After becoming famous for her roles in Behind the Green Door and various other films, Marilyn Chambers attempted to forge a career as a ‘legitimate’ film star. After a few minor roles, she returned to pornography in 1980 with the film Insatiable, directed by Godfrey Daniels (in reality, Stu Segall). The film is regarded as a classic of the “Golden Age of Porn”. According the Wikipedia, Insatiable was the best-selling adult film from 1980-1982, and it spawned several sequels and imitators.
Seen today, I have to say that it’s a little unclear to me why Insatiable it was so popular. Compared to other classic films, like The Resurrection of Eve and The Opening of Misty Beethoven, it has (as Linda Williams also points out) essentially no narrative interest. The story, such as it is, concerns Sandra Chase, a model, actress, and wealthy heiress whose parents have recently died (though that seems to have nothing to do with anything else in the story).
The film seems to proceed along two parallel tracks: Sandra’s adventures at her house, as her friend and manager Flo (Jessie St James) tries to arrange for a movie with Sandra and two other apparently famous people, Renee Reynolds (Serena) and Roger Adams (John Leslie); and Sandra’s later trip to London (after said film has been released) to visit her aunt, and their conversations about Sandra’s life. The latter seems to have very little to do with the former, and it took me quite a while to figure out what the temporal relationship was supposed to be, something Wikipedia (at present) gets backwards.
What we do learn is that Sandra is really into sex. When Renee shows up at the house, the two of them go for a swim and end up having sex on the edge of the pool. Later that afternoon, Sandra goes for a drive in her Ferrari and stumbles upon a young man who’s run out of gas. She gives him a ride, then pulls off into the woods to give him a blowjob, for no particular reason. At the end of the film, Sandra overhears Flo and Roger having sex, and masturbates while her various fantasies play out in her head and on the screen. The very last of these involves Sandra’s having sex with the legendary John Holmes (the subject of the movie Boogie Nights), but even that doesn’t seem to be enough to ‘satisfy’ Sandra, who closes the film asking for ‘more, more, more’.
The sex scenes are not badly photographed. There are fewer ‘meat shots’ than would become common later, and there’s at least some effort to include the men other than as ‘disembodied penises’. But the scenes do traffic quite a bit in standard porn tropes, such as ‘facials’, and there doesn’t seem to be anything approaching orgasms for the women. Sex here, as much as Sandra seems to crave it, seems mostly for the pleasure of the men. The one exception is the scene with Flo and Roger, which is romantic and even loving.
The most problematic scene in the film, though, occurs about mid-way through it. Sandra tells Flo about “the first time [she] made love”. She found the gardener (David Morris) playing billiards, where he really shouldn’t have been, and he ends up raping her. Her hands are pinned behind her back much of the time. Eventually, she becomes an active participant (much as she had in Green Door). And yet, she describes this as ‘making love’ and as ‘so exciting’. “I wasn’t frightened at all”, Sandra says. “I just loved being held down and made love to by him” (my emphasis).
This is one of the only scenes I know, in Golden Age pornography, that actually is a ‘positive rape depiction’, as they’re sometimes called, and which people like Catharine MacKinnon and Rae Langton seem to think are (or at least were) common in porn. I don’t think we can set it aside as ‘just fantasy’, as we might set aside the corresponding scene in Green Door. It just isn’t presented that way in the film. This isn’t Sandra’s fantasy but her memory. Even if Sandra’s memory weren’t accurate (and I doubt this film invites such a complex reading), it’s her present attitude towards the event that’s problematic.
On the other hand, Flo’s response to Sandra’s story suggests that we’re not supposed to regard this as ‘normal’. There is, that is to say, no suggestion here that most women would, or should, feel about the event the way Sandra did: Flo clearly wouldn’t have. One might think it bad enough to suggest that even one woman might feel that way, and I’d be inclined to agree, but it’s also true that Sandra herself is clearly presented as emotionally unstable, at best. She’s not, again, everywoman. So it’s not at all clear to me that someone watching this film would come away from with it inclined to think that women enjoy rape (if they weren’t already so inclined), or that such a message was intended by the filmmakers.
What’s undoubtedly true, however, is that the scene is in very bad taste. I found it very uncomfortable to watch. It would be interesting if that discomfort were actually intended. But, again, the film doesn’t seem to merit such a complex reading.
Overall, though, this is a film worth seeing, if you have any interest in the history of pornography. And if you have a serious interest in that topic, it’s a film you really have to see. There wasn’t a bigger porn star in those days than Marilyn Chambers, and there wasn’t a bigger film than this one.
And there is one really funny moment. Early in the film, as Sandra is getting ready to meet Flo, she opens a closet in her bathroom. And what’s on the shelf but a box of Ivory Snow detergent. Sandra makes a funny sort of face as she closes the door. The joke, of course, is that Marilyn Chambers had famously done an ad for Ivory Snow before she became a porn star, and her appearance in Green Door had caused something of a ruckus as a result.
Insatiable is available at Gamelink.
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