For about a week, at the time of writing, double-decker buses around Britain have been emblazoned with adverts for the new American comedy film Zack and Miri Make a Porno (pictured, below right). The film's title is written in bold, orange-yellow capital letters almost a metre high, like you'd see at a funfair. The word "PORNO" is particularly large. The typeface is similar to that used for Toy Story.
In the US, the film's posters feature black and white stick drawings. The words "make a porno" are printed in a thin, serifed typeface, rather smaller than the words "Zack and Miri." The producers, the Weinstein Company, who greenlit the movie on the basis of its title alone (according to Entertainment Weekly), originally submitted the "funfair" branding to the Motion Picture Association of America for approval, but were knocked back, so came up with the more discreet version.
Never before in my lifetime has the word "porno" been so present in the space that I share with my fellow city dwellers. Never before has the word been presented in such a friendly way. Never before has it been so close to the graphics of childhood pleasure. As you can probably tell, I am angry. But have I the right to be?
By living close to people unlike myself, I inevitably expect to see messages of which I disapprove. A guy has just come into the café where I am writing this wearing a T-shirt that says "Nice Legs. When Do They Open?" which, for me, chills the air for a moment. Every few years, the Orange Order marches through a park near me banging its drums. I do not claim the right to be consulted about such things. Nor am I angry at what some call the growing sexualisation of western society. This is far too vague a phrase. I would not object if the buses carried images of naked people, though I reserve the right to do so if the poses of the bodies or the semantics of the image were degrading. No, it's the word PORNO on buses that's got my goat. Especially as it's in the service of a medium—film—on which I dote.
What happened next, however, was the tsunami of internet sex. Its omnipresence led to the classification relaxations that made the above films possible. But it also set in motion a normalisation of porn that has resulted in the buses on my street carrying the word in kiddie speak.
Serious cinema took notice of this "pornisation" of life and conversations. The 2006 film Destricted was a compilation of short sex films made by artists. The most inventive was the segment by Matthew Barney (Mr Bjork) in which, naked, covered in feathers, flowers in his mouth and a turnip sticking out of his arse, he is hoisted into the underbelly of a huge deforesting machine. If this was porn, it was wildly surreal, funny, wince-making iconoclastic porn.
On a very different note, American filmmaker Larry Clark's segment in Destricted held a mirror up to the sexuality of the internet generation. In it, Clark advertises for young, inexperienced lads to have sex on camera with a female porn star. We see their screen tests. Most of the lads want to withdraw before climax and ejaculate outside the woman's body. Have men always put such an emphasis on seeing their own orgasm? I suspect not. The visuality of online porn explains this new element of display and ego.
What Clark's realist film shows is that, unlike our naked bodily selves, porn is "specialist" and contentious. It's a matter for adults. There's a narrowness to it, a risk of dejection. It's an experiment played with the self, which involves risks—to a person's erotic imagination and their sexual civility. It also, of course, risks the major moral crime of encouraging coercion or worse in its production.
The "transfer" of porn from the nation's computer screens, conversations and imaginations to buses seems but a small shift. But porn is a dirty, specialist, not-for-everyone word. It and references to it should be classified in our cinemas and confined to the neon quarters of our urban spaces.
As to the actual film—well, I have just paid £7.50 to watch Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It's a potty-mouthed The Full Monty. The title characters are so broke that they decide to make a sex film with each other and sell it to their friends. The dialogue is full of cock, pussy, blow and swallow; everyone's obsessed with the sex they're getting or not getting. But the film itself is humble. It knows how pathetic such obsession is. Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, who play Zack and Miri, are 26 and 34 respectively, yet their characters feel like they're 20, tops. They're porno dafties, which I found funny. Maybe their arrested development explains the childish advertising. If so, the ad's effect is no less bitter, and stupid as well as greedy.
