Deep Throat opens with a three minute long driving around/title sequence. This is not a good start when your runtime is barely an hour as it is, though partially redeemed by the super cheesy music and the weirdness of knowing that Sal & Mona did the catering.
Anyway, Linda Lovelace returns home to find her housemate Helen receiving cunnilingus from another anonymous young lover, though given her question "Do you mind if I smoke while you're eating" her enthusiasm is debatable.
Later the two women are at the pool. Linda confesses that, although she enjoys sex, something just isn't right: "It makes me feel tingly all over and then nothing… There should be bells ringing, dams busting, bombs going off." In other words, a typical post sexual liberation attitude, confirmed by Helen's response. "Different strokes for different folks. Maybe you're not doing it right."
Accordingly they arrange for a bunch of guys to come round, leading to an extended suck and fuck sequence that, nevertheless, fails to produce the desired results for Linda.
Highlights here include some unintentionally abstract shots that Stan Brakhage would probably have been proud of, an in-joke cameo from auteur Damiano as a campy gay guy and song lyrics that go "Love, love is strange. Lot of people take it in the mouth…"
"Well what now? How many was it? 14?"
"How about Dr Young. A psychiatriast. A real cook, but horny as hell."
So Linda goes to see Harry Reems' Dr Young, who seems to be from the Dr Hugo Z. Hackenbush school of medicine and probably out to have been barred from practice long ago. After determining that there's no mental reason for Linda's failure to achieve orgasm – so much for Freud and company, at least as far as this particular porno's discourse goes – he suggests a physical examination. The problem soon becomes apparent: Her clitoris is missing.
"No wonder you hear no bells, you have no tinkler"
As Linda gets most turned on by giving head and gets an excited feeling in her throat Dr Young decides to take a closer took there. Dada! "There's the little bugger!"
Now all that need be done is teach Linda to relax her gag reflex and control her breathing, letting the good doctor's cock slide in and hit that spot. And here we get more priceless lyrics:
"Now I'm going to tell you the way it has to be. Just relax your musicles and once you hit that spot keep right on pushing and give it all you've got. Now we've found your tinkle the solution is quite clear. For if we both can hit it now the bells you'll surely hear. Deep throat deeper than deep your throat. Don't row the boat don't get your goat. That's all she wrote."
And, sure enough, we get inserts of bells, fireworks, a Saturn V rocket blasting off and, yes, a tinkling bell. Eisenstein would be turning in his grave over what October hath wrought while Russ Meyer should have either sued or been sued – one forgets whether his montages of derricks etc came first…
So Linda's problems would seem to be over, except Dr Young is already busy servicing his nurse and unsure if he can meet both women's requirements. Accordingly he takes Linda on as his physiotherapist and sets her to work on his other clients.
The first case study presents Albert Finster, obsessed with finding out that "things really do go better with coke" – again one wonders if the Coca-Cola Corporation ever considered legal action, especially when you get lyrics like "Baby it's the real thing, come and lick my straw." Here we also get a greater sense of the film's tensions, it's assertion to be about Linda Lovelace's search for sexual satisfaction hitting against the need to show a range of different sexual numbers for the punters in the audience.
The second case presents Jacob Malts, a widower. On the DVD I watched we only get a before and after, with sex acts conspicuous in their absence – does anyone know if this is how it originally was or if something has been excised in accord with contemporary mores?
The last – excepting Dr Young's own case, which serves as prelude to more suck and fuck action alternating between Lovelace and the nurse – presents Wilbur Wang, heir to the Wang hula-hoop fortune. Chronically shy, he likes to play the masked burglar/rapist, leading to an obvious voyeuristic scenario as he and we watch Linda shaving her pubic region. But Linda isn't a good enough actress to help Wilbur play out his fantasy scenarios, though one somehow doubts this is an instance of Brechtian distantation with the actors speaking as if in quotes…
But the kindly Wilbur offers her marriage. She declines, because to satsify her – and note how this is in contradiction to the Finster and Malts sequences, unless we're to assume that Linda has been getting off on helping others, injecting a curious moral dimension as if from Kierkegaard's aesthetic to ethical life (if not his religious, though Damiano's Catholic guilt would feed into his impressive sophomore entry The Devil in Miss Jones ) – her man would need to have a nine inch cock.
Wilbur, then, is "only four inches away from happiness". The joke, of course, is that he's four inches too long…
The problem with golden age porn DVDs is that they needs a company like Blue Underground who actually take a pride in the product to go the extra mile in restoring the work, putting together a package of quality extras and fighting to get the original version reinstated. (Is it just me or does the porno industry's assertion to be campaigning for the rights of its viewers against their reluctance to present coercion and rape fantasy scenarios from 70s product, unpalatable though they might be, smack somewhat of cowardice and hypocrisy and reveal their overweening interest in money over art?)
For Deep Throat is, lest we forget, one of the most sociologically important and financially profitable films of all time. The shape of cinema history and the industry would likely be very different had it either been outlawed immediately – porn cinema would have remained underground – or been granted full legitimacy – Hollywood would have had a real fight on its hands. Plus, considering the Mafia money behind the film's production and distribution company – although this VCA disc has the film as an Arrow rather than Bryanston presentation – along with Linda Lovelace's later assertions, somewhat coeval with her re-emergence as a feminist anti-pornography campaigner, that she was coerced to participate by her then-husband/manager Chuck Traynor, its obvious that there's a lot that could have been said. But maybe that would ruin the illusion.. Or maybe it's that Hollywood's muscling in to in turn exploit porn with the upcoming Inside Deep Throat? Or perhaps the average porn viewer just isn't interested in all this stuff in the film geek manner of this author…
Whatever the case, this disc looks and sounds reasonable. The colours while somewhat faded are at least in the right ballpark, with fleshtones in the white-pink area of the spectrum. Damage and scratches are omnipresent but never really too distracting in that been-in-a-cement-mixer way that all too often affects such product. There are, alas, no extras.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
Rating:
5.0 / 5
(6 votes)
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