A star is porn: Corpulence, comedy, and the homosocial cult of adult film star Ron Jeremy

Camera Obscura

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 115-146

  Shelton, Emily ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950233991     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-17-3_51-115     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. Mark Hughes, "The Man Show: Ron Jeremy is Riding the Wave of KY Jelly to Fame," Dallas Observer, 10 May 2001.
2. See www.ronjeremy.com.
3. Qtd. in Susan Faludi, "The Money Shot," New Yorker, 13 October 1995, 70.
4. Qtd. in Nick Ravo, "My Dinner with Ron," Salon, April 1997, available atwww.salon.com/april97/media/media2970402. html.
5. Richard Dyer argues that stardom is always intertextual, in the sense that stars' symbolic meaning extends far beyond their image; not only are they always "themselves," but also a series of products that are circulated, distributed, and consumed by the audience and industry that collaborate in their manufacture. See Dyer's Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: British Film Institute, 1986)
6. Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1990).
7. For a variety of case studies on the ideology of stardom, see Christine Gledhill, ed., Stardom: Industry of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1991).
8. Doug Clark, "He's Not Really Bad Role Model, Porn Star Says," Spokane Spokesman-Review, 28 January 2001.
9. As William lan Miller describes it, "Disgust is there to prevent the activation of unconscious desire, or, more precisely, disgust is part of the very process of repression that makes such desires unconscious" (The Anatomy of Disgust [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], 109).
10. On Arbuckle and comedy, see J. P. Telotte's "Arbuckle Escapes," Journal of Popular Film and Television 15.4 (1988): 172-79.
11. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
12. Patricia Mellencamp, "Jokes and Their Relation to TV," in High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 337.
13. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 14, 16.
14. For this concept of the triangulated nature of modern homosociality, I am of course indebted to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in particular Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
15. Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
16. On the spectatorial dynamics of "live" sex, see Lauren Berlant, "Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material)," Feminist Studies, 21.2 (1995): 379-404;
17. John Champagne, "Stop Reading Films! Film Studies, Close Analysis, and Gay Pornography," Cinema Journal 36.4 (1997): 76-97;
18. Phillip Brian Harper, "Playing in the Dark: Privacy Public Sex, and the Erotics of the Cinema Venue," Camera Obscura 30 (1993): 92-111;
19. Linda Williams, "A Provoking Agent: The Pornography and Performance Art of Annie Sprinkle," in Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 302-24.
20. In particular, I have found Gertrud Koch's "The Body's Shadow Realm," in Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power, ed. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 22-45, one of the most rigorous analyses of the porn viewer's relentless "search for non-identity in sex," for a simulated experience that does not cheat one out of the real thing but rather mitigates the shock of potentially dangerous contact.
21. I was probably lucky to have found it at all, considering porn video's short shelf life. Most of the films in adult video stores have been produced in the last three years or so, with the exception of perennial favorites such as Deep Throat (dir. Gerard Damiano, US, 1972)
22. or Behind the Green Door (dir. Artie Michell, US, 1972). Quite a few of the older films can no longer be distributed because of pending litigation, mostly suits of copyright infringement. It is also fairly uncommon to find a date anywhere on a porn video or its packaging, perhaps not insignificantly On the one hand, porn is so perishable that an expiration date is redundant, and on the other, so immaterial that it appears to exist out of time, in the atemporal ephemera of fantasy.
23. On the carnivalesque, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
24. See Laura Kipnis, "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler," in Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
25. in Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove, 1996);
26. Constance Penley, "Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn," in While Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997), 89-112.
27. See, for example, Nancy Armstrong, "The Pornographic Effect: A Response," American Journal of Semiotics 7 (1990): 27-44;
28. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Plume, 1989);
29. Susan Gubar, "Representing Pornography," Critical Inquiry 13.4 (1987): 712-41.
30. The pioneering work of Linda Williams has been extremely important to my engagement with pornography, particularly her peerless deconstruction of porn as a cinematic genre. I consider my own argument, while respectfully different from hers in many respects, profoundly informed by her thinking. See in particular "Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the 'Carnal Density of Vision,'" in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 3-41;
31. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
32. In her response to Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon's theory of pornography, Frances Ferguson asks, "What do they accomplish by talking about what pornography does rather than about what pornography is?" See "Pornography: The Theory," Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 670. Lauren Berlant also critiques this projected "liveness" of pornography and its perceived "muscular," volitional threat to an ossified ideal citizenship.
33. See "Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material)," in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
34. See Richard Dyer on how the utopianism of entertainment - in his example, the musical - supports a strategy of disavowal that serves both ideological and nonideological ends. In other words, its nonrepresentational signs alert the viewer to the fact that this lovely fantasy is not real at all and that that is, in fact, what is so pleasurable about it (Entertainment and Utopia [New York: Routledge, 1992]).
35. Cindy Patton, "Visualizing Safe Sex," in Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 128.
36. On the role of television in constructing the domestic sphere of the twentieth century, see Lynn Spigel, "Television in the Family Circle: The Popular Reception of a New Medium," in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
37. Quoted in "The Money Shot: An Interview with Ron Jeremy," Onion, online archives, September 1999, available at avclub.theonion.com/ avclub3119/avfeature3119.html.
38. On the "cinema of attractions," see Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator," Art and Text 34 (1989): 31-45;
39. Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde," Wide Angle 8 (1996): 63-70;
40. Gunning, "From Obscene Films to High-Class Drama," in D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Silent Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991);
41. Gunning, "'Now You See It, Now You Don't': The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions" and "Primitive Cinema: A Frame-Up? Or, The Trick's on Us," both in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 71-84.
42. See Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990);
43. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
44. Linda Williams, "Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 507-34.
45. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 61.
46. On the relationship of dream work to the psychology of wit - in particular the economy of condensation - see Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905; New York: Dover, 1993).
47. In her Lacanian analysis of the semiotics of pornographic magazine photographs, Berkeley Kaite describes this triangulation of desire as a necessary inference, that "men [in these images] never touch or penetrate each other, except in a signifying chain: i.e. 'A' (male) touches 'B' (female) who touches 'C' (male)" (Pornography and Difference [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 80).
48. "Pornography is a prison writing in all senses, written against a limit, its triumph destined to be its power of contamination, its dissemination beyond that limit" (Susan Stewart, "The Marquis De Meese," in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991], 242).
49. For another potent intervention in the discourse on porn and fantasy, see Andrew Ross, "The Popularity of Pornography," in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).
50. Kipnis, Bound and Gagged, 95.
51. See also Lauren Berlant, "America, 'Fat,' the Fetus," in The Queen of America, 91: "[Fat] permits direct commentary on the embarrassment of public embodiment, it allows conjecture about desire, it brings perversity and compulsion into an unthreatening realm of controversial play."
52. On fat and cultural response, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon, "Divinity," Discourse 13.1 (1990-91): 12-39.