Sperm Count: Deep Thought

The famous male porn stars of the 70’s and 80’s were Harry Reems, Ron Jeremy (aka the Hedgehog) and John Holmes whose last film was done with La Cicciolina, and who was performing without protection while infected with the AIDS virus from which he died. Georgina Spelvin, Candida Royalle and Sharon Mitchell were some of their female counterparts. Today’s generation of porn stars (both male and female) are more film historical and often intellectual. They’re players in the meta-porn industry which may have been influenced by deconstruction. Sacha Grey, now retired from porn, modeled her personality on the Godard actress Anna Karina, whose name she toyed with adopting. The equally New Wave porn queen Stoya does her erotic pas de deux with a male sex idol who calls himself James Deen. The only thing missing are porn stars who really reflect the neuroses of our times, women porn stars who suffer from frigidity and whose male lovers can’t get it up. Audiences are sick of seeing idealized couples creating nuclear chain reactions that set the bar too high. Porn needs to go through a realistic stage say tantamount to the Ashcan School of Art which became popular in America before the Depression. Audiences for X rated films, in the age of therapy and recovery, need porn stars they can identify with and who tell their stories, porn stars who don’t make them feel they are constantly missing out on something. If Woody Allen had balls, he'd write and star in a porn film, a kind of X-rated Annie Hall, where Alvy Singer (Allen) says to Annie (Diane Keaton) “so we'll fuck now and get it over with” in place of the original  “so we'll kiss now and get it over with, and then we’ll eat.” There’s a growing demand for films that deal with subjects that were formerly taboo in pornography—porn films with titles like Chompin’ at the Bit (premature ejaculation), Pissimpotent (about a guy who is inhibited about giving his lover the golden shower she desires), If I Can’t Come in Your Mouth, On Where Am I Supposed to Come, On Your Face? (no particular theme), Deep Thought (about the dangers of meditation and how it can lead to sexual anorexia) and Once a Pickle No Longer a Cucumber (about failed Sexual Reassignnment Surgery). What about a sequel to Behind the Green Door (1972), where the portal in question leads to an analyst’s couch?

The Club Anhedonism

Anhedonia was famously the original title for Annie Hall, but it was thrown out because the word was deemed too esoteric for audiences (“Woody Allen Fights Anhedonia," NYT, 4/20/77). It's  strange since anhedonia's really an easy word to parse out with “an” being the not and “hedonia” referring to pleasure. Putting the two syllables together you get the inability to experience pleasure. Narcissism and anhedonia share some qualities, in that they can both be defensive postures which eschew the dependence on the outside world. Anhedonics may feel powerful to the extent that they don’t need or desire anyone or anything. Anhedonia frees you from vulnerability. It’s a perverse version of the Buddhist mantra “desire is but the beginning of suffering.” Those who go to silent retreats in Zen monasteries choose abstinence while the anhedonic ostensibly has psychological problems which make it difficult for him or her to enjoy the senses. In this regard anhedonia is a sister or brother ailment to depression, since its function, which is to some extent protective, has, at the same time, unpleasant consequences. But if Woody Allen wanted to call Annie Hall, a mild essay on cosmopolitan/melting pot neurosis, Anhedonia, what would be alternative titles for say the films in Bergman’s famous trilogy Winter Light, Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence. Pleasure is not only compromised, but absent in these filmic essays on the absence of God. There's a club Hedonism II in Negril, where anything goes. But where would the club Anhedonism be situated? On The Gulag Archipelego?

Irrational Man

Is existential despair the reason for Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), the title character of Woody Allen’s Irrational Man’s impotence, or is impotence the cause for his despair? Remember Allen’s famous standup quip in Annie Hall, “I was thrown out of N.Y.U my freshman year for cheating on a metaphysics exam, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” In Irrational Man Allen goes a little further and the précis of modern philosophy he offers through the voice of the flask guzzling philosophy professor that Phoenix portrays is a little like one of those audio guides to masterpieces at the Louvre.  In discussing Kant Abe says “in a totally moral world there is no room for lying,” about Kierkegaard, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Though he argues that “much of philosophy is verbal masturbation,” and that philosophy and life occupy two separate worlds, he seems to confuse these realms in the conduct of his own life. Even a dose of Cialis and the loving ministrations of the lubricious and unhappy wife of a colleague (Parker Posey) fail to solve either his physical or existential crisis. At one point he declaims, “I couldn’t remember the reason for living and when I did it wasn’t convincing.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Perhaps not. What precedes is not necessarily the cause. But Abe is spared by the notion of the perfect crime, the murder of a disreputable judge. And the murder works better than any drug to restore his zest for life and in particular his ability to fuck. “I feel I’ve accomplished something wonderful and that my life has meaning,” he says. The philosophical loophole, of course, lies in the fact that the perfect crime has little to do with making the world a better place, and a lot into shoring up Abe’s waning life force. Emma Stone playing, Jill, the student who is smitten with Abe, begins to get an idea of what is happening when she discovers a copy of Crime and Punishment and realizes soon after (when an innocent man is charged with the crime) that the existential act “opens the door to murder.” The philosophy however pithy is inexorable and drives the movie to its perhaps overly neatly packaged conclusion. One thing seems to be certain, from the director’s point of view murder is more effective than Cialis. The poster shot which shows a silhouette of Gabe standing on a rock over looking water and bathed in a wedge of blinding sunlight brilliantly captures the helplessness and solitude of the human creature.

Irrational Man?

What a brilliant idea to use a primer on existentialism, that first appeared in l958, William Barrett’s Irrational Man, as the title for a movie! There are the famous Alvy Singer quips from Annie Hall, “I had heard Commentary and Dissent had merged to form Dysentery ” and  “I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics exam, you know. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” However, Irrational Man may be a highpoint for Woody Allen. To hell with the movie and whether or not you’re going to like Parker Posey. The title alone says it all! Nietzsche for instance believed that man was basically irrational. The absence of moral categories which prefigures Freud’s unconscious is the underpining of his famous essay Beyond Good and Evil, which perhaps Allen will use as the title of his next film/symposium, if he doesn’t co-op Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.  As we learn in Philosophy 101, existence precedes essence lies at the heart of the existentialist mantra. Humans are defined by their acts rather than some kind of noumenal ideal form. But how will this apply to Allen’s current Education Sentimentale? Allen’s characters and ideas have always come hot off the Freudian analytic couch. Can we count on this latest examination of the human heart taking a more cognitive,  even behavioral twist?

Let’s Get it Over With

Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. during the Mercury-Atlas 6 Spaceflight

“Let’s Get It Over With”--it’s the new game show for those who don’t like to play games. With all the anticipation and anxiety conferred on almost all human activity, it becomes increasingly incumbent on the modern harried cosmopolitanite to get things over with. It’s great fun to look back with a kind of nostalgie de la boue at all the miserable experiences thrown at you by life (marriage for instance, can be defined as being in the trenches with the one you love). But it’s a lot greater to look back on it from the death bed then to actually have to endure the constant territorial struggles. Sex is another one. Hubba hubba, everyone one is supposedly hot to trot, but are we going to forget that in order to have sex you have to undress in front of stranger? Eventually you develop a certain familiarity, but remember familiarity breeds contempt. When it comes to sex, it’s always that first night of passion that everyone looks back fondly on. If only it were what it’s cracked up to be and there are some who can only say, if only it worked. Woody Allen spoke for all anxious lovers in Annie Hall, when he proclaimed to Diane Keaton that they should kiss and get it over with before repairing to a deli. Buddhists say desire is the beginning of suffering. Make a list. How many things make you so nervous that you have contemplated not even doing them at all? How many times have you gotten out of bed at the beginning of a day’s worth of activities that are generally considered to be fun and thought to yourself I’d rather be dead?