It seems appropriate to launch the site with some comments on the film that, in many ways, started it all. The one pornographic film that just about everyone has heard of.
There was, of course, pornography before Deep Throat. There were even feature-length pornographic films before Deep Throat. The film Behind the Green Door, directed by the Mitchell Brothers, was released earlier in 1972. But they originally screened it at their adult theater in San Francisco, the O’Farrell Theater. By contrast, Deep Throat was shown in many mainstream theaters and was even reviewed by Roger Ebert. And, as Linda Williams mentions in Hard Core, her classic study of pornographic film, it was one of the first pornographic films to be marketed to, and seen by significant numbers of, women.
Deep Throat is also the film that, more than any other, gets mentioned (if not exactly discussed) by anti-pornography feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Rae Langton. Judging from what little they say about it, however, I very much doubt that they have seen it.
Much of the controversy surrounding the film has to do with certain of the circumstances of its production. The ‘star’, Linda “Lovelace”, would later state, in her book Ordeal (written as Linda Marchiano), that she has been abused and coerced into performing in the film. One can easily get the impression, however, from what MacKinnon and others say about the matter, that the producers of the film had coerced her into performing. But, so far as I aware, Marchiano never made any such claim. Her (alleged, please don’t sue me) abuser was rather her husband, Chuck Traynor.
The other thing one often hears said about the film is that its central conceit, that Linda’s clitoris is in the back of her throat, is both ridiculous and misogynistic, because of how it makes Linda’s sexual pleasure dependent upon her satisfying a certain male fantasy. But this is wrong for two reasons.
First, at the very beginning of the film, some written text scrolls past, which says, among other things: “This film is designed in a broad and also humorous way to illustrate a psychiatrist’s treatment of one girl and his use of a ploy and the power of suggestion….” Surprisingly, Williams does not mention this. But you simply do not understand the film if you do not realize that (the character) Linda’s clitoris is not really in the back of her throat, any more than Dr Young’s balls are in his ears.
The second point, which Williams does make, is that Deep Throat, while certainly not a feminist film, is almost entirely focused on Linda’s quest for sexual pleasure. Moreover, quite unlike the Freudian orthodoxy criticized in Anne Koedt’s famous essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm“, Deep Throat does not buy into the idea that women’s sexual maturation involves abandoning clitoral sexuality for vaginal sexuality. Rather, the clitoris is acknowledged as central to Linda’s sexuality. That may not seem radical now, but it was then: Koedt’s essay was only published in 1970.
Moreover, as Williams emphasizes, the film’s whole ethos is “Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks” (as Linda’s mother tells her at one point). As it happens, Linda really enjoys giving blowjobs, and Dr Young’s real contribution is allowing Linda to embrace her own unique sexuality. That’s what the ‘ploy’ is designed to do. (Before you object that it’s just absurd to think that a woman would orgasm from giving head, be advised that some women do.)
But the thing that very few people seem to realize, and that Williams again does not mention, is that Deep Throat is a comedy. It is, in fact, hilarious at times. There is one scene that is so funny that I often start laughing just from thinking about it.
Everything in the film is so completely over the top as to be absurd, and intentionally so: from Linda’s mother having an ordinary conversation with her while some random guy goes down on her, to her mother’s recruiting a small army of men to try to get Linda to have an orgasm, to the way Dr Young dictates his notes while fucking his nurse, to the poor doctor’s ending up with an exhausted and bandaged penis from all the sex he is having. (“I can’t take any more of this ‘deep throat’”, he tells us.)
Linda is probably the only sane person in the entire film.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of ways that Deep Throat really is misogynistic. And in other ways, it is a pretty awful film. The acting is inconsistent, to put it mildly, it’s not photographed particularly well, and the music is abysmal—though, I suspect, intentionally so at times. (The title song is just too ridiculous for it not to be.) But what Deep Throat really is not is the nightmare it is often made out to be.
For those interested in seeing it, it can be streamed or bought at Gamelink. (No, that’s not an affiliate link.)
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