Russ Meyer died last week. Bummer. He was one of cinema's greatest visionaries and, I'd argue, one of its most important filmmakers. His influence was massive, far beyond what many people suspect. From Baywatch to Tombraider, it all came through Russ.
Hey, I didn't say his influence was necessarily good, just massive. And that's fitting since big and trashy was what Meyer was all about.
It's been almost a week since Meyer kicked the bucket, and I've been thinking about what I wanted to write about him and his films.
What I always admired about films like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was the humor, the world view: any tongue not wagging was planted firmly in cheek. His films had all the fun and humor that mainstream pornography doesn't.
The main difference between Meyer's work and the creatively barren sex films produced today is that Meyer loved women and today's pornographer's seem to hate them. Meyer's films were a display of both his own big boob fantasies and self punishment for having them. In Meyer's movies the women won, and the men who objectified them were soundly thrashed.
In modern porn, on the other hand, the women are not empowered. They are degraded, or I suppose debased is a more apt term. It's all about scrawny underage(-looking) girls or surgically moulded women being literally used by men who really don't appear to like them in the least.
I'm not offended by pornography. I'm not offended by boobies and willies. I'm not offended by the bits I have, nor by the bits I like. Plus I'm not offended in the least by things that have no purpose whatsoever other than to try to titillate me.
But I am offended by most modern porn. Why? Because modern porn is not fun and sexy, it's angry and hateful.
Meyer's films were full of violence, sure. But it was a righteous violence directed at punishing objectifiers, couched in a b-movie playfulness that removed the sharper barbs. That's a totally different thing than acts of debasements directed at literal objects of lust. Meyer had fun, and so did his audience: it was titillation and even punishment but without guilt.
But how can one take pleasure from most modern porn without feeling guilty? Enjoying something that involves the debasing of a person should make you feel guilty. Society already associates sex and guilt, unfortunately, and it's a shame that modern sex flicks seeks to give credence to that misguided link.
Even the titles in porn have lost their fun. It's no longer a world of puns on mainstream cinema or titles that reflect a lighthearted view of sex. Oh sure, there's the occasional Forrest Hump or Sperms of Endearment out there, but most of them now seem to follow a basic formula instead: (size adjective)+(race)+(sexual organ)+(preposition or conjunction)+(size or age adjective)+(race)+(insulting term for females).
Give me Flesh Gordon any day.
aside:
I like it when mainstream movies themselves have titles that could easily have been porn films: Fists Of Fury; Adventures In Babysitting; Big Daddy; The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. I look forward to your own suggestions in the comments section.
end of aside
Modern porn depresses me, for all of the above and for the fact that it's only going to lead to yet another generation of men afraid of public hair.
And I bet there's nothing we can do about it, because Russ Meyer is dead.
