This blog post is from an early paper considering Wash West’s double screening of critically acclaimed porn films at the LLGFF 2004, as part of a Queer Gothic strand. This overview considers how each of the films, their aesthetics and themes fit into a wider picture of the gay porn industry (as genre pastiches in an industry obsessed with the self-reflexive, with parody, and with making cross-cinematic references) and how these films can be seen as integral, but often overlooked, texts in the emergence of a New Queer Horror aesthetic.
A Porno Picture of Dorian Gray (USA 2001)
West’s version of Dorian was originally financed by All Worlds Video – the director was hired to make a feature length standard porn film to fit into a series of productions under the umbrella title of ‘Seven Deadly Sins’. West’s film was to fit into the sub-heading of ‘GLUTTONY’, the idea being that gluttony being referenced here is loosely grounded in sexual obsession and compulsion.
The original title ran at approximately 90 mins, but was extensively cut by West for the festival circuit (removing most of the hardcore scenes and largely leaving the narrative intact) to around 28 minutes. The film is typical of self-reflexive porn parody, in that it operates to retell or remake an existing text (e.g. piece of literature, theatre or successful film title/TV series)[1]. It is self-reflexive as it also refers to the gay porn industry in its own self aware narrative. The plot follows an fictional porn star, Dorian (played by then legendary porn-superstar Eric Hanson) who has an obsessed fan, a young film student (Tanner Hayes), whose obsession with the eponymous Dorian begins when he finds a photograph of Dorian hidden underneath his father’s mattress (continuing on the well-worn trope of Gaysploitation horror that I speak about at length in Queer Horror as often deriving from the father figure). The film not only borrows its title and concept from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (2001) in that Dorian is shown to have starred in a long running history of gay porn films due to the fact that he is immortal, but the film also operates as a parody of the chronological and aesthetic history of gay pornography itself.
Tanner Hayes, and arguably the director – West, in their search for the elusive narcissist dig up movies form his videography (all fake porn titles), when then form the classic gay porn structure alternating between exposition and action scene. Each scene is shown in its own inimitable and clichéd style, the classical poses and whimsy of the early 60s, the grainy unpolished naturalism of the 70s and the queer avant garde of the later 80s/early 90s – all of which take the form of a tribute to phallocentrism. Eventually the plot culminates in the film student’s realisation of his fantasy – to have sex with Dorian- which is also presented to the audience as a filmed video piece. The narrative is forwarded by the film student speaking in direct address to camera as a personally inspired piece of investigative journalism.[2]
The ‘porno picture’ in question here is the narcissistic Dorian’s legendary first exploration into gay porn – here seen as a stylised 50s AAG (American Athletic Guild) style muscle-pose photo shoot as shot on 16mm film. In the short he is encouraged to masturbate for the director, thus capturing the vital essence of masculinity on celluloid. Dorian then grows older only in the 16mm print and not in the film’s ‘reality’; when confronted with this via the film student, he returns to his rightful age. However this doesn't quench their desire to be together and seems to grant the young man with a father figure/gay daddy figure that the 50s piece of vintage film provides.
West’s film is an extreme and hysterically parodic extension of the self-reflexive gay porn film, his own obsession with the porn industry and the adult video world is further continued in his cross-over indie film The Fluffer (2002). In Dorian however the self-reflexivity cuts across narrative, form and aesthetics, in its focus on films about porn films, the industry itself and its marketing strategies, the appropriation of Gothic literature and in its attempt at cinematic/videographic pastiche.
The Hole (West, 2003)
The Hole widens the concept of genre parody from porn to the horror film. In doing so West reveals certain similarities between the two genres, something which Carol Clover points out: ‘the ‘art’ of the horror film, like the ‘art’ of pornography is, to a very large extent, the art of rendition or performance, and it is understood as such by the competent audience’7. Both tend towards the notion of the formulaic, the sequelised, the repetitive, and both horror and porn tend towards the repetition of a specific narrative structure (narrative exposition followed by death scene/narrative exposition followed by sex scene), a tendency for serialization/sequelisation and a compulsion to both repeat and enact parody. More comedy porn than horror porn, The Hole is a parody of The Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002), itself the US remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1999). Its narrative is now well-worn in the horror genre and tells the tale of an urban legend about a videotape filled with arty, nightmarish imagery which, once seen, is immediately followed by a phone call predicting the viewer’s death. The Hole, by contrast, follows a group of jocks that see a videotape of obscure black and white images which is following in this case by a phone call warning that the viewer will ‘turn gay’ in exactly seven days. A local reporter Benny Benson (Tag Eriksson) investigates mysterious reports of these sexual transformations and interviews the affected jocks – at one point the curious journalist even watched the tape himself. The rest of the film’s investigation is peppered with sexual shenanigans that are largely de rigeur for a standard gay porn film. Benny’s straightness is tested in one scene in which he masturbates with his girlfriend (TJ Hart) while in point of view framing Benny fantasises about men. The Hole’s running joke feature the ‘coded straight’ jocks becoming more and more comfortable with their burgeoning queerness coded in stereotypical ways which allow the director to satirise clichéd views of male homosexuality. In one scene, when offered which video he’d like to watch, Benny’s hand hovers between A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954) and fictional straight porn title Cheerleader Challenge.
West seems to have fun questioning fixed conventions of both straight and gay masculinity – having the supposedly uber masculine (and therefore coded straight) jocks remain ‘straight acting’ even after they ‘turn gay’ (though arguably this is the par for the course in typical US gay porn culture). West seems to be poking fun at both gendered stereotypes and the concept of a queer continuum of desire with lines like ‘women are so smooth and soft… but men, men are so hard and hot...’ Indeed some of the film’s ‘jocks’ come across as bisexual or omnisexual rather than portraying a more fixed and essentialist gay masculinity. There is an added irony here on an extra-cinematic level in that all but two of the film’s performers are self identified as heterosexual (admittedly self-proclamation and the marketing ploy of ‘selling straightness’to gay consumers, become blurred here). Tag Eriksson (real name Fredrick Eklund – now an ‘out’ TV real estate celebrity) self-identifies as a gay man and the director Wash West also outed Jason Adonis (one of the film’s stars and a then gay porn ‘superstar’) as bisexual – though one can wonder whether this was due perhaps to the influence of the film’s cursed ‘tape’ as another marketing strategy.
West also appears to be satirizing the obsessive nature of gay spectators/fans wanting to discover the ‘true’ sexual identity of their erotic objects (whether they be porn stars or celebrities), by having his main protagonist in The Hole (and he continues this theme in his films including the hardcore Dorian Gray, Naked Highway (1997), and the independent drama The Fluffer (2002) embark on a quest to discover the ‘truth behind’ a mystery of sorts or to uncover some kind of elaborate sexual secret. West appears at times to be using the conventions of the porn industry to make a jibe at it, yet appears also to be bound up by it himself. This is made apparent by his own obsession with the genre and its stars as a ‘fanboy’ himself. To my mind, West’s approach is one born out of affectional observation rather than criticism, given the meta-textual nature of his films, this ironic and self-aware treatment goes hand in hand with the trend toward a Butlerian ‘performativity’[3] in queer culture as a means of questioning the essentialism of gender and the fixedness of sexulity. West’s films are well known for their self-awareness and as such have been awarded critical acclaim within the industry (Naked Highway, Porno Picture of Dorian Gray and The Hole have all won GAY VN awards for direction, writing and acting). Richard Dyer points out the appeal of pastiche, parody and camp as a intrinstic element of gay pornography:
Modes like camp, irony, derision, theatricality and flamboyance hold together with an awareness of something’s style with a readiness to be moved by it [… these modes] are no less emotionally compelling for our reveling in the facticity […] we see their deliberation but still need their power to move and excite; it’s thus so easy for us to see porn as both put on and turn on’[4]
There is a particular scholarly appeal to West’s films and they have cultural value outside of their erotic potential. This is precisely the reason why they were both featured as part of the Queer Gothic strand of the LLGFF in 2004 and have continued to enjoy success as ‘soft-core’ edits of their hardcore originals. Yet one feels that if the films had nod possessed such self-reflexivity they would not have worked as well on screen and have a comedic/satirical appeal than more ‘vanilla’ porn may not have had. Dyer continues that, ‘intellectuals tend to be drawn to the meta-discursive in art, since what they do is a meta activity’[5].
However the erotic power of the image does not completely diminish. The narrative filler and knowing performances and the spectators’ intellectualizing can be recognised and accepted but not to the complete detriment to the erotic power of the visual image. This may be perhaps because – despite their generic pretensions – the films are still essentially porn films which still have a basic carnal appeal. Dyer comments further on the basic elements: ‘porn is a record of people actually having sex; it is only ever the narrative circumstances of porn, the apparent pretext for the sex, that is fictional.’[6]
As far as its use of horror tropes are concerned, The Hole is presented to us as a horror parody for gay male audiences who may be fans of the original horror title, but also as a piece of erotica that trades in the sale of the imagined ‘straight’ or ‘straight-coded’ male body. Yet within the film intra-textually – the film within the film is presented as a film that might make the ‘straight viewer’ gay. West manages to draw attention to the inhibitive discourses around gay sexuality. He highlights the concept of gay sex and indeed all sexuality as fluid, and therefore ‘performed’. This concurs with Dyer’s conclusion that:
Dominant culture does little to naturalise our sexuality, haking it harder to see gay sex as a product of pure need. We are less likely to think of gay sex in terms of biology than of the aesthetic.[7]
One could argue that West’s parodic porn (and other self-reflexive porn) simply augments the aesthetic, his films may have a postmodern and intellectual pretensions however it is the erotic sex act that forms the basis of his movies – they sell as porn film and therefore must deliver on that front. Within the narrative of a text like The Hole one could draw parallels between the intellectual and erotic choices offered to the film’s spectators and the sexual ‘choice’ offered to West’s stars. The cursed film-within-a-film is depicted with clearly artistic aspirations (a grainy black and white aesthetic) formally represents the lure of the queer erotic within the film. The majority of the film’s heterosexually coded men all seem to prefer queerness when offered the possibility of breaking the chain/curse that the video represents. Similarly the spectator of West’s meta-porn, initially there presumably to be satisfied by explicit erotic spectacle that they have paid to see, and instead may well find their intellect aroused alongside/in place of the lure of queer sex.
[1] See for example, Gay of Thrones and Captain America (A Gay XXX Parody) as produced by Men.com, http://www.men.com
[2] The rhetoric of the obsessive personal/journalistic investigation is a trope of West’s given his appropriation of the format in another of his films The Fluffer (2002)
[3] Dyer, Richard. ‘Idol Thoughts: Orgasm and Self-Reflexivity in Gay Pornography’ in Critical Quarterly (Vol. 36, No. 1), p. 53
[4] Dyer, p. 60
[5] Dyer, p. 61.
[6] It could be said that extra-textually there are many performed realities and fictional pretexts that occur between performers off camers, to initiate the performed sex act, which calls into question the ‘truth’ of the sex captured on film. Arguably the sex featured on film is so structured, directed and can be seen as fictional (in relation to stunt cum shots, ‘performed’ sexual chemistry between actors, the use of editing to pare down time and add erotic charge).
[7] Dyer, p. 61.
September 18, 2019