In his second inaugural address President Bush informed us, “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” I couldn’t agree more, but two documentaries released this week suggest that our conception of freedom may not extend to every point on the globe. Inside Deep Throat, an HBO documentary produced by Ron Howard’s longtime collaborator Brian Grazer, chronicles the production and exhibition of the notorious adult film Deep Throat (1972) and the free-speech battle it sparked. In the HBO-Cinemax documentary Born Into Brothels, which was recently nominated for an Academy Award, photographer Zana Briski recruits eight children from Calcutta’s red-light district, arms them with cameras, and sends them home to record their lives. Both movies are essentially about the sex trade, but the latter is a stark reminder that freedom from hunger can be more precious than freedom of expression.
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Shot for $25,000 by New Yorker Gerard Damiano, Deep Throat became the first porn movie to go mainstream, showing up in the pages of the New York Times and in Johnny Carson’s monologues—Ed McMahon was an early fan of the film, as was Bob Woodward. Middle-class moviegoers—including women—flocked to see its story about a woman (Linda Lovelace) whose doctor (Harry Reems) informs her that she has a clitoris in her throat and shows her how to use it for their mutual benefit. The accounting behind the production has always been murky, but it’s said to have grossed $600 million, which would make it the most profitable American movie ever. Its success was a beachhead for the adult-film industry, which became more open and professional in the 1970s. Deep Throat brought fellatio out of the closet and liberalized sexuality in general, but it also generated a Christian backlash that, as Alan Dershowitz points out in the film, has since matured into the modern evangelical movement.
One person missing from all this is Linda Lovelace, who died in April 2002 of injuries sustained in a car crash, and her absence, more than anything else, defines the documentary. A policeman’s daughter from Fort Lauderdale, Linda Boreman had a sad history with men: in 1969, at age 21, she fell in with a seedy character named Chuck Traynor, who pimped her, got her into stag films, and eventually landed her in Deep Throat. She and Traynor split up in 1974, and her career fizzled two years later. By the end of the decade she’d embraced feminism, become a born-again Christian, married a Long Island construction worker, and given birth to two children. In her book Ordeal she likened her relationship with Traynor to sexual slavery: “When you see the movie Deep Throat, you are watching me being raped,” she told the Toronto Sun in 1981. “It is a crime that movie is still showing; there was a gun to my head the entire time.” Her charges were widely disputed by people who had known her earlier, but she continued her campaign against smut and in 1986 testified before the Meese Commission on Pornography.
In the end the dire poverty of Calcutta prevails when both Puja and Suchitra are pulled out of school and back into the brothels by their families. As Avijit observes, “Nobody here understands anything but money.” When I read the president’s inaugural address, I was stirred by the concept of a millennial mission to free the oppressed people of the world. But his policies seem to be based on the contradictory principle of getting our mitts on as much of the world’s wealth as possible, while there’s still time. As any hooker can tell you, we’re all slaves to the dollar.
Directed and written by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato
Born Into Brothels ★★★(A must-see)
Directed by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski
