Porn King (2005) – DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
directed by James Guardino

by Alex Jackson James Guardino’s Porn King is a sterling example of how not to make a documentary. It fails on every conceivable level–I seriously cannot imagine any possible way to justify this movie. Above all I feel a real anger towards Guardino: he’s wasting my time. He has nothing to say and no passion for the medium; he treats this film like a glorified lottery ticket to the big leagues. My beef with most documentaries is that they’re all steak and no sizzle. They have a subject but no particular opinion on it and have little desire to realize it cinematically. That’s considered a virtue in some corners. Many believe that information should be unaffected and vanilla–objective. The thing about objectivity, though, is that it subjugates the author, clouding him in anonymity and making him and his film invulnerable to critique. I end up writing the same thing about almost every documentary I review, because otherwise I would be forced to discuss the subject matter exclusively, and a film’s subject matter should never be the sole criterion by which to judge its quality.

The laziness of Porn King suggests to me that Guardino just wanted to make a movie. I think what attracted him to documentary is that cloak of invulnerability afforded by the format. Were he to make a fiction film, he would risk betraying his lack of talent as a director and sophistication as an artist. With a documentary, there is the presumption that we will have no expectations of style or insight and will therefore never detect that Guardino is found wanting. The technique doesn’t work, of course: Porn King is incompetent in a sort of unified way that can’t help but invoke an auteur presence. Pauline Kael once said, “The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.” It’s a scary first step that Guardino is unwilling to take, conclusively distinguishing him from real filmmakers.

Porn King revolves around pornographer Al Goldstein, an outspoken but lonely nebbish now on trial for sending harassing phone calls to a secretary who quit on him without notice. Guardino holds onto this trial for dear life in the hopes that it will give his film some kind of narrative structure he is otherwise incapable of providing. Alas, even Guardino is perceptive enough to realize that it won’t sustain a feature-length film, and so he inserts clips from Goldstein’s public-access talk show “Midnight Blue” as well as interviews with his more successful peers in the pornography underworld, Larry Flynt and Ron Jeremy. Goldstein is the ideal subject for Guardino: he’s flamboyant, controversial, and loves to hear himself speak. Better yet, Goldstein’s favourite topic of discussion is himself. Guardino is spared the ugly chore of having to actually interview Goldstein or ask him hard questions because Goldstein is continually in the process of open self-analysis. The only thing Guardino has to do is point the camera at him.

I don’t much like Goldstein. That would hardly matter if he were pitted against a good filmmaker, but, of course, he’s pitted against Guardino. Goldstein isn’t nearly as funny as he thinks he is. His sense of humour could be described as obscenity for the sake of obscenity; he’s supposed to be hilarious because he tells it like it is with zero sense of decorum. After an outburst in court results in Goldstein getting arrested for contempt, a female journalist asks him, “What are you going to do tomorrow?” Goldstein responds as if it were the most obvious question in the world: “I’m going to show my cock and eat your pussy.” The other journalists in the room burst into laughter. It really is a great delivery. But still, their bonhomie kills the joke for us–we realize that if they’re not going to be offended, nobody is. Because everybody expects Goldstein to be offensive he can never truly offend. Everybody puts filters on when they’re around him and then regards him as either perversely charming or, as I do, exhaustingly tedious.

As an avatar for Free Speech, Goldstein is questionable. The purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government from regulating the marketplace of ideas. When Goldstein publishes cartoons in which the Pillsbury Doughboy is shoving a Jew into an oven, such speech is protected under the fair use doctrine as satire. He’s not using the Pillsbury Doughboy to sell biscuits, he’s placing the Pillsbury Doughboy in a negative light and thus commenting on the Pillsbury Doughboy–an idea, if you will, that is within his First Amendment protection. The ability to say bad things about the Pillsbury Doughboy is a constitutional right. Goldstein publishing the phone numbers of his enemies in his magazine and encouraging readers to call them is at least highly dubious. It’s still just information, but it doesn’t really serve the public interest and seems designed to cause mental anguish to several specific individuals. When Goldstein repeatedly calls up his former secretary and tells her, “You’re going down, cunt,” well, that could never be described as disseminating information. There’s no question that that’s being done for no other reason than to cause mental anguish to a specific individual. That is not and should not be protected by the First Amendment.

Putting this issue aside, Goldstein is a relatively easy pornographer to get behind. His preferred sexual fetish is cunnilingus, and, you know, at the risk of simplifying the thinking behind the anti-porn movement, getting down on your hands and knees and giving a woman sexual pleasure isn’t high on the list of sex acts that forward the stranglehold of the patriarchy. Goldstein’s main defense against the harassment charges, along with the idea that he’s protected by the First Amendment, is that he’s a sixty-five-year-old overweight diabetic who couldn’t cause anybody harm if he tried. As far as defenses go, that isn’t half bad. Attitude aside, Goldstein is utterly harmless. What would genuinely challenge an audience (and thus Guardino) would be defending the right of a rape pornographer or a virtual child pornographer to do their thing in the name of freedom of speech.

The Pillsbury Doughboy incident really captured my attention. Long before seeing Porn King, I saw a similar gag on the shock website Rotten.com. The Photoshop gag simply showed a perky housewife putting screaming Pillsbury Doughboys in her oven, in effect demystifying the utopian iconography of Pillsbury’s ads and following the anthropomorphization of their Pillsbury Doughboy through to its logical end. In both cases, Pillsbury threatened to sue under bullshit charges of copyright infringement.^[1] Goldstein was dumb enough and rich enough to fight them; Rotten.com was not. The lesson apparently is that freedom of speech can only be properly enjoyed by those with the resources to fight for it. For those who don’t have Goldstein’s money, the very threat of litigation is enough to suppress free expression, regardless of whether or not the charges have legal merit. The disturbing implication of all of this is that any gains made by Goldstein for free speech in fighting the corporations are largely cosmetic: that 500lb. gorilla is going to sit wherever it wants to sit.

Guardino says that he views Goldstein as a tragic figure, a trailblazer who has sadly become obsolete in the age of Internet pornography. The perspective simultaneously flatters his self-hating but narcissistic subject and affords Guardino a strange sense of moral superiority. There’s an odd scene early in the film where Goldstein accuses Guardino of voyeurism (because “all filmmakers are essentially voyeurs”) and asks him if he likes to eat his girlfriend’s pussy. Guardino shyly replies that it would be better if he just pretended he wasn’t there, a response that indicates: 1. He thinks Goldstein is scum, albeit scum he can tolerate for the purpose of finishing his movie; and 2. He’s reluctant to make himself an active agent in his own movie despite the fact that it’s near impossible to make a fly-on-the-wall study of the talkative and lonely Goldstein. (Guardino provides the film’s narration besides.) His reluctance seems born purely of half-baked preconceptions of professionalism.

The thesis that is aching to surface is that Goldstein is obsolete because he’s an obscene dinosaur in an ‘on-scene’^[2] world. Observe not only said bonhomie that met his come-on to the female journalist, but also the admission from SCREW’s advertising director that they lost a lot of their ads to THE VILLAGE VOICE. Goldstein whines about the Internet destroying published pornography, but it’s hard not to reflect that it hasn’t stopped Larry Flynt. If the United States is truly an on-scene nation, our smut peddlers should be living like kings. Alas, it’s not sex that turns Goldstein on, but self-loathing. Don’t expect Guardino to draw any of these connections, however: Porn King is ultimately little more than a snow job. He buys into Goldstein’s nostalgia for the Seventies and early-Eighties and lacks the savvy and initiative to critically question it. You could say with a certain amount of authority that this is the worst possible film to have been made about Al Goldstein.

THE DVD
Blue Underground’s 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of Porn King appears to be faithful to the source material, by which I mean it looks consistently fuzzy and washed-out like badly-shot digital video, if altogether free of significant defect. The Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo audio is clean and strong but nothing out of the ordinary. The sole extra is “The Last Days of Midnight Blue” (46 mins.), a compilation of rants from Goldstein taped during his trial. I found the feature somewhat redundant at first: what could be the purpose of hearing Goldstein give his perspective, as all of Porn King was Goldstein’s perspective? But things begin to pick up in its latter half, where we see Goldstein’s spirit completely broken shortly after returning from prison. He even delivers his farewell address to the audience while ravaged by a degenerative jaw disease.

Though Guardino ended Porn King with footage of a now homeless and emaciated Goldstein trying to get a job at a deli, it’s curious how he doesn’t come off nearly as vulnerable there as he does here. There is a particularly bizarre segment where Goldstein talks about how his estranged son Jordan had died in a car crash. I was prepared to denounce Guardino as a hack for not mentioning this in his documentary and claiming that the two men had yet to reconcile, until I happened upon an article from THE HARVARD CRIMSON, published months after Jordan’s alleged death, stating that Jordan now works at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City. Jordan had not invited Goldstein to his graduation from Harvard Law School, which devastated Goldstein, prompting him to do that old Jazz Singer shtick of “I have no son.” This would explain why he also rants about having his son disbarred after he’s supposedly already deceased. Maybe Guardino is incompetent after all, not for getting his facts straight, but for not quite conveying just how batshit insane his subject is.

77 minutes; NR; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo); DVD-9; Region-free; Blue Underground/NY After Midnight

^[1]Well, just to be clear, it was a cartoon showing the Pillsbury Doughboy having sex with a dough-girl and giving her a yeast infection that mobilized Pillsbury’s legal team into fighting Goldstein. The “Jew in the oven” gag seems to have been Goldstein attacking Pillsbury for suing him.

^[2]“On-scene,” an invented word from pornography scholar Linda Williams, refers to the increased visibility of materials that would have otherwise been considered obscene, a word that literally means “out of sight.” Williams argues that, strictly speaking, obscene no longer exists.