Annabel Continued...

So here is the deal, it may get a little complicated, and I probably won’t go through and actively edit this enough to make it perfectly clear. The most interesting part of the movie, at least in my opinion, is when the documentary maker appears to hand Ron Jeremy and the producer of Annabel’s Gangbang a piece of Annabel’s collegiate writing. They read it over and both appear pretty stunned, Ron especially, commenting first on how different she sounds on paper from what she says in person. The director says the most incredible thing in the whole film:

“Her intellect, her persona, is that of a delicate flower. Doesn’t that in itself become more obscene knowing that she can write and think like a human being, in fact, better than most.”

Wow, it blows me away. Seriously it does, out of all the speeches and interviews and college classrooms shown in this film, there is no question that the best line in the whole movie is spoken by a 50-something porn producer in a crappy hotel room. We will go through a couple parts about the quote and talk about it, probably in relation to Lacan, but lets note first of all, that it is exactly in contradiction to anything like Concordia's naked argument and, depending on how we see Ms. Chong’s comments, completely contradicts the on-face message of the film. This fact should become clear as we go through the statement itself.

First off, her body is in no way involved in the statement. The only lines which precede the quote I have above are discussing the fact that when she is in the spotlight she gets too nervous to talk in the same way that she writes. We have her intellect and her persona. Now, obviously, the fact that she is a porn star involved in the World’s Biggest GangBang is the assumed background here, so we won’t ignore that. The point of this fact is that it changes what we may assume is the object of the second sentence (at least it’s the second sentence as I have written the movie out) from her body or the pornographic material to “her intellect, her persona.” It is these elements that are referred to by the “that” in “Doesn’t THAT itself become more obscene.”

Reading her body back into the statement we can add the context of the quote in. Here is how I would formulate it: “Doesn’t the fact that the woman involved in the world’s biggest gangbang is smarter than most people make her (not the video, not her body, not the sex acts involed) even more obscene.” There is no question, none at all, that if read this way the quote is directly against any sort of project by which the incorporation of nudity and intellectualism subverts the demeaning tones of the sexual element. In fact, this quote is pretty much a straight turn. Nudity and sexuality are not brought into line, are not transformative, are not less exploitative towards women, but intellect is sexualized and obscenity dominates her thought.

Without going into the Lacanian blah-bitty-blah (I really like that spelling of blabbity blah by the way) that I plan to do shortly, there are some other ways we can tell this pretty easily. To start, Annabel’s gangbang is the best selling porno video of all time, selling more than 40,000 copies at the time this documentary was made and still going strong. That is apparently about 3 times as many copies as what would be considered a runaway blockbuster in the pornographic world. Annabel’s popularity in the intellectual arena happens to be a whole hell of a lot lower than her popularity in the world of masturbatory videography. What she interpreted as a project to show feminine involvement in the sexual act has become the most whacked-off-to thing ever created. Furthermore, the end of the film (though there are some sad moments) is ultimately not Annabel’s success in the academy. She does graduate from USC, but ultimately elects to return to the world of pornography. Where she apparently still resides. The conversation she has with the documentary maker at the end of the film is revealing. She is in the car smoking and speaking about how she feels going back to work, 1 year or more since she last made porn.

“Yeah, I am feeling nervous. I am more nervous now than I am, like, the first time I did it. I got nothing to prove, right, nothing to live up or down to, so. I guess, hell, I’ll just go in and have fun. But now, I mean, you remember that bitchy phone call, you know, “I AM ANNABEL CHONG!” Today I am just sitting here thinking “Am I Annabel Chong? Can I still do it? Do I still have what I need? After all that has happened, you know, have I once and for all lost my balls?””

The attitude we are seeing here is no question different than what we had back in the days where the woman responding to the “reverse patriarchy” went to get fucked on screen for fun. She explicitly compares for us how she feels today versus how she felt back in those days. Why is nervousness a component of the story now? The next sentence answers this question, SHE HAS NOTHING TO PROVE!! Without the ideological element of the equation there a “regular” reaction to pornography arises. She doesn’t have anything she has to live either up or down to and only then is she nervous. Pornography is more threatening, involves more questions about identity and the like, sans the intellectual bullshit.

Okay, I have to keep this in small chunks. I can do like 40ish hours of work a week, but Wal Mart has eaten up most of those hours. Serious preliminary writing about film will have to wait. On the brightside, we got a section of a paper/book coming along here. Now I just need season 3 of CSI on DVD.

Peace,

MB-K