There’s a scene near the beginning of Boogie Nights (1997), Paul Thomas Anderson’s nostalgic portrait of the 1970s LA porn industry, in which director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) sits in a diner across from wannabe star Eddie (Mark Wahlberg) and outlines his vision for a new kind of dirty movie:
It’s my idea to make a film that the story just sucks them in… [so] they can’t move until they find out how the story ends… It’s my dream to make a film that is true and right and dramatic.
Can a pornographic film be true and right and dramatic? While attitudes around depictions of sex on screen have moved on a lot over the years, there is still a stark division for most viewers between “real films” and pornography. Yet, the pornographic and mainstream film industries evolved in tandem and there has always been crossover between the two. Hollywood and hardcore film are closely interrelated twin industries that share many of the same challenges and have inevitably historically influenced and shaped one another.
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In Boogie Nights, which turns 25 this year, Anderson seizes upon this interconnected history, presenting an unusually three-dimensional take that has as much to say about Hollywood as it does about porn. The film centres on Eddie, a young busboy with a modest talent but “something wonderful” in his jeans, who is spotted by Jack and invited to join his family, a disparate group of crew and performers including glamorous mother figure Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and ingenue Roller Girl (Heather Graham). Together they make a series of increasingly epic films and Eddie, refashioned as Dirk Diggler, becomes a breakout star until spiralling egos, addiction and technological shifts threaten to derail the dream.
Boogie Nights’ sprawling narrative spans the evolution of adult film from the “porno chic” of the late-1970s to the VHS boom of mid-1980s. The film opens in 1977, at the peak of the “Golden Age of Porn”, a phase during which hardcore film briefly broke into the mainstream. A pivotal moment was the release of Deep Throat in 1972, the first feature-length porn film to break through into mainstream discourse. Helped along by a censorship scandal, Deep Throat became a box office hit, catching the attention of the mainstream media and making a celebrity of its star Linda Lovelace. The success of Deep Throat announced the arrival of what New York Times journalist Ralph Blumenthal dubbed “porno chic,” a period in which watching pornographic films at the cinema became for a while not just acceptable but cool. This new social acceptability meant larger audiences and bigger profits and as a result filmmakers began to develop more artistically ambitious projects further blurring the boundaries between mainstream cinema and porn.
In Boogie Nights, Anderson channels the spirit of porno chic through the character of Jack and his dream of making films that are “true, right and dramatic”. Boogie Nights is full of clips of Jack and Dirk’s collaborations, affectionately made film-within-a-film parodies that serve to highlight the ways in which porn drew inspiration from Hollywood. The artistic highpoint of these are the “Brock Landers” films, a series of elaborate James Bond parodies in which Dirk plays a secret agent who seduces his way out of every scrape. “It’s a real film Jack,” declares the cameraman in wonder after one particularly intense take. “This is the film I want them to remember me by,” Jack solemnly replies.
In a meta-twist, Boogie Nights itself could be read as a Hollywood parody. Dirk Diggler’s rise and fall is a classic “star is born” narrative that borrows all the tropes of that genre – the Svengali figure; the young star corrupted by fame; the bittersweet ending. As you’d expect from as cinephilic a director as Anderson, the film is also littered with references, particularly to Martin Scorsese. A sequence in which Dirk sits before a dressing room mirror and gives himself a pep talk riffs on Raging Bull, while another in which Dirk plans a cocaine-fuelled heist is pure Goodfellas. By drawing explicitly from other films and genre tropes but recasting those beats within the heightened world of porn, Anderson’s approach is not so far away from Jack’s – both are filmmakers stealing liberally from Hollywood in an attempt to make something new.
‘Salacious thrills’
Jack’s parodies demonstrate how pornography has often ripped off Hollywood, but this relationship has not historically been one way. As Karina Longworth highlights in her podcast series Erotic Eighties, the mainstreaming of porn in the 1970s also fed directly into Hollywood. A wave of erotic thrillers released across the 1980s and 1990s – films such as American Gigolo (1980), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and 9½ Weeks (1986) – drew directly on the aesthetics of pornography, offering up naked movie stars as sex symbols. Aside from these erotic thrillers, another way in which porn has clearly influenced Hollywood lies in the small but significant subgenre of films set in the industry. Like Boogie Nights, the best of these films have as much to say about the power dynamics and ethical challenges of working in Hollywood as they do about pornography.
Unlike other films of the 1980s erotic thriller boom, Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) is explicit about the crossover between Hollywood and porn. This campy and heightened B-movie homage centres on Jake (Craig Wasson) a struggling actor who becomes obsessed with performer/body double Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) and is sucked into LA’s seedy underworld. Intentionally lurid and violent, Body Double split critics on it release. While some responded positively – Roger Ebert called it “an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking” – others criticised the film as sensationalist schlock and “creepy crud”. Body Double was particularly strongly critiqued by feminist commentators who drew a link between De Palma’s depiction of violence and real-life violence against women, an accusation that has followed the director across his career, much to his annoyance. “I got slaughtered by the press right at the height of the women’s liberation movement,” remembered De Palma in a 2016 interview. “I thought it was completely unjustified. It was a suspense thriller, and I was always interested in finding new ways to kill people.”
Body Double has enjoyed something of a renaissance lately, with a new generation of critics restyling the film as a misunderstood gem. As time has passed De Palma himself has evolved from enfant terrible to filmmaker’s filmmaker, becoming the subject of an admiring documentary helmed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, and increasingly celebrated for his influence. Certainly, one can sense Body Double’s bloody fingerprints all over Ti West’s X (2022), a kitsch slasher flick about a porn crew who are stalked by a frenzied killer, which draws heavily on 70s exploitation films but has more than a dash of De Palma’s camp sensibility, dark humour and stylised violence.
Although not to everyone’s taste, Body Double’s self-conscious excess serves a purpose, indulging in Hollywood excess while simultaneously critiquing it. Like Anderson, De Palma constantly references other filmmakers, particularly Alfred Hitchcock – the film’s plot riffs directly on Vertigo and Rear Window – and these references have gained new potency over the years. Watching Body Double today brings to mind Hitchcock’s abusive treatment of actor Tippi Hedren (Griffith’s mother) and this connection adds another layer to the film’s commentary on Hollywood’s abusive dynamics. With its nudity and violence Body Double has its cake and eats it, but it nevertheless asks provocative questions. If Hollywood can serve up the same salacious thrills – and exploitative dynamics – as porn, where does the division between the two industries lie?
‘Porn wars’
Alongside other explicit Hollywood films of the era, Body Double was caught up in a furious debate around depictions of sex on screen which became known as the “porn wars”. One of the key arguments of the porn wars was that pornography inevitably exploits female performers. In 1986, Linda Lovelace herself became an ally of anti-porn campaigners when she testified before Congress that she had been violently coerced into appearing in Deep Throat, stating shockingly that “virtually every time someone watches that movie, they’re watching me being raped”. Lovelace’s testimony called into question the idea of sexually liberated femininity that underpinned “porno chic” and exposed the potentially troublesome dynamics of the industry.
This story was itself dramatised in 2013’s Lovelace, a biopic starring Amanda Seyfried in the title role and co-directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. That biopic is solid if unremarkable, but what is interesting is the way the film presents Lovelace’s life story as a contested narrative, first offering the image of Lovelace as a liberated star before correcting this account by showing Lovelace’s own point of view. In this sense, the film anticipates later post #MeToo work – think Promising Young Woman (2020) and The Assistant (2019) – which use unreliable narrators and withheld information to capture the difficulties faced by women who attempt to report abuse.
Lovelace’s experience also demonstrates that the roots of #MeToo, a movement popularised by Hollywood that would later expand into other industries including porn, run deep. In Boogie Nights, Anderson mostly shies away from questions about exploitation, presenting his female characters as enjoying their work. However, a key turning point in the film is the arrival of VHS, a technological advancement that transformed the industry in the 1980s. Just as the internet would decades later, VHS turned the industry upside down, making it possible to shoot films quickly and cheaply which could then be watched by customers in their own homes instead of in cinemas. Notably, the only time in which we see a female performer become a victim of abuse is after this shift, in a sequence in which Roller Girl has sex with a stranger for a television show. Anderson contrasts the gentler, affectionately made analogue porn of the Golden Age with the exploitative “shock factor” porn of the 1980s, and in doing so suggests that it is this shift in industry dynamics, rather than the nature of the films themselves, that leads to exploitation.
Boogie Nights’ depiction of the impact of VHS clearly echoes the way in which in the industry has been transformed once again in the past two decades by the availability of online porn. This technological shift plays a central role in more recent films set in the world of porn and sex work, such as Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (2021), about a washed-up porn star who returns to his hometown when his career hits the rocks, or Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam (2018), an effective horror centred on a camgirl. In these films, online porn serves to shape both plot and aesthetics, feeding into hyperreal visuals that blur the lines between fantasy and reality, reflecting the way that the hyper-accessibility of explicit material online has led to the “pornification” of imagery in mainstream popular culture, fashion and advertising.
The same is true for Ninja Thyberg’s 2021 film Pleasure, which follows a young Swedish woman as she navigates the LA porn scene, offers a nuanced reflection on the internet’s impact on the industry through a post-#MeToo lens. Like Boogie Nights, Pleasure centres on a newbie attempting to make their name, but Anna (Sofia Kappel) is a less passive character than Eddie. Over the course of the film we see how Anna makes her name, using social media to build a following, exploiting her friendships and mimicking the violence of her male peers in order to establish her dominance.
Yet at the same time as acknowledging the potential for exploitation, Pleasure also offers alternative perspectives, showing us areas of the industry in which performers are treated with kindness and consideration. Thyberg originally approach the film with a strong anti-porn perspective, but after immersing herself in the world of LA porn and meeting a range of performers and filmmakers, her view evolved into something more ambivalent. In Boogie Nights, Anderson cast porn actors in small cameos, but Thyberg takes this approach much further, casting performers in many roles across the film and working collaboratively with those in the industry to shape the film.
This approach has in itself proved controversial, with some of the performers and professionals involved in the production expressing reservations about their portrayals and Thyberg attracting criticism for not working with an intimacy coordinator. Nevertheless, this grey area is in itself consistent with a film that deliberately generates a sense of unease in its audience, leaving the question of whether Anna is empowered or exploited by her work unanswered.
Ultimately, the best films about pornography, the likes of Boogie Nights and Pleasure, reveal something audiences should already be aware of. Filmmaking, whether pornographic or mainstream, is an industrialised art form and as such is plagued by the same power imbalances as any industry in a capitalist society. Beneath the gloss, the glamour, the sleaze and the sex, these films remind us that the people who work in these industries are human, as complex and contradictory as any of us, regardless of the work that they do. By humanising porn performers and crew, these films put forward a compassionate case for taking this industry, and the rights of its workers, as seriously as we take any other. What could be truer, righter or more dramatic than that?
