In 'Lovelace' Porn Sucks and Hollywood Blows

There is a palpable fear on the part of Hollywood whenever it tells a cautionary story of life in the pornographic industry. It’s as if Hollywood is in the cinema with you, anthropomorphically glancing over its shoulder, nervously hoping that you don’t get its own brand of mainstream entertainment confused with its more sordid cousin.

“This sort of thing doesn’t go on in our industry,” it says, offering you some popcorn, “y’know?”

This week sees the release of Lovelace, the biopic of 1970s porn superstar Linda Lovelace, whose breakout appearance in the zeitgeist-steeped Deep Throat made her an instant household name.

The story told here is a familiar one, even to those to whom the name “Linda Lovelace” is only faintly recognisable. Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried) moves swiftly from her life as a relatively innocent all-American girl, to a victim of a seductive, oppressive, and violent older man (Peter Sarsgaard). As she is plunged deeper into a life of porn and prostitution, her personal journey of survival starts to look like a story of redemption—as if Lovelace herself has something to make up for—where happiness is eerily indistinguishable from the middle America ideal of a suburban nuclear family.

To understand Hollywood’s tricky relationship with the porn industry, imagine that Linda Lovelace has an identical twin sister (say, Melinda Lovelace) who is a popular, legitimate actress on stage and screen. Whenever the tricky topic of Linda comes up, Melinda finds herself forced to constantly underscore the differences between them.

And so the lesson becomes this: if porn is a place where all the sexual acts are purely on the screen, then surely Hollywood, which we must naturally assume to be less sleazy than porn, must be a place in which actresses are never compromised or forced into situations they do not wish to be in. Unless of course they married a violent and horrible man—that distinction is key. But the implausible lack of casting couch scenes in these films—note particularly how producers are depicted, myopically business-minded and unconcerned with their own sexual proclivities—suggests that the concept of the predatory financier is purely a myth.

To suggest a corruption on the part of the producers would create a syllogism in the minds of the audience, immediately connecting sleazy porn producers to sleazy Hollywood producers. In Lovelace, the only questionable act committed by Deep Throat financier Anthony Romano (Chris Noth) is an act of cathartic vengeance on behalf of Linda, an heroic ass-kicking that we’re supposed to applaud. The rest of the time Romano is a perfect gentleman who even refuses Chuck’s offer of a girl to sit on his lap. He is reminiscent of Boogie Nights’ Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), who treated his actresses as queens.

Lovelace is not, of course, the classic that Boogie Nights is, for whilst writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson was inspired by true-life figures, he was not restricted by them in the way that Lovelace is. As with most biopics, Lovelace threatens boredom when adhering to the facts, and damnation when it veers away from them.

But then, about halfway through, Lovelace does something unexpected. It doubles back on itself, playing us events we have already witnessed, but showing them for what they really were for poor Linda: exploitative and hellish. This revelation, however, tells us more about the storytellers than the characters.

The idea that this second pass is significantly more depraved suggests that we were supposed to find the excesses of the first pass tolerable. That Hugh Hefner (James Franco) and Lovelace’s husband treating her as cattle to her face was still within the bounds of acceptability, and the truly horrendous moments come when this behaviour is upped a few notches.

Lovelace’s Deep Throat co-star Harry Reems (The OC’s nebbish Adam Brody) is depicted as a nice guy, and in promotional interviews Brody has, with the best of intentions, described the relationship between Reems and Lovelace as “brotherly”. However, the real-life Lovelace’s insistence that every time someone watches Deep Throat they are witnessing her being raped is irreconcilable with this idea of harmonious siblings. Financiers Romano and Butchie Peraino (Bobby Cannavale), director Gerry Damiano (Hank Azaria), and star Reems are all impossibly nice guys. It is Lovelace’s manipulative husband Chuck (Sarsgaard), a man with no identifiable title, who is the true villain.

This is the film’s central thesis. It is not the industry, nor its many trustworthy professionals, who are to blame for Lovelace’s treatment, but an unstable outsider. An unprofessional.

It should be noted that Lovelace directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman are far from hacks. They were responsible for the outstanding documentaries The Times of Harvey Milk and Celluloid Closet, as well as 2010’s underrated Ginsberg biopic Howl, and clearly have a strong track record in depicting complex historical events.

It’s Lovelace’s rise-fall-redemption structure, whose formula was so clearly exposed by the proximity of back-to-back biopics Ray and Walk the Line (unrelated films about two completely different men which appeared to use the same script), that is to blame here, luring in a relatively inexperienced screenwriter (Andy Bellin) with its blindingly seductive signposts.

There is a more interesting story to tell here. We don’t see anything of the claims made by the real Lovelace that she also felt used by the anti-pornography movement. Surely a film about the tragic exploitation of a woman would be so much richer by covering this rarely-discussed aspect of her life. Seyfried’s Lovelace becomes increasingly aware and concerned that her life is defined by one single act, and yet this biopic itself is equally complicit.

When the credits roll, the lesson we are left with is one only tangentially connected to Lovelace herself. It is that exploitation is external to an industry with clearly-defined roles and boundaries, and that these external influences are what corrupts. Pornography, and by extension Hollywood, remain unsullied.

Follow Lee on Twitter: @leezachariah

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