Film Review: Inside Deep Throat (2005)

The old saying that every revolution devours its own children could be applied to the participants of a truly revolutionary event in which swallowing played a very important role. This case became the subject of 2005 documentary film Inside Deep Throat.

This work by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato - a duo usually specializing in films with gay themes - deals with Deep Throat, a film which, by the admission of the author himself, is not particularly good, but is undoubtedly among the most influential film titles ever made. This 60-minute hard core pornographic film, shot in 1972 for a meager $25,000, according to some, albeit dubuous estimates, made $600 million, making it one of the most profitable films of all time.

However, the real achievement of the film is not financial, but the fact that, thanks to an unusual and today hardly understandable combination of economic, political and cultural circumstances, it changed history. An entire generation in search of the revolution of their era saw in that little film their own equivalent of the storming of the Bastille and the shots from the Aurora. Pornography - hitherto always present, but officially non-existent aspect of culture - suddenly gained legitimacy as a tool of sexual liberation in America at the time. It is precisely thanks to Deep Throat that terms previously reserved for textbooks of forensic psychopathology began to appear on the front pages of the daily press, and many former perversions - including the one that is the subject of the film itself - became part of socially acceptable lifestyles.

The film follows all these events through the fates of the three key people of Deep Throat - Gerard Damiano, a hairdresser who thought he would become a Hollywood star through directing porn films; Linda Lovelace, not a very bright anonymous person who, thanks to a talent rarely seen until then, became a national star; Harry Reems, an actor whose main resource was the ability to enable Lovelace to demonstrate the aforementioned skill.

Using archive footage, soundtracks from the early 1970s and interviews with participants in those events, historians and social commentators, the authors gradually show the circumstances in which the film was made, then the effect it had on the public, the reaction of the conservative establishment embodied in the Nixon administration, and finally, mostly the tragic ending of the story of American porn pioneers who were brought not by censorship and state repression, but by their own weaknesses, or something as prosaic as a home video.

Inside Deep Throat, like Deep Throat, was the product of its time. It clearly shows that the authors tried to push the view - quite popular among the liberal part of American public in mid 2000s - that there was a great similarity between the situation in the USA in the early 1970s and in mid 2000s i.e. that Vietnam, Richard Nixon and the persecution of pornography had their new incarnations in Iraq, George W. Bush and the Janet Jackson nipple affair at the Super Bowl.

However, Barbato and Bailey showed far more objectivity and willingness to consider the arguments of the other side, unlike some of their better known colleagues. That is why conservatives who could not stand pornography even thirty years after its de facto legalisation were given the opportunity to express their opinion in front of the camera.

The real problem is the liberals who now represent the same establishment against which they once rebelled. Perhaps the best example is Hollywood, whose leaders in the 1970s publicly stood up in defence of pornography and in whose studios porn films were shot, and today they make sure that nothing of explicitly sexual nature remains in commercially ambitious blockbuster. The leaders of this trend were feminists who in the 1980s stood shoulder to shoulder with religious fundamentalists in the crusade against pornography, and who used Linda Lovelace - the tragic heroine of this film - as a symbol, and then, same as her porn employers a decade earlier, discarded her as an old rag.

The main shortcoming of this documentary is that this thesis is only superficially indicated at the end of the film, i.e. that viewers have to watch some 30 minutes of deleted scenes on the DVD and listen to the audio commentary of the two authors before they could draw that conclusion.

On the other hand, Barbato and Bailey have undeniably showed great sympathy for characters of the film. Perhaps the best example is the charming elderly bickering of the couple who were distributing Deep Throat in Florida in the early 1970s and, unknowingly, doing business with underworld figures.

If someone is willing to accept the explicit scenes edited from Deep Throat (which made this documentary receive rather rare and the strictest censorship rating NC-17), Inside Deep Throat deserves to be watched, not only as a nostalgic reminder of a time when everything seemed possible.

Inside Deep Throat can also serve as an argument that revolutions - even those that devour their own children - do not always have to result in desolation and despair as their ultimate effect. Most viewers will agree that compared to the guillotine and gulags, Severina’s and Paris Hilton's videos don't look that bad.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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