Melbourne, Australia — Despite unseasonably cold weather and a steady rain, an overflow crowd turned out for last night’s world premiere of Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together at the 2006 Melbourne Underground Film Festival, (MUFF).

It was the sort of night when most Melbourners choose to stay home and watch the tube, but that didn’t stop an overflow crowd from showing up for the unveiling of Tony Comstock’s latest erotic effort, Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together . Late arrivals struggled to pack themselves into the Glitch lounge as the crowd waited expectantly for doors to the theater to open. Once they did, it quickly became clear that folding chairs in the aisle weren’t going to provide enough seats. As the first screening started, hasty arrangements were made for another screening which started in a second theater 15 minutes later.

“Showing sexually explicit films publicly is strictly forbidden in Australia,” noted director Tony Comstock, “so it’s incredibly flattering that MUFF and Glitch would take a chance on showing this film. As much as it is a celebration of sex and love, the public exhibition of Damon and Hunter is an act of defiance, a challenge to the status quo, a pointed question – why is the depiction of joyous, passionate, carnal love treated like a crime?”

In a world where it seems the only way “serious films” address sex is by having one or more of the lovers die or get cholera or consumption, “Doing it Together” dares to show sex as pure joy, where the only consequences are good. In the whole range of emotions a director might hope to incite in his audience, arousal remains the last taboo – a taboo Tony Comstock’s films gleefully break.

“It’s my sincerest hope that last night, in that darkened theater in Melbourne, people were getting turned on by Damon and Hunter. I hope jeans were getting stretched tight by hard cocks; I hope panties were being dampened by wet pussies. I hope people had smiles on their faces as they thought about how wonderful it feels to love and be loved.”

The much ballyhooed “Free Lube!” promotion threatened to become an embarrassment when it was realized that supplies of Eros Bodyglide 30ml bottles were insufficient to provide for the overflow crowd. In the end one-per-person became one-per-couple, and a minor crisis was averted.

“I’ve always thought my films would make a great appetizer for a couple before they made a main course out of each other, ” said Comstock. “I’m glad that so many people came to see this film with someone they love!”

“Western man, especially the Western critic, still finds it very hard to go into print and say: ‘I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection.” — Kenneth Tynan

Yesterday’s post about DESTRICTED drew a post from Ms. Naughty which I’ve excerpted:

“I would say [DESTRICTED's] definition is fair enough…“If society was OK with porn’s place as a masturbatory tool, we wouldn’t have to talk about art being “disguised” as porn or vice versa.

Certainly attitudes toward sexuality and masturbation have their effect, but in the case of film it’s worth looking at this from a producer’s point of view.

When it comes to dollars and cents, the label “porn” is extremely marginalizing. Witness John Cameron Mitchell’s recent comments RE: SHORTBUS. “No one got a hard-on watching this film” says Mitchell. That’s a way of reinforcing the position that SHORTBUS isn’t porn. And with a budget of $2.5M — more than any porn film ever made — Mitchell and his backers can’t afford to have SHORTBUS shoved off into the porn ghetto, where returns are measured in thousands, not millions.

What I have noticed recently in reading reviews of films like THE DREAMERS, 9 SONGS, etc. is how venomously critics use the word “porn” - derision indeed. Whatever these movies’ failings, they look and feel nothing like any of the porn I’ve ever seen, and it makes me wonder just what sort of porn these critics have been watching that they feel a comparison is appropriate.

In fact it’s not, and in much the same way that “faggot” is used to dismiss a person’s sexuality as inappropriate and as the ultimate and overriding aspect of their humanity, these critics use the word “porn” to dismiss explicit sexuality as inappropriate subject matter and label the director’s interest in making such films questionable, and likely the product of a quirk or defect in the director’s psycho-sexuality.

In that respect, I would say that DESTRICTED’s and similar definitions of porn and erotica are anything but fair. At best it’s a useless construct that doesn’t really tell us anything about the work labeled “porn” or the work labeled “erotica”, save the economic ambitions of the person doing the labeling. (For some reason the phrase “straight looking/straight acting” pops to mind.)

More often such definitions are divisive, poisonous even; perpetuating a sort of Krafft-Ebing continuum for sexually explicit art, only instead of having poorly framed discussions about where the line between healthy and unhealthy sexuality lies, we have no less illuminating debates about where the line lies between porn and art. While this might lead to a lovely academic wank fest, it’s the wrong question, or at least a question I find utterly banal.

Let me lay my cards on the table about hanging the label “porn” on our work:

On one hand I have no qualms with being labeled “porn” because it lets people know in no uncertain terms that these films are absolutely frank in the way they depict sex and absolutely intended to arouse. If Mitchell proudly states that “all of the orgasms and all of the semen is real” but “no one got a hard-on watching SHORTBUS”, I am no less proud of the fact that my films also have real orgasms and real semen. Additionally, I am proud that my films have inspired countless happy erections, orgasms, and ejaculations. I’m please and happy that my films make people feel good about themselves and make them feel good about sex.

But along with the proclamation of sexual frankness, the word porn comes with a wagon-load of baggage and restrictions that I hope won’t be applied to my work. Like any artist, I want to have my work widely seen and widely respected. And like any business, we need to make money off the the work we do. The label porn is an obstacle to wider distribution of our films.

And just as I’m sure that directors who contributed to DESTRICTED don’t want to be lumped in with MEATHOLES, THROAT GAGGERS or CUM DUMPSTERS, I don’t want to be lumped in there, either. These are extreme examples, but by and large porn is cynical and poorly crafted; an insult to both sex and cinema. I am nothing if not sympathetic to filmmakers who do not want their work labeled as porn.

But what’s so very wrong about the the Porn vs. Art/Erotica vs. Porn question is that it supposes that whether or not SHORTBUS has crossed the line from art to porn (or whether our own DAMON AND HUNTER has crossed the line from porn to art.) is a relevant question.

It’s not; at least not if we’re evaluating the work without concern for its commercial potential.

Like Krafft-Ebing’s PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS, this porn/art nonsense supposes a continuum where there is none. It separates sex from the rest of life, porn from art, and then tries to draw a line, or at least define a grey area. (Lest we go too far!)

This, of course, is sillly.

Sex is not apart from the rest of our lives, and in this context “porn” is merely an inflammatory, and largely meanless descriptor. (So is “erotica” for that matter.)

Either SHORTBUS is or is not a worthwhile viewing experience; either you are comfortable or take issue with the methods JCM used to achieve his vision. Either you enjoy watching DAMON AND HUNTER and are comfortable with the way it was produced or you’re not. Whether or not you got wet or hard only matters in as much as it helped or harmed your enjoyment of the film.

The rest is marketing spin or sophistry, or both.

Since making my last post about Psychopathia Sexualis, I have had the very good fortune of chatting with Bret Wood, the film’s director and he was kind enough to send me an advance copy on DVD-R, which Peggy and I watched last night. Getting an advance copy feels extra-special, because unlike porn, which goes straight to DVD, Psychopathia Sexualis is going to have a nice little art-house run before the DVD becomes available. Watching a preview copy makes me feel like a trendy insider!

Since a few of the things I have to say about the film are provisional, let me start with this; the film is boldly experimental in its subject matter, its storytelling style and its filmcraft. The film provided an entertaining evening, followed by a full morning’s lively discussion with my wife. It’s an entertaining (strange word for something creepy and unsettling) movie, and it’s provocative art.

So then what is this Psychopathia Sexualis? Let’s start with the basic facts:

The film is drawn from the 19th century book of the same name, written by the German physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Krafft-Ebbing’s book is a collection of 238 case-studies of sexual perversion, classified variously as antipathic sexuality, homosexuality, lust murder, fetishism, unconscious sadism, lesbianism in transition to viraginty, symbolic masochism, and other “catagories” of psycho-sexual illness.

In a series of sometimes intercut vignettes, Wood presents a handful of these case studies in full period regalia. There is red velvet and red satin. There are muttonchops and tuxedos and horse-drawn carts. There’s a hell-hole asylum with patients in sack-cloth gowns. There are housemaids in black uniforms with white ruffled aprons. There are taxonometric diagrams and calipers. With nearly 100 players and at least a couple dozen locations, the scope and ambition of the film is impressive!

The photography and production styles are also period, recalling films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Shadows are long, in each scene the pallete washed hard by one muted color or another, complimenting the stylized creepiness and sickly tone of the proceedings.

Not all of it works. The actors speak in contemporary American accents, which while pointing out the silliness of the conceit of having actors inflect their lines with the native tongue of their characters, also points out that it’s a conceit that works well.

Like most truly independent productions Psychopathia is shot on video, and mostly looks quite excellent, but when it doesn’t, the video look clashes with the period tone worse than it might with a story set in comtemporary times. Some of the acting is off-pitch.

But there’s plenty that works well enough, and quite a bit works brilliantly. If you’ll forgive the film its few stumbles, you’ll be rewarded with lush depictions of kink, combined with an empassioned take on the meaning of “sexual normality”.

Starting with a truly horrific tale of “lust murder”, the “pathologies” of the vignettes become less and less foreign, ending with a middle-aged spinster who has lived her entire adult life in the absense of sexual pleasure because she craves the touch of other women.

In Kraft-Ebbing’s time it seemed perfectly natural for an educated person to place homosexuality in a collection of psycho-sexual perversions along with rape and sexualized torture and murder, and it’s easy to see Psychopathia as an indictment of the good doctor, his times, and his methods. But if you stop there, I think you miss the real power of this film. This film is not just about kink and quackery.

At its core, Psychopathia Sexualis challenges the pervasive assumption that sexual desire and sexual acts lie on some sort of continuum; with procreative sex between married partners on one end, and lust-murder at the other — and the fear that is wound into the very fabric of our culture that sex for pleasure’s sake is the first tiny step to erotic cannibalism or other terrors, that sexual pleasure is inherently transgressive, and that the pursuit of that pleasure is fundamentally corrupting and anti-social.

This erotophobic continuum is easily seen in the fundamentalist strains of our culture, but having seen Psychopathia Sexualis I now see this erotophobia in myself, and how it pervades even the most sex-positive segments of our culture. We are all so steeped in this erotophobia, this fear that in being corruptable, we are inherrently corrupt, that we are compelled to excuse and justify our interest in sex for pleasure’s sake, and that in each of us there’s a least a little fear that in pursuing our desire for sexual pleasure, we take a small, but inexorable step towards becoming Hannibal Lecter.

Psychopathia Sexualis explores, challenges, and then ultimately explodes this continuum. Yes, there are terrible monsters, and perhaps some part of that dwells inside each of us. But sexual pleasure is not a gateway to evil, it is not a dance with the dark side of our nature; and marriage or procreation do not (and thankfully need not) provide some sort of magical protection to us when we enjoy our own bodies and our lovers’ bodies. How strange and beautiful that this is the ultimate theme of such a dark, gothic film!

Psychopathia Sexualis begins a one week run at New York’s Pioneer Theater on June 8th; a part of the theater’s Mindfuck: Sex, Art, and Psychology series. There used to be dozens of theaters like The Pioneer in New York City, now there are just a handful, making the chance to see films like this on the big screen rare. And if you miss seeing it on the big screen, you’ll have to wait till early 2007 for the DVD, so don’t miss it!

Bret Wood’s Blog

Psychopathia Sexualis Website

Pioneer Theater Website

Other Upcoming Showings:

CHICAGO
Gene Siskel Film Center, Opens June 9, 2006

SEATTLE
Grand Illusion Cinema, Opens June 9, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO
Roxie Cinema, Opens June 16, 2006

PORTLAND, OR
Clinton Street Theater, Opens June 16, 2006

ATLANTA
Atlanta Film Festival Atlanta, Opens June 16, 2006

The dark side of sex isn’t really my thing, and I continue to be frustrated that when “the mainstream” takes on sexual themes there seems to be no issue in revelling in violence and sickness, but a hard cock stretching open a wet pussy is strictly forbidden.

Never the less, this period piece from Bret Wood is pretty eye catching.

http://www.kino.com/psychopathia/