Marky Mark in his guise as scantily clad Calvin Klein model had kept me "entertained" (well, he helped me entertain myself) for many, many, many an hour in my late teens. He was my go-to when my fucking dial-up modem was just too damn slow. Our relationship was one sided but beautiful. Even Kate Moss couldn't come between us.
I got obsessive. The Funky Bunch helped a bit. They prolonged those good vibrations... The Basketball Diaries got a good going over... but it was never enough.
That's what Boogie Nights promised me. For me, PTA was nothing more than an enabler. He was my avenue to more sweet, sweet, Marky. That view of PTA lasted about two minutes into the insane single tracking shot that opens Boogie Nights. The excitement I felt by the time the object of my affection appeared on screen bussing drinks in the club was well and truly swallowed by my elation that classic Hollywood had returned and that it was priming to tell the story of its own downfall through a less-than-socially-acceptable lens.
Okay, I'm overstating it. I'm not above personal mythologising. All that did come to pass but I wasn't quite so quick to recognise it. Hell, even the cast weren't aware of what was going on while they were caught up shooting their scenes surrounded by actual porn stars, lines of coke, mini-shorts, frizzed hair and rollerskates. Seeing the film again now (and on the big screen) confirms that is exactly what PTA was shooting for.
And, if you'll excuse my turn of phrase, he delivered a 155 minute long money shot.
The porn landscape of Boogie Nights is a world away from the one that presses our buttons now, or the one in whose buttons we press. And while that x-rated nostalgia that seeps through PTA's film provides a culture-shifting context to the A Star is Born trajectory of Marky’s young Eddie Adams and to the disintegration of the family that forms around him, it is easy to forget that pornography, in any form, hasn't always been just on the other side of a touch screen.
My first porn, at least the material I can first remember, was a rain damaged magazine thrown in the bushes of our local park. Back then there were so many vacant blocks in our suburb that it was pretty hard to distinguish park from undeveloped bushland and back then, without fear of paedophiles, we were allowed to roam free until dark. We'd play 20/20, we'd build cubby houses, and we'd secretly sneak off to ogle large breasted women printed on rippled, caterpillar-eaten, no-longer-glossy paper.
We'd find them. Find somewhere to stash them. Go back to visit them until some other horny kid had the dubious luck of uncovering them.
I don't remember jerking off out there. To be honest, I'd hazard that I hadn't discovered how all that worked at that stage. So it was just an exercise in rebellious titillation.
We don’t see this in Mark Wahlberg’s Eddie Adams. Our introduction to him, though smothered in ridiculous boyishness, is very much an introduction to a sexually active kid. He may indulge in literal bed bouncing (and who could resist that grin) but it is made perfectly clear that he’s already well-established in the sack. Like he says to his older girlfriend, “Everyone is blessed with one special thing.”
By the time Burt Reynold’s porn director Jack Horner (good name) latches on to him at the end of that tracking shot, he’s already primed. He’s already seen Jack’s films. He’s already flopped out his abundant schlong to paying voyeurs. It doesn’t take too much to pull him into the adult entertainment industry. Not that that should take anything away from the overtly calculated grooming Jack sets in play to get Eddie and his impressive tool into his stable.
“I think Burt [Reynolds] was like, “What the fuck are these people doing?” [But] he just went with the flow. He had no choice.” – Luis GuzmánI love the mythology that built up around Boogie Nights (and if you are keen to dig deeper, the now defunct Grantland’s ‘Livin’ Thing: An Oral History of ‘Boogie Nights’ by By Alex French and Howie Kahn is must read stuff). If we’re talking grooming, PTA’s grooming of Reynolds, with all its ups and downs, is a story for the ages.
Young turk director. Hardened, old school, old hat movie star. Risky material. Clash of sizeable egos.
Reynolds may not have had much faith in his performance or the material to hand but PTA’s calibrated direction and his capture of what must have been substantial coverage (one gets the sense that there were many, many films that could have been cut together from the shoot) reveals an almost too-precocious master plan. Jack’s easily-mistaken-for-attraction advances to Eddie, the predatorial ease with which he ingratiates himself, the sugary ego-fluffing, and the Machiavellian effortlessness with which he deploys those around him are all played to perfection.
The beauty in Jack’s play for Eddie is that Reynolds’ creepiness is so seductive, especially when cut against Eddie’s stark, unfulfilling, sexless home life.
I was raised on rock solid suburban morality, which is to say sex wasn't talked about at home. My parents weren't particularly affectionate to each other and, bar my father's penchant for cooking pancakes naked, flesh was an abstract thing. There may not have been too much affection in the house, but there was certainly not the almost ridiculously vehement puritanism of Eddie’s mother (though I could never begrudge Joanna Gleason her over the top performance, especially not when it gives Wahlberg so violent a foil to play his angsty teen against).
By the time my hormones started to kick in, I was reduced to jerking off to the underwear models of Target catalogues (I actually had favourites). I did keep an analogue wank-bank of newspaper and magazine clippings. New material was had to come by. I remember once "borrowing" a friend's school diary because she'd stuck a cut out of the Manpower Australia strippers on the inside cover. It wasn't one of my proudest moments.
Amongst all this, Marky's career making CK spread held pride of place. It served me well.
It is not something I consider often but the repressive pressure of sexuality in our home lives is so omnipresent that it is almost taken for granted in our lives. It starts young and we’re forced to keep it under wraps until we’re out from under-wing. This is doubly true for homosexual sexuality. That wank-bank of mine was kept in covers, under clothes in drawers. As innocuous as those cut-outs were, a stack of semi-nude men was pretty incriminating if found. Compared to Eddie’s room, hung with busty women, Ferraris and Bruce Lee (basically the expression of everything I wasn’t), it is no wonder I struggled with sexual expression. Any expression really. My bedroom was a bit of a blank slate.
It is that overt expression of self that makes Eddie’s bedroom the perfect stage for his final confrontation with his mother. And given Boogie Nights’ preoccupation with both sex and family, it is a scene that provides a perfect pivot point for PTA. Eddie’s mother’s night-lit, angry repression literally fades into Jack’s open-armed, fleshy pool party. Eddie trades one family for another.
And all is suddenly right in his world.
Boogie Nights is a film structured, rather daringly, around set pieces. If you took a stopwatch to its tracking shots and extended montages, I hazard you’d have clocked up over half of its substantial run time. It’s an approach that many attempt and few manage to pull of effectively. Where PTA stands out from the crowd is in his ability to keep a handle on the abundance of narrative threads that dance and dart across the audience’s line of sight.
The film’s opening stedicam shot not only situates us in Maurice’s nightclub in the San Fernando Valley, it also introduces us to the film’s protagonists. It is there, across that three minute take, that we meet Maurice (Luis Guzman), Jack, Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), Buck and Becky (Don Cheadle and Nicole Ari Parker), Rollergirl (Heather Graham) and of course Eddie.
It’s a tour de force opening, but it pales in comparison to the character-driven fluidity of Eddie’s welcome into Jack’s family. Where PTA introduced us to the film’s cast in Hot Traxx, around the pool he gives them life. 15 minutes. Eight mini-scenes tumbling over each other to create a beautifully self-contained fantasy world. We get to see how everyone fits together (Eddie and Reed’s first meeting is almost touching in its romantic comedy), how they ingratiate themselves (Maurice's pestering for a porn role), how they are trying to find their place in the world (Buck’s ongoing struggle with his image is beautifully set off against Becky’s “chocolate love” moment), how they lust after each other (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tight tank-topped, ‘You Sexy Thing’ entrance as the eternally drooling Scotty is his enduring gift to cinema), how they have managed to isolate themselves (the understated tragedy of Amber missing the call from her son) and how the underbelly is constantly threatening to drag them all under (the overdose of the Colonel’s girl is a particular gut-punch).
And then there’s that underwater dive.
He is, essentially, the only overtly queer element in an exceptionally queer film. His awkward hero worship of Eddie is a palate cleanser after the profit-driven fawning of both Jack and The Colonel (“May I see your cock… Why, thank you Eddie.”) And though he is a desperate, needy and pretty unattractive as a character, he carries a whole lot of heart. He’s was also the most accessible point of association for the young, self-conscious, uncertain gay boy that I was at the time. I want to give him a hug. Just like I’d like to go back in time and give the 20 year old version of me a hug.
The other character actor who bears mentioning here is William H. Macy as production manager Little Bill. The arc he shares with his porn star wife (played by real life porn star Nina Hartley) is the PTA’s bookend to porn’s heyday in the Valley. It is during the pool scene, the most ebullient expression of that heyday, we get their story’s most tragi-comic moment. A very public fuck, which Macy’s long suffering husband isn’t a part of.
It is a frustrating moment for Little Bill and a frustrating moment for his wife (who is seemingly pushing him to man up) but it is also a moment reminiscent of high school, where even the slightest hint of sex could create an almost instantaneous audience. A group of boys would huddle around someone bag, they'd claw eagerly through the pages of some god awful mag, there'd be some excruciating adolescent posturing about how they'd seen bigger tits before or how they'd do this or that to this one or that one (even though they'd never gotten close to any of that to anyone).
I'd hang about for as long as I had to to keep up the charade but it didn't really hold much interest for me.
None of it did really. I’d bottled all that away. Buried it deep. If you were around when I recounted the story of the first gay mag I ever purchased, you’ve already heard how that purchase popped all that back to life. It was out of that magazine that I snipped my first mail order coupon free and with much excited trepidation filled it out and posted it off. A couple of weeks later I received from the UK a copy of The Chain Reaction, a softcore version of a hardcore porno from Bel Ami, the Czech studio that was to be my primary window into man on man sex for the next few years.
Somehow in those early days I managed to find a way to consume my favoured porn without letting go of my diehard romanticism. My Bel Ami phase was marked by a determined naiveté with respect to the mechanics of the porn industry. Certainly, and I argued this at the time with university professors who lectured on the matter, the gay porn world (at least the clean cut quarter of it that I frequented) didn't work off the degrading power play of straight porn. Everyone looked to be having fun. And what hot Czech guy wouldn't kill for the opportunity to fuck around with other hot Czech guys in exotic European locales? They were getting some and getting paid for it.
I eagerly accepted the façade.
Boogie Nights makes a point of playing with that façade. It delights in it but it also strips back the veneer to reveal the grubbing money grabbing underneath. It is a slow strip though. Jack talks a big game. He has dreams for the fledgling industry. He wants to see it take off. It is this dream that he lays out to Eddie during his seduction. Art. Acting. Stardom.
I don't wanna make a film where they show up
But compare Jack’s dreams to the run sheet Little Bill reads out before the shoot and it is pretty clear the gulf between artistic ambition and the artistic capacity of, well, just about everyone involved. The shoot sounds exactly like every porn film ever made, complete with accidental girl on girl action.
(reading from script)
Okay. Set up is . . . here we go:
1.) Amber talking to Becky
They make the phone call to the agency to
send over some actors.
2.) Enter Reed to audition for Amber.
They go at it. Becky just watches.
3.) Becky goes to the bathroom to jack-off
and is interrupted by Amber. They get into it.
It is not a complete washout though. Boogie Nights’ early porn scenes are marked by immense tenderness and refreshing frankness. Julianne Moore’s Amber Waves, the pseudo-mother of the family, is to be praised for that. I don’t like to throw about monikers like “brave” or “fearless” over performances but Moore’s performance here, at an early point in her career and in danger of being pigeonholed in the industry, is both. Unselfconscious would also be an appropriate descriptor. But these are labels that could be applied to her acceptance of the role in the first place, what she makes of it is another thing altogether.
On set with Eddie (now new-baptised Dirk Diggler after his neon-lit vision), Amber is a nurturing Jocasta, mother and lover. Moore slides through the screenplay’s sex talk like butter. Nothing registers as unwholesome or risqué (“Come on my tits if you can, okay?” may as well be, “Can you pick me up a litre of milk?”) and she becomes all the more motherly for it. It’s a fucked up family scene that is only reinforced by the endearing naiveté of Dirk’s wide-eyed eagerness to please (“Let's try and do it really sexy?”)
And he pleases. He pleases Amber, who asks him to come inside her. He pleases the crew who tilt their heads with jealous, dispassionate awe (and arousal) as he de-pants. The only one not pleased is Little Bill who misses his money shot.
That is until Dirk comes to the rescue: “I can do it again if you need a close-up.”
The carefree air of Dirk’s first porn shoot is 16mm fantasia, all light bleeds and pink flesh. It resonates because for a long time this was my view of porn because that genre endured in the gay world. I guess it warped my view of porn somewhat. Looking back now, my championing of the lusty, care-free bonking of the Czech teen porn that filled my early twenties, feels similarly naïve.
Having seen the wider world before stepping into my queer bubble, how forcibly it is aimed at the dead straight male gaze. I mail-ordered a lot of straight porn in the early days. Not completely by choice. It as a discount deal that I chucked in with the guys I used to teach with. Buy five get the sixth free or something like that. Nasty video porn sent to four toey guys in the desert straight from our nation's capital.
It wasn't the most pleasant introduction to straight sexuality. We didn't go as far as jerking off together to our purchases (I have it on good authority that such setups are pretty common *hot*), though I have sat watching my mates cheer on some unattractive guy blast out his money shot to shouts of, "Get it in her eyes," an uncanny echo of the original screenplay where, during Eddie’s off-camera scene with Rollergirl, Jack’s direction was to “Aim it at her face”.
Her response was to be, “Fuck you, Jack.”
Having seen a few vids (and having had scanned countless catalogues for straight porn with half decent looking guys), Dirk Diggler stands out as an almost fairy tale anachronism. Of course, by the time we were ordering in VHS cassettes by the bag load, Ron Jeremy’s democratising of porn was well established. Unattractive guys buying porn wanted to live in a fantasy world where other guys as unattractive as they were could get the hot chicks. Women were available for the taking, no matter what you looked like. And if you weren’t around to take them, they’d get on with each other just to keep you happy.
There was little there to cater for gay men or straight women. Even gay women were left out at sea when it came to the desperately unerotic woman-on-woman scenes (Seriously, are women really that careless with milk?)
At the height of their optimism, Dirk and Jack aim for more. PTA echoes the sense of promise of the late ‘70s, a time when erotic cinema stood on the cusp of actual legitimacy. Films like Deep Throat and The Opening of Misty Beethoven (incidentally noted by PTA as the first porno he remembers watching at age 9) would play in actual cinemas and receive actual reviews in the actual media. Dirk’s Brock Landers character, a suitably lo-fi rip-off of the buddy cop movies of the time, is born out of his desire to curtail the increasingly poor treatment of women in porn.
Like all the retro porn in Boogie Nights, the film elicits laughter now (Brock and his sidekick Chest Brockwell are preposterous, especially with John C. Reilly on hand) but the sentiment is solid. These guys were attempting, very earnestly, to cling to something good in the industry. Their successes (again played out over a wonderfully soundtracked montage - this time packed with imported Italian nylon, magic tricks and star signs) are punctuated with an industry-lifting manifesto from Dirk. He wants what he does to make the world a better place.
Of course, the ‘80s arrive to shit all over that, and Little Bill is there to punctuate it with a finalising bullet.
The end of the ‘70s is PTA’s next major pivot. It’s the light and dark moment. The tipping point. Most importantly it is the point that Jack is confronted with the future: video.
Video arrives in the form of Floyd Gondolli, played by Philip Baker Hall, and his new-blood stars. Even as they stand in the lounge room you can feel the energy and optimism being sucked out of the film. They’re colourless and fuzzy edged. Clean cut and dead-eyed. Floyd argues commercial concerns: video is the future; it is cheap. Theatres were already converting to video projectors. Jack is a hold out in danger of becoming a dinosaur.
JACK
You know if it looks like shit
and sounds like shit,
it probably is shit --
It’s an interesting parallel, one almost strong enough to justify the film’s existence as a polemic for artistic endeavour over commercial gain. It is a parallel constantly reinforced by PTA’s old school methods, his nods to the ‘70s (and decent ‘80s) Hollywood of Coppola, Scorsese, Altman and Friedkin, and the height of the precipice he throws everyone off.
Things fall apart. And things fall apart quickly. As if the tide turns in an instant, Dirk’s optimism is drowned in misogyny and violence. Reed’s comments in Amber’s documentary profile of Dirk make light of the shift but the film suddenly seems as murky as the video it is shot on.
REED
Violence is a bad thing.
But when you see violence in films... it's... you know...
if movies... films caused violence...
we'd be able to wipe out violence tomorrow.
Boom. No more films.
That's fine with me. I'll find something else to do.
I'll fuck on my own time.
You know, I got other interests.
I'm a magician.
The passion is gone. The women are more plastic. There’s just no more joy.
And along with the violence comes the drugs. Barely a moment passes between Amber giving Dirk his first line (three years into their relationship, if you can believe it) and Dirk donning an unattractive headband and tweaking at Jack.
Jacked up upstart. Braggadocio-prone father figure. Physical violence. Another case of art imitating life, though this time Marky’s stepping in for PTA (the director and his star came to blows on set). The scene is a cracker, not just for the conviction of Wahlberg’s delivery but for the shell shocked faces of everyone else around him. It really does feel like a family breakdown and with Dirk storming out, they all lose something.
The first thing to go is taste. With Reed in tow, Dirk’s music career is the sort of trainwreck only the ‘80s could throw up. PTA nails it but, honestly, I probably even mention the horror but for this little titbit of info that popped up in my reading…
“I wrote Feel the Heat - it's fucking good! You Got The Touch is actually a song I found on the soundtrack to a movie called The Transformers. Remember those things? They were robots that used to turn into trucks and helicopters. I saw the soundtrack in this 99-cents bin and I thought, "I've got to have this. This is too good."”- Paul Thomas Anderson in Total Film, February 1998.
The taste was also sucked out of the porn shoots. With Dirk gone, Johnny Doe takes on the mantle as the barely renamed Rock Harders and the violence ramps up. Shit just gets nasty. It is an aesthetic that lasted well into the nineties. Pre-internet porn had a longer shelf life, I guess. It is this grainy, washed out, short haired jackrabbiting that I remember well. This was my porn era really. Unfortunately.
By the time I left the desert I’d inherited the VHS tapes of all the other teachers as they’d moved on. I ended up with a stack of about 30 well-worn cassettes that my mother decided needed to go into the bin, much to my father and brothers dismay. What I didn’t give up was the stash of gay porn I’d collected in the intervening years. It was a sizeable stash: Lukas’ Story and its various sequels, Frisky Summer and its sequels, a fair bit of skater porn, some prison stuff, some cowboy stuff – it was basically x-rated Village People by that stage.
I still remember those tapes affectionately. I honestly can’t remember what I did with them. They went the way of the video recorder.
Even that had a shelf life.
If the onset of the ‘80s started the downturn, PTA takes everyone to a new low with his final montage, a three thread mash-up that pre-empts (and, in my not-so-humble opinion, completely overshadows) the much-fêted intersection scene in Magnolia. Dirk is on the street turning tricks for drug money; Rollergirl is hanging with Jack in the back of a limo, Ron Jeremy style; and Buck is cluelessly out buying doughnuts with his pregnant girlfriend.
The montage is one of PTA’s most powerful. It’s the film’s definitive souring. The metronomous knell of the bells. The disastrous escalation of both Dirk and Rollergirl’s exchanges, both desperately out of character, both looking exceedingly worse for wear. Their faces are no longer kissed by the ‘70s summer. There’s no longer any joy in their sexuality. Nor is there any passion on the part of the other participants.
The violence is bleak. This is porn catching up to them, yet it isn’t a moral statement on the industry so much as it is a moral statement on society. For PTA, porn isn’t good or bad. Porn stars aren’t good or bad. The porn and the porn stars are just a reflection of our desires. If porn is bad in the ‘80s, it is because we were bad in the ‘80s. Porn just gives us the most truthful expression of that.
That’s an interesting point to extrapolate, since the democratisation of porn didn’t end with Ron Jeremy. Rollergirl’s ‘70s innocence would have slid past this seedy stomping ground. Technology has progressed. We have progressed. Sexual mores have progressed. And, feeding off each other, we’ve arrived at a place that would be altogether unrecognisable even to these guys as the plummet towards it.
I’m no sociologist, so you probably shouldn’t look to me for any insight into the effects of omnipresent porn on our desires, on our view of each other, on our expectations and our performance. I can tell you that we’re avid consumers. That we get access from a younger age and we’re not having to hang out in the local park with a raggy magazine to find it. In fact, even by the time I gave up teaching, I was needing to teach 12 year olds how to avoid porn on the internet. Art is starting to turn on to this. It is certainly something that needs to be interrogated.
Back in the Valley though, that’s still an uncertain future and PTA has taken us to the edge of that porn abyss. Realistically, that is the film. It’s done. Almost every one of the characters has reached his or her lowest point. They’ve bottomed out. He doesn’t need to push it any further.
But he does....
If there is a more perfect, more unnecessary in American cinema than Boogie Nights’ “Long Way Down (One Last Thing)” coda? It doesn’t need to be there but it is impossible to cut. It is a masterpiece in its own right. It gives frame to one of the most impeccable performances of the ‘90s. It holds PTA’s most exceptional use of music (in a career marked by exceptional use of music). It has nothing to add. And neither do I.
“Alfred Molina’s house with the kid with the firecrackers. That’s the most tense scene I’ve ever witnessed, and it goes on forever.” – William H. Macy
So, Dirk ends up back in the arms of his family. His real family. They’ve sorted out their issues. Buck’s got his kid, his stereo warehouse and a contemporary (!?!) look. Dirk and Rollergirl are seemingly back on the good side of the business under Jack’s fatherly hand.
And Amber’s gone legit. She’s directing. It happens. Actually, it was pretty recently that I saw that one of Julianne Moore’s films, Still Alice was co-directed by Wash Westmorland. The name rang some faintly orgasmic bells. A quick google search and it turns out he was the same Wash West who was celebrated back in 1998 for Naked Highway, one of the artier films in my neck high stack of x-rated gay porn. It turns out he hit porn sets while he was researching for his film The Fluffer and thought he’d give it a go. Small world.
---
And, as Philip Seymour Hoffman says in Punch Drunk Love, “That’s that.”
Well, almost. There’s still the money shot. The much talked about perfect cock. The prosthesis Marky pulls flops out of his Miami Vice suit. After the build up. After the anticipation. After all those years jacking off to those newsprint CK ads. We get the come down.
I think PTA says it best. I can’t really put it any better. He references two of my favourite films of the era, Jaws and E.T., and he nails the sentiment.
Here he is with from an interview with Matt Grainger in Cinemattractions in February 1998:
MG: A lot of people think that when you see the shark in Jaws, it's too much - the shark in the mind of the audience is a lot more powerful than the rubber shark on-screen. Did you have any similar misgivings about revealing Dirk's penis at the end of Boogie Nights?
PTA: No. You know what, I did, but when we were shooting it I kept thinking, this is exactly like seeing the dinosaur in Jurassic Park or seeing the shark in Jaws or seeing E.T. for the first time. It's a reveal.
MG: That's a scary analogy.
PTA: I like the E.T. one, that was really a good one - I like that! And the reality is, when I wrote the movie and when we shot it, I wasn't sure what to do - whether we should see it right away, like within the first forty-five minutes - get it out of the way, sort of mortalise it - or whether it should stay to the end. It was never a question about whether or not to show it - it was about whether we show it earlier or whether we save it till the end. And we shot it both ways. You know, we shot it early on and then we shot it at the end. And then in the very first assembly of the movie it was the first thing I took out. I said, we're waiting till the end - it was just really clear to me. And the funny thing is, when I saw it - when I really sat back and watched it for the first time without seeing it early in the movie, I sat there not caring! I'd gone through the whole movie and I'd gone through it emotionally without having to see the dick! I just loved the silliness of twisting it all around, and seeing it at the end, and not caring. I don't know if I can really verbalize that well, I'm trying to explain... but I just thought it was funny to me as the guy that wrote it and shot every frame and sat through my movie one time and didn't even care to see it at the end, and didn't even know it was coming. And then got there, and kind of had this weird reaction, like a true audience member would almost - just in my gut, going "Oh fuck - it's just this stupid piece of meat - what have we been talking about the whole time?" And thought that it was kind of funny. And interesting. I still don't really understand why I did it, to tell you the truth.
Boogie Nights is #95 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.
You can track my progress here.
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