Earlier this week, I was driving home from work and heard a bit on NPR about a church burning porn (Florida Church Burns X-Rated Film Reels). The organization in question had purchased an old drive-in, and they were in the process of turning the site into a worship center.
During their renovations, they uncovered a stash of film reels.
Porn reels. Or so they say. I imagine (with some delight) the good pastor, maybe his wife and a few "investors" in attendance, loading up a stray reel and discovering something rather lewd. What were their reactions, I wonder?
Well, their actions were simple: They opted to take the reels and burn them in a ritual consecration of the site. Like Forrest Gump, they were making lemonade out of lemons. Well, it was more like a ceremonial biohazard concert of cheering do-gooders.
I wasn't the only listener bothered by this story. I do think, however, that I was one of the likely few to think about film preservation first.
Yes, let's burn our history, I thought. That's a really good idea.
Okay, so porn as history is a minority position. Certainly Behind the Green Door is not The Godfather. Or a Buster Keaton yarn. But certainly anything put to celluloid—in an era when it was either revolutionary or bold to do so—deserves saving. Think of Birth of A Nation. Certainly, it is hard to (and I certainly wouldn't) defend this piece of arcane racism, but had the church found a pristine copy of it, would they have set it ablaze, or would they have handed it over to film authorities instead?
And so here I am, defending classic porn.
Craig Schaefer introduces his treatise on exploitation cinema, "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!", with a quote from Harry Martin: "So sinister, so subversive is this type of motion picture that organized producers of Hollywood have long since outlawed its manufacture entirely." Martin, Schaefer goes on to explain, was referring to a film his family was subjected to at a drive-in. This "slice of cinematic slime"? Smashing the Vice Trust, a film far removed from the category we have come to know as porn. The year? 1937.
And this is the point that has always confounded me: Each age thinks it faces horrors unbeknownst to the primitive world. Well, guess what. That's bullshit. Among the first photographs ever taken—in the age of daguerreotypes—were nude studies. In the brothels of the late nineteenth century, patrons would find books filled with suggestive photographs, catalogs of services provided.
Sex, despite our vanity, is nothing new.
Nor is the selling, photographing, or filming of it.
So here I find myself defending those poor, lewd reels. Here I find myself wondering what goodies were lost to the brash actions of the self-righteous. "Obviously," pastor Eldredge remarked to Melissa Block, "we knew the right thing to do would be to destroy it, and not let it ever be out on the market, so to speak." The good pastor's fear was that others might profit from, or be entertained by, something he and his congregation clearly felt was immoral and worthy of destruction.
I won't be so bold as to raise concerns about censorship, invoking Nazi book burning; rather, my concerns are more mundane. I simply wonder what the good pastor burned. Without doing any research whatsoever, I can guess that it was not the hard core porn that we have come to accept as the norm (in regards to porn, of course). These were no Jenna Jameson films. In all actuality, what the good pastor probably stumbled onto was either seventies mainstays like Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones, or—the horror to film historians and theorists (surely there's someone besides me who is disturbed by this)—relatively tame exploitation classics.
Here's the thing, what happened here goes beyond a simple act of consecration, or a religiously motivated crusade. See, the history that many of us have forgotten is this: Most film venues—from the old neighborhood twin (that closed under multiplex pressure) to the weed infested drive-in—existed by showing a wide variety of films. What many modern film goers might be surprised to discover is that the viewing public of the fifties, sixties, and seventies had far better access to foreign films and bizarre tidbits than we presently do. While the internet has collapsed the space between, many of us will never be able to experience a foreign film on the big screen.
And yet, in 1953, the inhabitants of a small town in western North Carolina might very well have been able to catch a viewing of Strip-O-Rama, a burlesque film featuring a brief performance by pinup queen Bettie Page. Because these theaters needed to keep seats filled, they dipped into a large catalog of films. For a small price, a film house manager might be able to show foreign films in the day at reasonable cost and make a few bucks midday—before the big shows at night.
Interestingly enough, one of my mother's friends, when he was younger, used to run the projector at a drive-in. He remembers spooling out an exploitation staple: the sex-hygiene film. The theater managers were careful to apprise him of the ritual: Play the "Doctor" tape during intermission and be sure not to interrupt it because the audience might catch wind of the ruse. (1)
Getting back to the church ritual, I'll conjecture some more. The drive-in where the films were found is in Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville was definitely part of the exploitation circuit. Dave Friedman writes, in Youth In Babylon, of his role in the history of exploitation cinema and I recall that much of Friedman's productions were filmed in the great state of Florida. I don't have the book on hand at the moment, but I seem to recall that he criss-crossed the state for a decade (or more), making and selling his films.
Now, what little research I've done, nets that the films were 70s and 80s era, but… how do we know this for sure? The good pastor would likely have not taken the time to view all of the reels to determine their origin and worth, right? Would the good pastor have watched all of them?
I don't care to point fingers, but I am perplexed. The big issues at stake here are ones I won't address (What is porn? Why is it so bad? Why is it that representations of sex carry such baggage? What role does sex, and representations of sex, play in our modern condition?), but I did want to at least express my anxieties and thoughts. Surely burning anything is bad, right?
The Girl Who Made Good Being Bad
Back in 2001, I wrote, defended, and published my master's thesis. Bettie Page was my subject. And, to some extent, this posting has its seed in that writing. See, I discovered Bettie Page in Playboy (I am too young to have known her elsewhere), and I discovered exploitation cinema in graduate school. Dave Friedman's book (mentioned above) was a wonderful crash course in the genre that crossed carnival and celluloid. Ever since, I've been fascinated with the culture of bad.
Don't mistake me: "The culture of bad" is not that which is wrong, but simply that which is, well, bad. Anyone who has suffered through Blood Feast, or Color Me Blood Red will understand the difference. Bad cinema is just bad—bad acting, bad scripting, very poor production. All of these are qualities of exploitation cinema. The idea was not to create art, but to make money. And "exploitation" (for those uninitiated) refers not to the actors (or participants in the filming) but to the audience stupid enough to plunk down good money to see hours of crap. (Friedman's delight at raking in the dough of the duped, as recounted in Babylon, makes for infectious reading.)
Bettie Page's performances in burlesque films—like the above mentioned Strip-O-Rama—were simply horrible. In fact, these films are horrible, through and through. But despite their poor quality, I find them utterly fascinating. There's something magical about the ingenuity of trying to capture the raw variety of vaudeville and burlesque on film. Maybe, just maybe, if these films had employed better talent (better directors and writers, better production, etc.), they might have struck a deeper artistic chord. They didn't, but they might have.
And now we are living in world without the bawdiness burlesque, without the oddities of the carnival, or the virtuosity of vaudeville. True, burlesque shows are reappearing in urban centers of America, but do they compare? Or are they simply parroted parodies a la The Brady Bunch Movie? Good but forgettable fun.
I remember being surprised, when viewing Varietease (another pinnacle of burlesque cinema), that one of the most artful performances was a striptease performed by a transvestite. Schaefer writes about burlesque that this was not only a standard part of a burlesque show, but that these shows were often attended by married couples. Flash forward to the reactions we saw at the arrival of Brokeback Mountain, or the sad, horror of Boys Don't Cry, and I am flabbergasted by the thought that we've not made progress but rather backpedalled in our tolerance of deviant behavior.
All of this on the dawn of an election where conservativism is shopped out as the "old time religion."
Huh.
(1) - A classic "Sex Hygiene" exploitation experience (at a drive-in theater) involved being lured to the show with promises of lurid, adult material-- under the guise of sex education. The ruse would include either a hired "Doctor" who would "teach" and warn the crowd. Or, in many cases, the "Doctor" would simply be a recording. During intermission these tapes would play while hawkers circulated through the audience selling "sex manuals." The denouement of the film would usually be footage of a live birth. Like Disney World the exploitation experience was all about the merchandise.
"Florida Church Burns X-Rated Film Reels." All Things Considered. 20 Oct. 2008 NPR.org. {http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95913049}
Schaefer, Eric. "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History Of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999.
