangerous social response. As Lauren Berlant describes it, ‘as a thing that denotes an unquantified substance, fat’s very fixity accrues to itself an unshakable stability of identity’.20 The ‘fat’ body in this case has an anchoring effect in the pornographic arrangement, not so much because Jeremy is an unthreatening, perhaps even especially realistic male subject with whom the viewers can easily identify (and therefore more successfully enter the heterosexual fantasy), but because he embodies the very operation of displacement upon which the entire formula depends.
With every year, Ron Jeremy’s popularity grows along with his steadily thickening cult of personality. The more he infiltrates the mainstream, the more efficiently he functions as an alibi for the male porn viewer, who, in recognising Jeremy in both the public sphere and the private publicity of the scene of porn spectatorship, can avow knowledge of him as culturally legitimate while possessing an ‘other’ knowledge of him in excess of his mainstream representation. He bears the burden of a pornographic representation that can only make sex visible by obfuscation, by bloating the image into a manifest hyperreality that disguises its ‘Real’ with layers of flesh. Pornography exaggerates itself so much as representational – with its obsessive allusionism, highly self-conscious ‘acting’, and confounding insistence on narrative – to conceal the fact that what preoccupies it so much cannot be visually avowed. To gorge oneself on porn’s significatory excesses is to ingest it like junk food, is to internalise the degraded spectacle under the cover of displacing it, just as Ron Jeremy immediately turns from spectating at a male/male sexual encounter in Never Say Good-Bi to stuff himself with pizza. ‘Watching all that sex’, he says thoughtfully, before slapping his hands together and turning towards the refrigerator, ‘makes me feel … hungry.’