Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Why should I pay for the channel when the teaser is free and I enjoy it more?
Oct 25, 2000 | Every night, at the stroke of 10, something magical happens to one of the channels on my cable service. The all-day stream of ho-hum cooking-and-gardening schlock vanishes with a flicker, and the screen explodes into a kaleidoscopic swirl of scrambled sex flicks. These rowdy hump-a-thons feature your standard hardcore fare: the most insatiable nymphos on earth receiving all manner of orificial service from well-hung hunks with jackhammer hips.
Hardcore porn makes for pretty compelling TV when viewed in its unscrambled form, but once the action is fed through a scrambler into my 27-inch Sony, something much different emerges -- something finer and more rewarding. Those highly choreographed shag sessions materialize on the screen as the distorted, sliced-up sequences of porno-cubism that jargon-makers call "Picasso porn."
A ramrod-stiff penis here, a jiggling breast there, a vague thrusting of hips that you can't quite trace to two distinguishable human bodies -- scrambled porn is a moving mosaic of sex. It can be a little hard to follow the action, as you squint into the flickering screen, but you're captivated in a way that you never are with straight porn, because you have to envision with your mind's eye the parts you can't quite see. And that's what makes the scrambled stuff so much more fulfilling: It leaves more to the imagination.
I don't much like unscrambled porn. With its worn-out story lines, its so-bad-it's-funny acting, and its mechanical humping and sucking, straight porn bores as often as it excites. It's the too-much-information problem; it doesn't leave you any room for filling in the blanks. But scrambled porn, like a finely wrought minimalist short story -- imagine Raymond Carver erotica -- gives you just a scattering of small but telling details. You catch a flash of breast here, a vague hint of penetration there, and then you flesh out the story line from your own mental storehouse of fantasies. It's interactive titillation, much like the give-and-take of sex itself.
The similarities to real-life sex don't end there. At its finest, scrambled porn achieves a kind of cinéma vérité effect. Compared to the unscrambled stuff, it bears a much closer resemblance to the actual experience of a sexual encounter. When you're in the act, you never see yourself and your partner from the camera's-eye viewpoint. You never observe things from that far-off, objective perspective. There are no slow, steady pans, no pull-back shots of the action. Everything is jumbled and in your face, herky-jerky and dislocated. As you flail around in the sack, you may -- in a fleeting moment of clarity, like the interludes of clarity in scrambled porn -- catch a glimpse of your partner's torso writhing above or below you, a gaping mouth near yours, a leg extended at the very edge of your peripheral vision. But you'll get no slow-motion sequences or tidy freeze-frames. Sex is scrambled, and if pornography aims for verisimilitude, it should be scrambled too.
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