Consider the Lobster (3 page)

“Most of these guys become incredibly nervous when I come up to them,” veteran starlet Shane has explained. “I’ll put my arms around a guy and his whole body will be trembling. They pretty much do whatever I tell them to do.” The whole industry, now, has this oddly reversed equation—the consumers are the ones who seem ashamed or shy, while the performers are cocky and smooth and 100 percent pro.

It is no longer the 1980s, and the Meese Commission mentality that led to a major crackdown on video porn is long gone. Federal task forces and PTA outrage are now focused on the Internet and kiddie porn. But today’s adult industry is still hypersensitive about what it perceives as fascist attacks on its First Amendment freedoms. A specially prepared trailer now runs before many higher-end adult videos, right between the legal disclaimer on the product’s compliance with or exemption from 18 U.S.C §2257 and ads for phone services like 900-666-FUCK. Against shots of flowing flags and the Lincoln Memorial, a voiceover says stuff like:

Censorship goes against our Bill of Rights and the founding principles of this country. It is an attempt on the part of the government to legislate morality and to stifle free expression.
¹⁵
This new, “legal” morality is dangerous to all Americans. Vote for those who believe in limiting government intrusion into your personal affairs. Vote against government control of your life and home. Vote against censorship. Only you, the People, can keep the American ideal intact.

These trailers always say they’re sponsored by either the Adult Video Association or something called the Free Speech Coalition. Both organizations (and the extent to which the two are separate is unclear) are basically industry PACs. Porn, in other words, has taken the political lessons of the ’80s to heart; it is now a hard-lobbying political force no less than GM or RJR Nabisco.

Feminists of all different stripe oppose the adult industry for reasons having to do with pornography’s putative effects on women. Their arguments are well-known and in some respects persuasive. But certain antiporn arguments in the 1990s are now centered on adult entertainment’s alleged effects on the men who consume it. Some “masculists” believe that a lot of men get addicted to video porn in a way that causes grievous psychic harm. Example: An essayist named David Mura has a little book called
A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction,
which is a bit New Agey but interesting in places, e.g.:

At the essence of pornography is the image of flesh used as a drug, a way of numbing psychic pain. But this drug lasts only as long as the man stares at the image… . In pornographic perception, each gesture, each word, each image, is read first and foremost through sexuality. Love or tenderness, pity or compassion, become subsumed by, and are made subservient to, a “greater” deity, a more powerful force… . The addict to pornography desires to be blinded, to live in a dream. Those in the thrall of pornography try to eliminate from their consciousness the world outside pornography, and this includes everything from their family and friends or last Sunday’s sermon to the political situation in the Middle East. In engaging in such elimination the viewer reduces himself. He becomes stupid.

This kind of stuff might sound a little out-there, maybe, until one observes the eerie similarity between the eyes of males in strip clubs or stroke parlors and the eyes of people in their fifth hour of pumping silver dollars into the slot machines of the Sands’ casino, or maybe until one’s seen firsthand the odd kind of shock on the faces of CES patrons seeing performers now “in the flesh,” complete with chewing gum and chin-pimples and all the human stuff you never see—never want to see—in films.

Maybe just a little bit more here on the whole scene at the Adult CES, which is a lot more of a rub-elbows-type venue than the stylized Awards ceremony is going to end up being… . Mr. Harold Hecuba is deep in conversation with a marginal porn producer about one of his performers’ being sidelined with something called a “prolapsed sphincter,” which condition yr. corresps. decline to follow up on in any way. We are standing just west of a staff writer for
Digital Horizons
who’s dropped by to scope out the legendary scene in here again this year and is telling two presumed other tech writers that being around porn people always makes him feel like he’s been somehow astrally projected onto a cocktail napkin. It is also roughly now that Ms. Jasmin St. Claire is making an appearance at the Impressive Media booth in order to spell the starlet behind the counter, who is limping to the booth’s rear area; she (i.e., the limping starlet) has (reportedly) had to be sprayed with silicon to fit into her pants. The crowd at the Impressive Media venue immediately starts to enlarge. Jasmin St. Claire is wearing a red vinyl jacket-and-miniskirt ensemble. A porn starlet entering any kind of room or area has a distinctive energy about her—you turn your head to look even if you don’t seem to want to. It’s like watching a figure from a pinball machine illustration or high-concept comic book step out into 3-D and head your way. It turns out really to be possible to feel as though your eyeballs are protruding slightly from their sockets. What makes the whole thing so weird is that Jasmin St. Claire isn’t even all that pretty, at least not today. Her hair is dyed black in that cheap unreal Goth way, and she is so incredibly heavily made up that she looks like a crow. (She is also somewhat knock-kneed, plus of course has the requisite Howitzer-grade bust.) Ms. St. Claire is being escorted to the Impressive booth by two large men whose expressions are describable only as mug-shottish. This is another thing about porn starlets—they’re never alone. They’re always accompanied by at least one and sometimes as many as four flinty-eyed males. The impression is that of a very expensive thoroughbred being led onto the track under a silk blanket.

FYI, Ms. Jasmin St. Claire’s cult-celebrity status at the ’98 CES stems from her having broken the “World Gang Bang Record”
¹⁶
by taking on 300 men in a row in Amazing Pictures’ 1996
World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2
. Since most of these 300 men were amateur porn-fans who’d had only to fill out an application and produce an HIV all-clear from the DPH, she now enjoys an almost legendary populist appeal—“the People’s Porn Star”—and an enormous serpentine line of fans with cameras and autographable memorabilia has formed at the Impressive booth, which line Ms. St. Claire appears for the moment to be ignoring, because she and H. Hecuba, having exchanged double-cheek kisses, are now deep into some kind of tête-à-tête above the sockless Docksiders of the unconscious bald kid, who’s (the kid has) evidently been carried or trundled by pranksters unknown from the XPlor counter (right next door) to this one. Dick Filth—after your correspondents have remarked on how it’s kind of heartwarming that everyone in the porn industry all seem to be friends, even critics and performers—dishes an involved anecdote about how Jasmin St. Claire apparently once actually tried to
strangle
Harold Hecuba at an industry soirée a couple years ago, an anecdote which, if you’re interested, appears as FN
17
just below. Twenty feet away, over at XPlor, Mr. Farrel Timlake has meanwhile produced what is alleged to be the prototype and world’s only authorized Kenny
^®
Action Figure from the upcoming
South Park
merchandising line—fourteen inches tall, kind of heavy for a doll, w/ hood up and face obscured (not unlike F. Timlake’s own hood and face)—and is entertaining some of the IM crowd’s spillover by manipulating the doll’s limbs to simulate its “tok[ing] a bone.”

Not unlike urban gangs, police, carnival workers, and certain other culturally marginalized guilds, the US porn industry is occluded and insular in a way that makes it seem like high school. There are cliques, anticliques, alliances, betrayals, conflagratory rumors, legendary enmities, and public bloodlettings, plus involved hierarchies of popularity and influence. You’re either In or you’re not. Performers, being the industry’s fissile core, are of course In. Despite their financial power, studio execs and producers are not very In, and directors (especially those who’ve never undergone the initiation of having on-camera sex themselves) are less In than the performers. Film reviewers and industry journalists are even less In than execs; and nonindustry journalists are way, way non-In, almost as low-caste as the great mass of porn fans themselves (for which fans the Insider term is:
mook
¹⁸
).

The foregoing is meant to help explain how exactly your correspondents ended up in porn titan Max Hardcore’s personal suite at the Sahara and got to hang out in the suite’s living room with Max, certain of his crew, porn starlets Alex Dane and Caressa Savage, and two B-girls—which is to say that it was actually Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth who were invited to hang out in the suite on Friday afternoon, but yr. corresps. clung almost like papooses to their backs, and the burly MAXWORLD Production Assistant wasn’t quick enough about slamming the door.

So yr. corresps. were, for a couple hours, at least logistically speaking, In.

For a regular civilian male, hanging out in a hotel suite with porn starlets is a tense and emotionally convolved affair. There is, first, the matter of having seen the various intimate activities and anatomical parts of these starlets in videos heretofore and thus (weirdly) feeling shy about meeting them. But there is also a complex erotic tension. Because porn films’ worlds are so sexualized, with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse—a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake—to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there’s a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/ hope that this is what might happen in Max Hardcore’s hotel room. Yr. corresps. here find it impossible to overemphasize the fact that this is a
delusion
. In fact, of course, the unconscious expectation/dread/hope makes no more sense than it would make to be hanging out with doctors at a medical convention and to expect that at the slightest provocation everyone in the room would tumble into a frenzy of MRIs and epidurals. Nevertheless the tension persists, despite the fact that the actresses are obviously tired and disassociated from the day’s CES,
¹⁹
plus, it emerges, somewhat sore—it turns out that Max Hardcore is shooting one of his “Gonzo” porn spectaculars right here at the 1998 Consumer Electronics Show, using the CES as a hook and backdrop, and the girls have been alternating CES booth-duty and riding-crop shenanigans with a tight and SS-intensive filming schedule. (Max, being a firm believer in the fait accompli method of filmmaking, has not yet gotten around to chatting with the CES’s administration about his featuring the world’s biggest consumer-tech tradeshow by name in a
“SEE PRETTY GIRLS SODOMIZED IN MANNERS MOST FOUL
” video.)

Mr. Max Hardcore—a.k.a. Max Steiner, a.k.a. Paul Steiner, né Paul Little—is 5'6" and a very fit 135. He is somewhere between 40 and 60 years old and resembles more than anything a mesomorphic and borderline-psycho Henry Gibson. He is wearing a black cowboy hat and what has to be one of the very few long-sleeved Hawaiian shirts in existence anywhere. Once the PA guarding the door mellows out and introductions are made (H.H. managing to drop the name of this magazine several times in one sentence), Max reveals himself to be a genial and garrulous host and offers everybody disposable plastic cups of vodka before settling in with yr. corresps. to discuss what for Max are the most pressing and relevant issues at this year’s AVN Awards, which issues are the career, reputation, personal history, and overall life philosophy of Mr. Max Hardcore.

Pioneered (depending whom you talk to) by either Max Hardcore or John (“Buttman”) Stagliano, “Gonzo” has become one of this decade’s most popular and profitable genres of adult video. It’s more or less a cross between an MTV documentary and the Hell panel from Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights
. A Gonzo film is always set at some distinctive locale or occasion—Daytona Beach at spring break, the Cannes Film Festival, etc. There’s always a randy and salivous “host” talking directly to a handheld camera: “Well and we’re here at the Cannes Film Festival, and it looks like there’s going to be lots of excitement, John Travolta and Sigourney Weaver are supposed to both be in town, and there’s also the world-famous beach, and I’m told there’s always some real seriously good-looking little girls at the beach, so let’s us head on down.” (That’s the approximate lead-in to a recent Max-at-Cannes Gonzo, a type of signature lead-in that Max refers to with a 56-tooth grin as “always mercifully brief”—and please note the “
little girls
at the beach” thing, because this is another of Max’s professional signatures, the infantilization of his videos’ females as dramatic foils for his own film persona, which is always that of a sort of degenerate uncle or stepdad.) Then the shaky but ever-focused camera heads on down to the ocean or mall or CES or whatever, scoping out attractive women
²⁰
while the host moans and chews his knuckle in lust. Then pretty soon host and camera start actually coming up to the women they’ve been looking at and engaging them in little cameo “interviews” full of sideways leers and salacious entendres. Some of the interviewees are actual civilians, but some are always what Max refers to as “ringers,” meaning professional porn actresses. And so the viewer is treated to the classic frathouse fantasy of moving, via just a couple of singles-bar “Hey there babe” lines, from scoping out an attractive woman to having wild and anatomically diverse sex with her, all while one of his buddies captures the whole thing on tape.
²¹

The issue of who exactly invented Gonzo being impossibly vexed and so notwithstanding, it is true that Max Hardcore is famous as a director for several things: (1) Being incredibly disciplined about budgets and tactical logistics, right down to forcing his crew and staff to wear identical jumpsuits of scarlet nylon so that they look like a national ski team—Max’s shoots are described (by Max) as “almost military operations”; (2) Not only employing ringers but actually sometimes being able to talk real live civilian “little girls” on the beach or in the mall into coming on back to the special MAXWORLD RV and having anal sex on camera;
²²
(3) Being the first in “mainstream” (meaning nonfetish) adult video to perpetrate on women levels of violation and degradation that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. W/r/t item (3), Max, after detailing for yr. correspondents the vo- and avocations that led him into the adult industry (a tale too literally incredible even to think about factchecking and trying to print), informs us that he is and always has been adult video’s “cutting-edge blade,” and that other less bold and original filmmakers have systematically stolen and used his, Max’s, degradations of women as a blueprint for their own subsequent shabby and derivative films’ degradations.
²³
(Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, by the way, have heard Max hold forth many times before and are now outside the circle of discourse—D.F. in the bathroom for what seems like a peculiarly long time, H.H. on the couch with the actresses hashing out the implications of Seinfeld’s retirement for NBC’s ’98 lineup.)