The Wake

While reading Dan Savage one afternoon, I stumbled upon the website of a certain high-profile porn blogger and was taken in by her rhetoric. She seemed down-to-earth about pornography, admitting that most of it sucks, but holding that it serves a purpose and should not be looked down on. Interested, I took a look at her recommendations section, and though most of what she recommended seemed fairly standard, one film caught my eye: The Fashionistas. She calls it “the best porn film I’ve ever seen, the film that made me sit up and realize that there really were porn filmmakers that could make a real fucking movie.” In her glowing description of it, she mentions its “great acting and . . . very clever storyline.” Well God damn, I was sold. I paid a visit to the film’s website and found out that this is one of the most highly acclaimed and respected films in the porn industry, nominated for record-breaking numbers of awards. But that’s not all: it has been made into a Las Vegas stage show! I’m not kidding. Go to fashionistastheshow.com if you don’t believe me. With the anticipation building, I got my hands on a copy of The Fashionistas to see what all the fuss is about.

I guess this high-profile porn blogger’s idea of “a real fucking movie” is prolonged, extreme domination-based sex scenes and very little plot. Our hero is a fashion designer named Antonio who is contacted by a fashion company called Fashionista to design BDSM-themed clothing to sell in major retail outlets. Predictably, the major retail outlets say no to that. Antonio visits the Fashionista company, meets the dominant boss and a quiet, submissive lady who also works for Fashionists and takes them to an S&M club. Antonio finds out it’s the shy girl who has been doing all the work, THE END. That’s it for plot. Nothing is resolved, nothing even progresses. A woman from the retail outlet gets taken into the back room of the club and engages in BDSM practices. Is this some sort of transformation? Does this mean that she’s one of the kinksters now? I don’t know, as it never returns to her. All I know is that she got the shit fucked out of her.

With so little in terms of plot, how long is this movie? Four hours and ten minutes. That’s because within the first ten minutes, the “writer” has already come up with a way for Antonio to spend 35 minutes fucking some random lady who will never again be seen. The sex scenes are long and frequent and the non-graphic scenes are short, thankfully. Without the sex, the movie would be less than an hour of bad dialogue delivered by actors chosen for their bodies and sexual abilities rather than any acting abilities. They’ve certainly got sexual abilities; I’m not saying that what they’re doing doesn’t require some goddamn talent. It’s just that their skill sets are not directed towards, you know, acting: delivering lines and portraying emotion and such.

Who is surprised by any of this? It’s a fucking porno! I had thought, for a second, that maybe this high-profile porn blogger could be right. I thought that maybe… possibly, there could be a film that is both pornographic and worthwhile, but no. The non-sex scenes are cheesy and ridiculous, the sex scenes are overlong and don’t serve the plot in the slightest, the plot is trite and hastily thrown together just to get the characters’ glistening, engorged genetalia on screen. Just like any other porno, The Fashionistas is not a good movie. I mean, it’s written and directed by a guy whose nickname is “Buttman.” That’s a nice tip-off that even if he did start his career as a dancer and not a pornographer, he’s not the most tasteful dude. To the film’s credit, it is over four hours long with decent production values, and in the opinion of certain high-profile porn bloggers that’s all it takes to make a movie great.

There are enough mind-twisting shades of gray in the consideration of what makes art “art” without pornographers trying to throw their materials into the arena. I’m not gonna claim to understand the dividing line between art and non-art, but seriously, if it’s designed with the express purpose of being masturbated to, it’s not art. Art porn is one of the most pathetic and unsubstantiated concepts I’ve ever come into contact with. It’s cool if you’re into porn, and it’s cool that you’re trying to take a critical perspective on it, but take it for what it is and don’t try to glorify it just to justify your interest.

Illustration by Jeremy Sengly

This is a lesson that can be applied far more widely than just to pornography. Everybody’s got their guilty pleasures, which is fine if they are taken at face value. Don’t put your fetish on a pedestal and pretend that there is some great artistry hidden in it. If you’re a fan of Love Actually, that’s cool, I have no problem with that. However, it’s not a good movie. If you get off on spontaneous marriage proposals, cute coincidences, and Christmas treacle, then that’s all there is to it. In the same way, most grindcore (with notable exceptions like Discordance Axis) is not artistically valid in any way, but I like it because all the frantic riffing and blast beats make my penis rigidly erect. You can pretend that’s a metaphor if it makes you feel better.

Not everything you like is brilliant, not everything I like is brilliant, regardless of how invested we are in those things. So please, just enjoy your shit without acting like it’s the be- and end-all of the history of art and we’ll all have a better time.

And though it’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, The Fashionistas is worth seeing if you wanna watch a woman shove a guy’s foot into her mouth while he’s fucking her from behind. Just throwin’ that out there.