Right now I’m reading Consider the Lobster, a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace. (I’ve gotten back onto a Wallace kick recently.) The first essay in the book is “Big Red Son,” an informal disquisition on the (heterosexual) U.S. porn industry that takes as its launching point a description of Wallce’s experience attending the Annual Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. The piece first appeared in Premiere. It’s cynical and hilarious and saddening all at the same time. Though Wallace is a master postmodernish ironist, his meta-ironic point is usually that all this irony is killing our ability to deal with real human emotion. That comes through in this essay.
Two passages stood out for me. One:
Volunteer as a judge for the AVN Awards and spend 1.4 years gazing without rest at the latest in adult video. We guarantee that you will never thereafter want to see, hear, engage in, or even think about human sexuality ever again. Trust us on this. All five marginal (and male) print journalists assigned to cover the 1998 AVN Awards concur: Even just watching the dozen or so “big” or “high-profile” adult releases of the past year… fried everyone’s glandular circuitboard. By the end of the Awards weekend, none of us were even having normal biological first-thing-in-the-morning or jouncy-bus-ride-between-hotels erections; and when approached even innocently by members of the opposite sex, we all now recoiled as from a hot flame (which made our party a kind of strange and challenging breakfast gig, according to our Sunday-AM waitress).
The second passage is too long to quote, but it makes the point that the only moments of real humanity in porn films appear when porn actors’ faces accidentally drop their masks to reveal the person underneath, and that this happens rarely.
The essay didn’t touch on gay porn at all — it seemed largely to be about female porn actresses and their exploitation — and for that reason, I felt disconnected from it. Still, the essay was so long (nearly 50 pages) and so relentless in its focus on the tawdriness and extreme tackiness of everyone involved in porn that a third of the way through the essay I felt a strong desire to wash my brain out. I was happy when it was over.