Amis and Wallace on porn.
Angie Feaver-Feith, Contributing writer and MFA-haver, occasional pervert
INTRODUCTION, APOLOGIA
Let’s start with the title. I’m sorry.
And now for the subject matter: I apologize.
Porn is bad. Porn is gross. Porn is vulgar. Martin Amis said the mere act of writing his article, “A Rough Trade,” for Talk Magazine way back in 2000, was pornography; worse he called it prostitution—writing about sex for pay as sex work. What I’m writing here, if not prostitution, since I am the one paying and all I receive is an academic “credit,” involves perhaps a bit of second hand minor exploitation1. I have no good excuses for what I am engaging in here. I’m analyzing the craft of two overhyped white dudes who were paid oodles to write witty complaints about what a lousy time they had hanging out with porn stars. And for that, I’m sorry. The world doesn’t need my take on this, just as the world doesn’t really need anymore porn. We’ve made enough2.
Porn, however, is inherently interesting. As a subject matter it brings up issues of privilege and power, exploitation and abuse, sexism and sexuality, gender and genitalia—all loaded, electric topics. And then there is the attraction to the taboo in porn, or in writing about it. Of doing what you are not supposed to do, either in life or in this case, a proper MFA program. I never planned to write about porn for my Critical Essay. I was hoping for inspiration and inspiration didn’t strike. I tried pretension: The Art of Metadiscourse in Narrative Nonfiction. The subject matter put me to sleep faster than the time it takes to read that discarded title. But then, there were these essays… that I really liked… and kept rereading… about this subject that I knew I shouldn’t write about… until I started writing about it. And couldn’t stop.
In my defense, I found that Amis and Wallace juggle the subject of pornography masterfully, without accidental discharge, and with, in my opinion, some of their best creative nonfiction writing respectively. So how did they do it? I found copies of each article online, copied the text to MS Word and printed them out double-spaced and began my dissection of their wroks. I wondered: How did they write about porn without mirroring its exploitative nature? How would they avoid the tropes of bad sex writing or juvenile humor? How much or how little of himself would each writer insert into the body of the story, as character, as narrator? How do they make something meaningful, or interesting, out of a subject matter that is at best, cheaply titillating, at its worst demeaning and disgusting. And why, except for pay, bother? What’s in it for them? As writers, what do they get out of the experience of reporting on porn? What are they trying to teach us as readers?
Well, let’s find out!
BACKGROUND: TWO GUYS, ONE SITUATION
David Foster Wallace originally published “Big Red Son” in the September 1998 issue of Premiere magazine: the now defunct, then higherbrow version of Entertainment Weekly. He attended the 1997 AVN (Adult Video News) awards in Las Vegas and wrote the about his experience under a pseudonym. Two of them actually: the byline of the magazine edition listed Willem DeGroot and Matt Rundlet as the authors. To put it in context of his other work, “Big Red Son” was written after his famous Harper’s essays (often referred to as “Cruise Ship” and “State Fair,” both of which are collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) and after Infinite Jest. Originally intended as 5000-7000 word piece of entertainment,3 in typical Wallace style the published version ran to almost 25,000 words. The version published in his essay collection Consider the Lobster is longer still, with footnotes that nearly equal the body of the main text. Despite the length, the article is compelling readable, and is as fascinating and funny as it is overlong and obscene. The article is nothing less than inspired, by design alone—the notion of sending David Foster Wallace to the AVN awards is ironic and funny in itself. An argument could be made that there’s a perhaps pornographic quality to Wallace’s many orgies of many words. He is a man with an almost prurient interest in language and literature.
“A Rough Trade” was commissioned as a literary expose of the LA porn industry by Martin Amis’s longtime friend Tina Brown for her post- New Yorker publication, the short-lived and much-hyped Talk magazine. Amis is a somewhat controversial British writer most famous in America for his stylish, witty, and often grotesque novels with titles like Dead Babies, Success, Money, London Fields, Yellow Dog, and The Pregnant Widow. In his native England, Amis is perhaps more famous for being the celebrity novelist son of celebrated novelist Kingsley Amis. In Britain, Martin Amis’s personal life is a subject of the tabloids, where his own affairs and dealings with money have received much attention. Why does this matter? Because Martin Amis is perhaps the most perfect and interesting writer to send back live transmissions from inside the porn world. Sex and money and exploitation have not only been the subjects of his novels, they have been the topics he has been both defined by and judged for in his home country.
Neither writer seems to like the porn industry much. David Foster Wallace declares self-castration preferable to his experience of attending the annual Adult Video Awards in Las Vegas. “Hold off with those kitchen utensils and/or wire cutters!4” he implores the perhaps imaginary self-hating sex-addicted potential castrati of America, “because we believe we may have found an alternative… 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 want to see, hear, engage in, or even think about human sexuality ever again.” Amis doesn’t go quite so far with the explicit condemnation of the industry, but his consistently contemptuous weary tone makes clear that save perhaps one, he is not at all enamored of the pornographers he is being paid by Talk magazine to talk to. Porn stars, he says, “pay their rent with the death of feelings.”
CASTING CALL: BIG… PERSONALITIES, REVEALING… CHARACTERS
Just as porn stars aren’t hired for their acting abilities, neither Amis nor Wallace was hired for their reporting skills. They were hired for their giant… personalities. In each writer’s case, his personality, or how he told his story, was just as important to his respective publisher as what he wrote about. The meaning of their respective stories would therefore be told through the interaction of their particular personas with the situation and the subject matter.
The persona a writer presents is largely the amalgamation of individual word choices, sentence structure, rhythm, diction, or as essayist and teacher Phillip Lopate writes in his nonfiction handbook To Show and To Tell, “that pitiful set of quirks, those small differences that seem to set us apart from others…” (42). Wallace’s cultivation of those quirks is well known and borders on the pathological to his critics. I knew I would find “w/r/t” (w/r/t: with regards to, why he uses the acronym when he has never been afraid of word count I don’t know, but its quirky!) somewhere in “Big Red Son.” It appears multiple times. It appears in so many Wallace essays, along with “pomo” (postmodern) and “yr.” and “viz.” and “pace.” And of course there are the footnotes—the many, many footnotes, often with footnotes of their own within the footnotes. “Host,” his fascinating Harper’s essay about a right wing talk radio host, is such a maze of footnotes within footnotes it was left out of the eBook edition of Consider the Lobster.
Amis is a serial namedropper. He couldn’t get through “A Rough Trade” without having mentioned his Brit Literary Bratpack pals Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, and Ian McEwen. He quotes, as he often does, poet Philip Larkin, his father’s best friend, as well as Gore Vidal and John Updike. None of them bring much to the party, but Amis seems to need an entourage, and love him or hate him for it, it’s part of what makes up his persona. Amis is fond of creative punctuation. In this piece he makes uses one word sentences: “Now.” “Behold.” The firm stop of the period being the waypoint between the pause of the comma and the shout of the exclamation. And while his tone is not formal, occasionally some of his phrasings reveal his Britishness, or felt that way to me, this one especially: “there are plenty of ‘jokes’ on a porno set; and there is much raucous mirth to break the tension.” The italics are mine. “Much raucous mirth” would be painfully pretentious for all but the most blueblood of Americans to write, but it sounds perfectly natural if it plays in a British accent in your head, as it did in mine.
Synecdoche is certainly a pretentious word no matter which side of the Atlantic it is used on, and it’s another Wallace favorite. It’s also a good term to remember if we are to consider how style reflects character and creates a persona. It’s interesting to me that Wallace’s story boils down to something close to THIS IS TOO MUCH, and that his writing style absolutely reflects that. He uses words like “exeunt,” “tumesce,” “hypersucrotic,” “anuresis,” “leptosomatic,” “distaff,” “tympanum.” “plangent.” Words that don’t seem out of place in his writing, for Wallace is always at play with words, but which aren’t necessary, are easily substituted for words that would convey equal, or to the reader, greater meaning, but much less character.
And after all, it is our choices that reveal character. What we include or exclude from our stories has loads to say about us as writers. As writer and critic Carl Lewis puts it, near the end of his book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, choice defines taste and ultimately personality. “Taste after all is part of the character you present to others. Personality is a creative medium of its own.” I’m not sure what Amis’s predilection for repetition says about his personality, but I do know that repetition establishes rhythm, and in the following example it seems to me that Amis uses the word porno repeatedly as mild form of contempt5, almost spitting it back into the faces of the pornographers. In the first paragraph of “A Rough Trade” alone he use the word “porno” seven times, as an adjective attached to home, patio, pool, shore, sunset, pink, and moon. And on a later page he uses it six more times within a single paragraph, coupling it with house, tank, coloured, TV, deck, and pool. His use is hypnotic, I think, and draws the readers into the unreality of the setting, a whole porno world into and of itself.
DESCRIPTION: GETTING IT RIGHT ON THE FIRST TAKE
One of the elements of writing that most surprises me in both “A Rough Trade” and “Big Red Son” is the simple accuracy of each author’s descriptive language. Their inventiveness too, but that isn’t as impressive for any reader even passably familiar with the authors’ work. While Wallace is perhaps most famous for his verbal excesses, I was surprised by his restraint. There are a lot of words in “Big Red Son,” but very little of the “purple prose” John Updike, for one, was famous or infamous for. Both Wallace’s and Amis’s descriptions are, more often than not, sharp, and witty. Describing an imaginary porn consumer contemplating (while masturbating) the authenticity of emotion displayed by the grunting actors, Amis writes sarcastically: “and the genuinely discerning viewer (jackknifed over his flying fist) has got to be thinking: Is this for real? Or is it just bullshit?” The sentence sets up the masturbator in a pose one step forward on the evolutionary chart from the Neanderthal, and manages to convey, at least to this reader, a passing reference to the pose of Rodin’s thinker. And jackknifed is the perfect verb for a hunched over masturbatory stance. While the word may not provide the most mindblowing of metaphors, given all the cheap euphemisms Amis could have employed his word choice feels exceptionally apt. The term jackknife also builds on theme of violence that Amis interjects into his narration of the world of porn as he does again when he states that porn star Chloe “stabbed a hand through the air at me,” or as in the following example: “If you are going to be a porno star, what do you need? It’s pretty clear by now… You need to have a ferocious sex drive.” Ferocious, rather than massive, prodigious, enormous, insatiable, etc, carries the theme of violence and sets up the reader to receive Amis’s ending observation that porno actors are not as he initially surmises, glorified prostitutes, but instead “gladiators.”
Amis’s nonfiction writing is surprisingly spare. His fiction can be very dense. In “A Rough Trade,” he makes use of a number of short and choppy sentences to set a punchy combative tone that also informs the reader of the author’s persona. Wallace’s tone isn’t quite as hostile and is generally more expansive. As a reader of many of his works might be, Wallace’s tone is often “overwhelmed.” Paragraph length sentences and page length paragraphs navigate the reader through a Las Vegas convention center. Everything he sees is documented, listed, shared. He seems to miss nothing. How many notebooks did he bring on assignment, I wondered; how many did he fill, and how often did he have to scramble to go get more? It’s not surprising then that his most strikingly accurate descriptions aren’t single word metaphors but multi-word phrases, like the following: his definition of vulgar is “humility with a combover; “ his description of one “major-league pretty” porn star as a “slightly debauched Cindy Crawford”; the smell of adult video stores as “a mix of cheap magnetic tape and disinfectant”; and of the whole Adult Video Expo center as “a cross between an MTV documentary and the Hell Panel from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.” There are more, with Wallace there are always so many more. This line is a perfect example of alliteration done right, not an easy thing for many writers to do: “the crowd lingers over hypersucrotic cake and coffee and $9.00 cordials and howls of conversation…”
Amis is no slouch in the alliteration association. He offers the reader this mildly obscene morsel: “Behold. A platonically perfect pubis, wearing nothing but the latest hairstyle, a minimal mohawk.” It’s funny, too, and that leads us to the next element of rhetorical personality that I’d like to explore: humor.
HUMOR: NOTHING BUT A SMILE, AND THE OCCASIONAL SHUDDER
Wallace’s humor is largely derived from tone. As with so much of his writing, readers of “Big Red Son” are entering a carnival ride of consciousness. Not merely a Ferris wheel or merry-go-round but tilt-a-whirl latched onto the tracks a looping roller coaster. The words come fast and furious, but excepting the not-all-that-funny, trying-too-hard, opening paragraphs about the wire cutters/castration there isn’t much in the way of actual jokes in the main body of the text. I personally chuckled whenever Wallace made mention of Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, (or the abbreviated to D. Filth and H. Hecuba, which I find funnier still) the fake names Wallace gives his two professional porn-scribe/tour guides through the porno-hell of the AVN Awards and the preceding Adult Video convention.
Of late I have become biased towards scene driven as opposed to joke driven humor. Reading collections of Lorrie Moore and Sherman Alexie back-to-back last year shaped my thinking. Though I am an admirer and aspiring practitioner of verbal cleverness, I found that too many cute tics and cheap jokes wear thin pretty quick, even when employed by good writers6. But a well-crafted scene driven joke stays with you for a long time7. Like this one, from almost the end of “Big Red Son,” which will unfortunately lose some of its charm in my retelling: A female ABC news reporter is seated at table near Wallace’s. During the nearly three-hour ceremony the professional to conservatively dressed woman looks increasingly miserable amongst the obscene and overlong pageantry. Then a twelve year old boy—yes twelve years old at the porn awards—takes the stage to accept an Adult Video Award for his absent older brother, Jim Buck–winner of Gay Performer of the Year Award, and the twelve-year-old jokes that he taught his brother “everything he knows,” which results in an “enormous audience laugh and ovation—single spasmodic shudder from hunched ABC Radio lady.” The scene is funny because the professionally dressed and well-mannered ABC Radio lady is introduced only after a cavalcade of vulgarities. Her presence provides immediate contrast and friction-discomfort. The reader and the author have been groaning with disgust for a while. When she shudders, you feel it, and feel for her, and the release uncomfortable release of the shudder, the rattling bit of tension relived, for me, comes out in a little hiccupy laugh. Not quite an lol. But does any one really lol?
In their respective works Wallace and Amis employ more wit than jokiness. Amis takes his humor seriously, and perhaps this is a good working definition of what wit is: humor applied with seriousness, instead of silliness. Wit is supposed to be served dry. Ironically, the ability to keep straight face, Amis says, is one of the prerequisites of porn. But this attribute is almost the opposite of seriousness, more a function of emotional blankness, of a clinical disengagement from life—numbness. Porn stars are “very bad at acting,” but very good at “keeping a straight face.” Because so much of porn is outlandish, ridiculous and of course, obscene, it is helpful to the reader that Amis and Wallace are smart about their use of wit and sparing in bad puns. Despite the subject matter there are almost no puns8 and only two mild double entendres. One per author. But porn is crude and so sometimes is the humor in these works, how could they not be. While Wallace is more prudish, his narrator feigns a sort of disgust at the whole spectacle; Amis occasionally wallows in the obscene.
“Pussies are bullshit,” are the opening words to Amis’s article. The whole first paragraph is Amis’s obscene interrogation of porn director John “Buttman” Stagliano, whose name is both ridiculous and repugnant at the same time. “Buttman” spends the first three paragraphs trying to explain to Amis why anal sex is more real than vaginal sex, which is kind of joke, if a sad one: he argues anal sex is more “real” because the receiver is much more likely to express real feeling. Because anal sex is more painful. Which is ironic. In the most bitter way.
And here is some more ironic anal sex humor, this recapped from a video Amis watches about sexy times at a firefighter’s funeral: “The next scene, which occurs about a millennium later, is also triggered by grief counseling, here a male star comforts two female stars, one of them anally…” About watching porn videos Amis says: “I kept worrying that I’d like it. If you harbor a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You’d better hope this doesn’t happen while you’re watching a film about a coprophagic9 pig farmer, or an undertaker.”
Moving on…
ROLE PLAY: THE AUTHOR GOES BOTH WAYS, THE NARRATOR IS ON TOP
Before we plunge into the depths of not just how the authors write about porn, but how they feel about it, I want to go back to the academics for a brief bit to explore just how the meanings of stories are made. Phillip Lopate urges the writer to become a character in the story, in order to better guide the reader thorough the situation. To do this he said that, “you need to have—or acquire—some distance from yourself… You need to be able to see yourself from the ceiling… you need to take inventory of yourself so that you can present that self to the reader as a specific legible character…” (To Show and To Tell, p. 45). Lopate’s fellow nonfiction author and writing teacher Vivian Gornick similarly advises the writer to pull “out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience.” (The Situation and The Story, p. 37) But for Gornick, the more important aspect of this concept, at least in relation to the art of personal essay writing, is the pulling out: becoming, as Gornick says, a “narrator who was me and at the same time not me” (p. 32); thereby separating the narrator from the character.
For Gornick, part of finding the meaning in a work of personal nonfiction is done by identifying the gap or the connection between the author narrator and the author character, paying attention to “who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two” (p. 222). While both Wallace and Amis are characters in their stories, their author characters are their reporter selves, giving mostly the play by play of the situation. Wallace’s character in particular seems very much along for the ride—a sensation he imparts to the reader as well by means of a rushing rhetorical torrent. In both “Big Red Son” and “A Rough Trade,” the job of making sense, or making meaning, is the job of the author narrator serving as a secondary guide and interpreter to the experience of the author character within the narrative situation.
Amis’s author character takes a combative tone from the start. Like a boxer, he is adversarial with his subjects and subject matter: “‘Answer me something,’” he demands of Mr. Stagliano by way of an introduction to the character (Buttman if you’ve forgotten) in the third sentence of the first paragraph, and before printing his answer and after describing the various porno items of Mr. Stagliano’s home Amis repeats the demand/question: “‘Answer me something.’” Note the lack of question marks. “‘Tell me Temptress,’” is how he begins his interview with…Temptress (she won’t let him print her real name). “Is this for real? Or is this just bullshit?” is the rhetorical question Amis asks in the third paragraph. His narrator asks a number of rhetorical questions, sometimes answering them himself and sometimes not. The character Amis is blunt, but the narrator Amis is a bit more expansive, or philosophical perhaps. “More than this,” his narrator opines, “porno it seems, is a parody of love. It therefore addresses itself to love’s opposites. Which are hate and death.” This sentence is delivered as narrator commentary in the midst of a paragraph Amis otherwise devotes to describing the onsite filming of a graphic sex scene. Within that same paragraph we have the Amis character describing the situation and the Amis narrator pulling out of himself to comment on what the situation means to him.
You won’t find much of David Foster Wallace’s author narrator in the main body of “Big Red Son.” To find it/him, and to find the real meaning of the story, you need to read the footnotes. In the main body of the text, Wallace’s twin pseudonymical author characters, most often referred to as your correspondents—or yr. correspondents, or yr. corresps.—take you on the supposedly fun and crazy tour of porno land that they rather not take again, and it reads rather like “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” jouncy and bouncy and fun and fast, but the ending is a bit unsatisfying. There is no real climax, the ride just jerks to a stop about the same time as the reader has had enough. The footnotes therefore function as a way for the author narrator, Wallace himself, to comment on, and make sense of, what he is seeing. The footnotes are also home to some of the more disgusting details, as well as unsettling or illuminating anecdotes. Criticism as well, like this, attributed ironically or not, to the full-length version of yr. corresps: “Your correspondents elect here to submit an opinion. [Porn Directors] Dark’s and Black’s movies are not for men who want to be aroused and masturbate. They are for men who have problems with women and want to see them humiliated.” In the main body of the text his loudest complaints are about nonalcoholic drink prices at the awards ceremony.
COMING TO THE CLIMAX AND POSSIBLY SOME CONCLUSIONS
In “A Rough Trade,” Amis’s author narrator is happy to tell you exactly what he thinks about porn—he makes appearances throughout the text as the author character guides us through the porno situation and then grandstands/soapboxes on the last page to neatly wrap his hypothesis up. It is Amis’s view that modern day porno stars are not in fact prostitutes (selling sex for money) or mere pornographers (selling images of people having sex for money) but slaves—slaves in the way that the gladiators were slaves: warrior performers in combat (which porn sex has more in common with than standard copulation) for mass spectacle. The gladiator element is clear. Amis and Wallace, and many many others10 have documented the increased violence in porn, and the physical strain/stamina its performers, especially the women, must have/endure. But the term slave seems a strong assertion, even for a porn actor. As caveat Amis says, of the gladiator slaves “some of them won their freedom.” Amis thinks that perhaps one of the porn stars he has profiled, Chloe, will win hers. She will win hers, he says, because she alone amongst the pornographers he had endured, had maintained her sense of humor. And humor is something Amis maintains in his writing no matter how bleak his narrative situation.11
This is then the essence of Amis’s story: humor equals humanity. “Humourlessness, universal and institutionalized humourlessness, is the lifeblood of porno,” he writes early on. And to forfeit humor, Amis maintains, is to forfeit humanity—and therefore freedom. The freedom of consciousness, of self will. When the vile “Buttman” tells Amis “‘pussies are bullshit’” he “had no idea that he was joking.” He has no idea because he has traded away his humanity. He has, as Amis implies, given up his humanistic feeling in order to make himself rich via porn—through abuse and exploitation. Amis writes that “porno is littered with—porno is heaped with—the deaths of feelings.” And as the medium gets more and more violent, the inability to feel, either joy or pain, becomes an ever more important part of the job description. So what sort of effect does an entertainment that increasingly demands the deadening of its makers feelings have on its viewers? Amis doesn’t ask this. But I will. And David Foster Wallace will almost answer the question.
But he’s coy about it. Wallace doesn’t come as close to making a clear conclusions on his feelings about pornography as Amis does. Wallace processes his journeys through the porn world in a more personal, internal manner. He is interested less in what porn does to its actors and more bout what the sex show/mass media spectacle/over-electro-stimulus (porn, Hollywood) does to us. Wallace is as drawn to spectacle as anyone, and his writing is spectacle in its own right. Describing the Oscars he says: “We pretty much all tune in, despite the grotesquerie of watching an industry congratulate itself on its pretense that it’s still an art form, of hearing people in $5000 gowns invoke lush clichés of surprise and humility scripted by publicist, etc.—the whole cynical postmodern deal—but we all seem to watch. To care.” The scale of the spectacle alone makes it interesting. And though porn has none of the prestige of Hollywood, it has perhaps an even greater spectacle to show: “the adult industry takes many of the physical deformities that Hollywood is famous for—the vanity, the vulgarity, the rank commercialism—and not only makes them overt and grotesque but seems to revel in that grotesquerie.” The porno industry is a freak show, and he, and increasingly we, can’t turn away. We’d often rather not have seen it afterwards, but never once consider closing our eyes while inside the tent/in front of the screen.
In main body of the text, the real story of “Big Red Son” is essentially the same as in “Cruise Ship” or “State Fair”—which is perhaps notionally best summed up by the title that adorns his most celebrated essay collection, in which the latter two stories appear: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. These essays form a kind of trilogy in that regard, and I would go as far as to argue that they are Wallace’s true masterpieces, not as is commonly thought, Infinite Jest. “Big Red Son,” is, in my opinion, the most entertaining of three. “State Fair” is, I think, the best written, in a way the most poignant, dealing with Wallace’s Midwestern homeland and revealing something of his own inner self we rarely see in his writing. The piece also contains some of his best and clearest description. “Cruise Ship” has the most bravado, is the most obviously stylish, is what you think about when you think about the style of David Foster Wallace. It’s also harder to read, the least compelling, though the most lauded, in part perhaps, because of its difficulty. “Big Red Son” because of its humor, and despite the subject matter, might be most human of the three. Unironically it is the most naked. The least guarded by rhetorical artifice.
Ultimately, the deeper meaning of “Big Red Son” is not so different than that of Infinite Jest: a 1000+ page novel that muses on the nature of stimulus abuse and its aftermath. The stimulus in Infinite Jest include drugs/alcohol, television/media, tennis/sports, sex/violence, politics/ideology… In fact Wallace’s novel might best be summed up by another book title, one that was often referenced in relation to Infinite Jest: media critic Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. Though it was published in 1985 and its primary focus is television, Postman details the evolution and proliferation of, and our collective subjugation to, ever more stimulating and increasingly invasive media technology. Wallace echoes Postman’s title when he makes the point, in the footnotes of “Big Red Son,” that “whether or not it ever actually gets there, it’s clear that the real horizon late-90’s porn is heading toward is the Snuff Film.” In this he echoes Amis as well. Remember his quote from earlier? “Porn addresses itself to love’s opposite, hate and death.” There is one step beyond the snuff film: the video that kills not just the actor but also the viewer. Wallace wrote of such a film, he called it “the Entertainment,” the recorded cassette that also gives Infinite Jest its title. Wallace wrote Infinite Jest in 1996. Little did he know that it would be a piece of portable hardware and not merely consumable content that would all but lobotomize viewers ten years later: the smartphone. Little did he know that we would all be carrying around an instant porn-viewing device in our pockets.
AFTERWORD, CONTEXTUALIZATION, SELF-IMPLICATION
Despite porn’s continued shift to a more violent extreme, the reality is that porn has never been more mainstream, more socially acceptable, more viewed, than it is right now. So much more so than it was when Wallace and Amis reported on the subject back at the turn of the millennium. Part of the reason is of course the Internet, which was still in its hatchling state at the time of their reporting. But the main reason porn is more popular than ever is because it is essentially free. Paid sites exist, but unless you have a specific and deep-seated kink, most people don’t need/use them. People watch porn, in the quantities that they do, now merely because they can. There is no real impediment. All that is needed is a phone or a computer, a (wifi or data) connection, and a minor modicum of privacy (for the non-pervert)—elements almost all modern First World and Second World humans have. And because we all do, and because we almost all watch it, and because, also a relatively recent phenomenon, we all know we all watch it, there is almost no social stigma in watching it12.
Before I had high speed Internet I’d hardly watched any porn at all. I’d never liked dirty magazines, and being a writer or a person partial to good narratives, I liked dirty stories better—though good ones were hard to find. But since the internet, well, I am sorry to say that porn has become almost a daily habit, especially during times of stress. Especially since I have been divorced. I may go a week or two without but it’s rare. And I am not proud. Beyond maybe 15 minutes of mindlessness and then the microseconds of euphoria, which I used to be able to get without the aid of the video filth and merely from my own imagination when younger, my usage amounts to what is perhaps now a bad habit. Like junk food. Like Facebook. A balm, or a hand cream, for the wounded soul.
While I loved the meta-irony of sending David Foster Wallace to the porn awards, of sending the cynical anti-Hollywood author of Money to go and grill “Buttman,” ultimately it was their use of wit and vivid language that interested me most about the pieces I have analyzed for this essay. The subject matter serves mainly as the sticky substance binding the two authors together. Or maybe that isn’t quite true. Maybe what interests me most is the union: the entertaining coupling of these particular personalities with this somewhat, or not somewhat, sordid subject.
If that’s the case, and I guess it is, then by undertaking this critical essay I have been able to achieve every porn viewer’s dream: I’ve gone from passive viewer to partial participant with the stars. Perhaps not in a true glorious three-way of authorship, but still, I get to be more than mere voyeur. I don’t get to do any actual fucking, but I can linger and touch. I get to be the cuckold.
Like I said in the introduction, I’m sorry.
Works Cited and/or Consulted
Alexie, Sherman. “Do Not Go Gentle.” Ten Little Indians: Stories. New York: Grove, 2003. N. pag. Print.
Amis, Martin. Experience. New York: Talk Miramax, 2000. Print.
—–. The Information. New York: Harmony, 1995. Print.
—–. “A Rough Trade.” Talk Magazine [New York] Feb. 2001: 98+. The Guardian. 17 Mar. 2001. Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968. Print.
Enfield. “David Foster Wallace – Big Red Son.” Genius. Lit Genius, n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2015.
Finney, Brian. Martin Amis. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013. Print.
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1 Not to at all be confused with the exploitation of minors.
2 According to a study by Internet Filter Review in 2006, a new porn film is made every 39 minutes. In the US alone. I’m guessing the frequency is much higher now, and could conceivably be in the single digits with foreign and amateur production.
3 Background Information on the origin of “Big Red Son” obtained from interviews with and blogposts by Glenn Kenny: Wallace’s editor at Premiere Magazine. He appears in the story as well under the pseudonym Dick Filth.
4 Editor’s note: no page numbers will be provided for the quotes pulled from either “Big Red Son,” or “A Rough Trade.” In order to thoroughly take both essays apart, and in a nod to the nature of the subject matter, online versions were used as the source material for both articles. Links to each can be found in the citations at the end.
5 Joan Didion, another writer prone to expressions of contempt, also frequently employs repeating words and phrases in her writing. According to my copy of Martha Kolln’s textbook Rhetorical Grammar, there is a term for the proper use of repeating phrases- parallelism. Done properly, Kolln says that the use of parallelism/repetition adds “cohesion and style.”
6 Alexie and Moore are both funny writers, but in my opinion rely to heavily on tics and gags. Not so problematic if you read them piecemeal, over years, as individual short stories come out, but pretty grating if you are trying to read their collections all the way through over the course of a long weekend.
7 My all time favorite scene driven joke is in, or actually it’s the whole story, Sherman Alexie’s very short “Do Not Go Gentle” from Ten Little Indians, which I always think of as Chocolate Thunder, the punchline essentially, but as the story is so brief I can’t give any more info away.
8 Wallace devotes a whole footnote to why he chose to carefully avoid and or purge all puns from his piece. And actually in “A Rough Trade” Amis indulges in a whole paragraph of puns, but almost as an aside and told by the Brti Lit Bratpack at a conference. They swap bullshit for pussy in famous phrases or titles. Salman Rushdie takes the prize with his Bond film swap: “Octobullshit.”
9 Coprophagic: it’s gross. You’ll have to look it up yourself.
10 In prepping for this paper I read dispatches from the land of porn reporting by Wells Tower, Emily Witt, Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, and Shalom Auslander. But the assertion of increasing violence in porn hardly needs bibliographic support. Proof is just a private Google search away.
11 Amis’s newest novel is either lambasted or loved for the humor in the holocaust storyline it employs. The Zone of Interest—a title that could have been used for his porno piece.
12 Unless you watch that, or get caught watching that, kind of porn. Whatever that particular porn taboo is for you and whoever might catch you. What ever turns you on merely by knowing that you shouldn’t be turned on by it. Whatever it is that compounds your pleasure through the admixture of shame- that volatile solvent stirred into the thick diesel of normal human lust.