A great big Loofah.

Somewhere else that cocaine makes real inroads and “synergises” with other increasingly professionalized and business-oriented practices is the world of porn, not quite yet, as of the early-to-mid-seventies the fully fledged Industry it will become, but with increasingly relaxed censorship rules and the emergence of Porn Chic, along with numerous other forms of Chic in the Seventies, Radical Chic, Body Building Chic, Heroin Chic: essentially the co-option of subcultural, counter-cultural and subaltern energies for middle class consumption/delectation in newly neoliberalized spaces. Cultural gentrification.

In the early Seventies porn was still primarily shown in Cinemas and early porn is, from a contemporary perspective, bafflingly narrative and dialogue heavy, even quite intricately plot- based at times, and however clumsily, still shares in something of the cinematic language of the Sixties (witness the clunky montage sequences that augment/interrupt the sex scenes in Deep Throat) as well as assumptions about the subversive nature of putting sex up on the screen.

If we jump back and forth between decades, from the Seventies to the Eighties we might consider that the two main male stars representative of their respective epochs are “Big” John Holmes and Jeff Stryker and the pivotal point is perhaps the film Insatiable (1980) the sequential climax of which is a semi-erect Holmes and starlet Marylin Chambers having sex in a gym. The most famous sequence though, the “classic” moment is the much more aggressive domination scene in which Chambers is held down on a Pool table. Within the film there is a kind of dialectical pathos the flaccid, flabby Holmes billed as Ultimate Fantasy Lover in a forgettable old-school “climax”, eclipsed by the Travoltaesque young stud slapping his dick in Chambers’ face.

Holmes (the influence for the character Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights and whose story is partly told in 2002s Wonderland, another film much more  admired by the public than critics, and the documentary Wadd) is an unusual choice for a pornstar, except of course that he has an enormous dick. A part of what drew Paul Thomas Anderson to him as a subject is his Ripleyesque, Kosinski-like self-invention, the constant embroidering and fantasising with which he tried to disguise his own background and overlay his sense of emptiness. Holmes has a certain tragic quality, an existential complexity, a hauntedness. He looks to have been affected by the life he has lead, both before and during his porn career. There is something mocking and disquieting about Holmes a man who was abused as a child, married young and throughout the Seventies is heading toward involvement in the Wonderland murders, cocaine addiction and death from AIDS at the age of 44.

The difference between Holmes and Stryker is immediate and, well, striking. Homes is huge but oddly unthreatening, his semi flaccidity and generally hangdog air rendering the contrast between his skinny arms and pigeon chest and his elephantine member all the more pathetic. Stryker however is a reimagining of the Jock, a buff perma-hard stud with a wet look quiff. The porn industry of the late sixties and early seventies still carries a train something utopian and liberatory, it is, like bodybuilding, still charged with freakpower, a remnant of the Hippies, the underground.. Holmes himself is something of a curio, his enormous dick an object of goofy amazement, as with Schwarzenegger the circus sideshow is never far away. Performing with Homes during the Seventies, with his difficulty in getting and maintaining an erection is “like making love to big, soft loofah” as one of his co stars puts it in the biographical documentary Wadd.

Homes own life story ties in to the gradual usurpation of pot and hippie free love with the increasing use of coke and the professionalisation of the porn industry in the seventies, its  "jockification” if you will whereby the male performers become less like “everyman” figures and more like quarterbacks, with the emphasis on athleticism, stamina, endurance “performance”. It is fitting that the biggest porn movie, one that sets the industry standard in the 80s should be called Insatiable, the hunger for money, for status, for feelgood consumption and feelgood drugs, the endlessly accelerating hedonic treadmill starts to pick up speed here and Chambers at the end of the film, despite having been with her ultimate fantasy lover and getting to tussle with the biggest dick on the planet is still left masturbating away, moaning “I want more, more, more...”

Careful what you wish for