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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
It all boiled down to that courting query that my generation and adjacent ones will go to our erotic graves asking: "Hot or not?"
Mar 20, 2003 | The question of the archive is not, I repeat, a question of the past ... but rather a question of the future, the very question of the future, question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.
-- Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever"
Thursday afternoon I arrived late to the Anthology Film Archives at the corner of Second Street and Second Avenue in the East Village, where we were to spend five hours watching each other's audition videos. While we waited for other latecomers, John Cameron Mitchell addressed the group, pacing casually in front of the oversize television and the pile of VHS tapes.
"When porn actually was good was when they had multiple cameras," the director was saying as I walked in. "Because they were like, 'They're having sex, and we don't have much money -- let's have three cameras, one of them slo-mo.' That's why you see stuff from the '70s that actually seems real, and emotional, and you think, Wow, these guys are actually having a relationship."
How much of a limb were we walking out on with this project? He went on:
"I was talking to Gus van Sant. He wants to make a film with real sex. There's been a number of French films lately with a lot of real sex, actually none of which I really like. But there's a new wave happening here now, and this is going to be one of the first, which is kind of exciting. So it would be nice to raise the bar for making it one of the best that might explore these types of things."
And what was wrong with the sex movies already on the market?
"A problem with a lot of these films is that people are always equating sex with death. Sex with depression, sex with anomie, sex with trouble. And sure, they can be connected, but sex is connected with every part of your life, or could be. And I think all these films that are pretending to be so groundbreaking in France -- it just shows how fucking scared they are of sex. French people say they invented love, but they are so scared of it.
"I think an American film about love with sex is definitely necessary. 'Y Tu Mama También' had that kind of comedy and fun, but imagine if you actually saw the hard-ons when they're on the diving board, or imagine if you saw the sex fully instead of hiding it in the normal way. You really could have been ... sucked up into that film even more. They could have taken it to the next level. And that's where people have stopped from going there fully, with trust, with love."
Next, the director told us the movie would be unrated rather than X-rated, and that independent houses in college towns and major cities would show it. The rest of the distribution would be through festivals and mail order. No, he didn't think Blockbuster would carry it.
After JCM answered a few more questions, the producer started handing out three-page questionnaires that listed the 34 cast candidates along with four ratings: NEVER, POSSIBLY, I THINK SO, DEFINITELY. With each video we were to rate the candidate based on his or her sexual attractiveness. Under each rating was room for written comments.
I understood why the filmmakers had us do this, and in fact it inspired less dread than the free-form cruising of the night before and the "dates" for which we were keeping our Friday through Sunday nights free. But as the videos started playing and people began scribbling on their ratings sheets, I began to feel almost as if I'd been duped. I'd made my 10-minute audition video with the instructions to tell a true story about a sexual experience I'd had, with the obvious purpose of interesting the filmmakers in me as an actor, as a storyteller, and as a sexual person. But now my peers were about to watch what I'd done and rate me based on something related but entirely more specific, which boiled down to that quintessential Internet-time courting query that my generation and adjacent ones will go to our erotic graves asking: "Hot or not?"
This was not the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, supposedly voting on my artistic vision and technical prowess, it was three dozen peers contemplating whether they wanted my penis and other appendages penetrating their various orifices while John Cameron Mitchell's crew immortalized the images for an international audience. Without knowing it, I had made and submitted a video personals ad. Had I known it, would I have devoted said video to the affair I'd had with a married couple who resembled my parents?
