Boogie Nights

Paul Thomas Anderson, USA 1997, 156 mins

California, 1977. 17-year old Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) has a dead-end job washing dishes in a nightclub (the Boogie Nights of the title). Eddie knows he has one big asset that he can use to get himself a better life - his cock.

After meeting famed porno director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) Eddie's destiny is set. He changes his name to Dirk Diggler and makes his porno debut with the industry's leading female star, Amber Waves (Julianne Moore). Everyone on set gets so excited they forget about getting the money shot', i.e. the ejaculation close-up necessary to satisfy the audience and let them feel that they have got their money's worth. When Dirk says he's ready to go again for the money shot a star is born. Dirk quickly becomes the best known name in porno, becoming rich, winning industry awards and finding a real sense of family and community with other porno types.

But as the 70s end and the 80s begin, things start to go wrong for our heroes. Cocaine becomes a more and more important part of their lives and video threatens to radically change the rules of the game.

This is Paul Anderson's second feature, following on from the barely-released and sadly neglected Hard Eight (1996). It is a sprawling decade spanning epic about the porn industry - a rare example of mainstream cinema exploiting porn for ideas rather than the other way around.

In style and feel Boogie Nights is most reminiscent of Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). Anderson draws us in subtly, using the perhaps- surprising amount of humour inherent in his material and the easy charm of Eddie, Jack and the others. Then, suddenly, he starts bludgeoning us with the heavy stuff.

But while the film is quite heavy going for a while, it's still ultimately something of a rose-tinted nostalgia trip. Anderson contrasts the good 70s porn cinema, where there was a community and artistic integrity of a sort, with bad 80s porn video, where these qualities are absent. Sorry, but I don't quite believe it. And would many have found a film about John Holmes, the real-life inspiration for Dirk Diggler, an entertaining prospect? I think not.

Keith H. Brown
EUFS Programme 1998-99

One of the biggest difficulties we might have with Paul Thomas Anderson's film about life in the US porn movie industry of the late 1970s is a relative lack of familiarity with the milieu and genre it depicts. Hardcore pornography - which at the time Boogie Nights is set meant feature films with 'meat shots' of penetration and 'money shots' of ejaculation - has never been legal in this country. (Recently the BBFC seems to have been flying a kite for possible liberalisation though.)

According to Linda Williams's study Hard Core (1990) three factors led to the establishment of hardcore pornography as a quasi-legitimate US film genre. First was the exploitation film boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Features like The Immoral Mr Teas (1959) and Blood Feast (1963) which exploited sex (or rather nudity) and/or violence were played in proper movie theatres and their willingness to show audiences things that the mainstream cinema would not often proved very profitable. Second were the 'beaver' films of the later 1960s. In some ways a development of the earlier 'stag' films, in that they were short and cinematically 'primitive', these films tested the obscenity waters when they too were shown in legitimate theatres. Soon, with the rapid shift from 'beaver' to 'split beaver' to 'action beaver' films "hard core was ... delimited to the display of the erect penis and penetration alone." Finally there were documentaries about the European porno scene like Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1970). By claiming to be serious studies of the sexual mores of another culture these films could claim to have what the US Supreme Court called "redeeming social importance" and to be of interest to more than just the traditional porno audience. Together these three factors came together to give rise to the hardcore porn movie in the early 1970s.

Though not the first example of the new genre, Deep Throat (1972) was certainly the best known and most important. "For the first time in hard-core cinematic pornography a feature length [non-documentary] film ... managed to integrate a variety of sexual numbers ... into a narrative that was shown in a legitimate theatre." After Deep Throat was prosecuted it became a cause célèbre - a film which ordinary people felt the need to see and talk about. Consequently, of course, Deep Throat also made a lot of money and a lot people got on the hard-core bandwagon. Some had dubious criminal and drug connections - a fact that Boogie Nights does not shy away from.

By 1977, when Boogie Nights begins, hard-core had become established as a legitimate - if deeply disreputable - genre. (Note here the industry awards which Boogie Nights' characters attend.) The 'porno chic' boom of the Deep Throat era was, however, at an end. Legal decisions meant that obscenity cases had to be fought on a state-by-state basis. This made it expensive and difficult to get a hard-core film released nationally. Having gone to see Behind the Green Door or The Devil in Miss Jones after Deep Throat the respectable middle-class audience soon realised that 'if you've seen one you've seen them all' and found other topics for their after dinner-party conversations. Thus increasingly only the hard core audience, in both senses of the term, remained. Someone realised that as this audience - the proverbial dirty Mac brigade - simply wanted material to masturbate to, it would make more sense to use the then-emerging format of home video. Video, of course, also puts the viewer/user in control. If they're not interested in character development or narrative of even the most rudimentary sort then there's nothing the film-maker can do to stop them fast-forwarding to the sex. Needless to say it's a development that will have for Boogie Nights' Jack Horner, a man who prides himself on making quality porn films.

In its depiction of the period 1977 to 1984 and the changes in the porn milieu over that time Boogie Nights convinces. Its blurring of fact and fiction in the Eddie Adams character played by Mark Wahlberg is more problematic though. Many aspects of Adams are obviously based on porn star John C. Holmes. Obviously both have rather large penises. Over and above this Adams's Brock Landers character and films, with their combination of detective and porno themes, are clear takes off on Holmes's Johnny Wadd, Private Dick series. Both the fictional Adams and the real Holmes descended into cocaine addiction and attempted to rip off a drug dealer. But at this point the similarities end. Whereas Adams is physically attractive Holmes had no physical assets of note other than his cock. Holmes's drug problems led to a jail term. Released from jail, he tested HIV positive, continued to sporadically appear in porno for a time despite this and died in 1988. What the Adams/Holmes contrast shows is that Boogie Nights could have been far more sordid and sleazy. But then maybe that wouldn't have been good box office.

Whatever the case, there's no doubting that Paul Thomas Anderson is a film-maker with a bright future. While his debut Hard Eight and Boogie Nights have different styles - the former being a tightly narrated chamber film and the latter a sprawling Altmanesque epic with visuals and attention to period details by way of Scorsese's Goodfellas - a thematic continuity, in terms of an interest in twisted family-type relationships, is already apparent.

Programme note by Keith H. Brown
October 1998