Intermission 2: On a Sequence of "The Porne Identity"

Talking about going over the top: this is what my dear sister in arms in Kiev left as a comment on the post about Brent’s mannerisms.

“Dear Lana! It's Irene! I am sorry for disappearing for such a long time, but be sure – I didn’t forget to follow your blog. I feel very excited now because you have finally published your observations on Brent’s mannerisms. It’s always interesting to examine what in his performance is real and what is fake or just slightly exaggerated.
I have watched once more that moment from “Porne Identity”, that you have described, and glad to tell you what I have observed: before lifting up his shoulders in such a sexy way, Brent was warming up the muscles on his back behind his neck, then, shortly, he was stroking his right breast with his left hand and finally – I mean that moment of shoulders lifting – he, as it seems, had squeezed his cheeks for a moment and then quickly moved his hands down to his thighs, doing it so violently that his shoulders in the process had jumped right up to his ears. So it was not, of course, “a spontaneous muscle contortion”, but a visual consequence of another one Brent’s mannerism – he strokes himself or squeezes his cheeks, and we, looking at it, want to do the same. Bad that this moment – I really believe that it was in the movie and was not just imagined by me - wasn’t caught by the camera.
As to the “ballet like stretching of legs and feet right before climax”, this gesture looks much more real to me. I can’t say that I had a lot of men in my life, but when it came to masturbation, they always did the same, and yes - it was always very aesthetic and sexy, of course.”

See also a quote in a previous post http://lana-e.blogspot.com/2009/05/female-fan-site.html

Now that’s what I call meticulous enthusiastic observation! Is it a female speciality? What a tricky question. For sure it is a form of wild fun to get hold of a material that has not been produced for you, reappropriate it and see your own stuff in it. Female watchers of gay porn, is it pathetic? There is no art without projection, and there is no sex without projection, so one can calculate how much projection there is in porn. Double as much. And if any cultural manifestation is able to “stand by itself” (a formula I took from Deleuze’ terrific testament of thought “What is Philosophy?” http://www.amazon.de/Philosophy-European-Perspectives-Gilles-Deleuze/dp/0231079893/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de&qid=1255805339&sr=8-1 and will elaborate in the upcoming part 3), there is no rule and no law who is allowed or able to make something of it.

I am not quite sure if Mike Donner’s campy follow up of “The Porne Ultimatum” “The Porn Identity” http://myblog.brentcorriganinc.com/?p=1191, a spoof of the “Bourne Identity” action series, is able to “stand” in that sense. The acting is so hilariously bad that one cannot quite tell if the performers were told to act badly or if they were told to “act naturally”, which with amateurs often sums up to the same thing.

Brent has a very pragmatic, almost cynical attitude towards working for other studios. And he is very aware of the different demands of “professional” studios for “larger” expressions.

Which brings me to the sequence my friend Irene from Kiev described in detail. This particular sequence ending with the shoulder lift shows Brent’s reaction to a rather weird and sloppy blow job the supposedly threatening gangster character who has just abducted him for a notebook performs on him. So much for the logic of character. And this little sequence of sexual expressionism stands all for itself and seems to be completely disconnected from the cause of the arousal. That is maybe the secret reason why it is shot on two levels, the face and upper body and the groin, – only interrupted by a funny little counter shot right behind Brent’s ear giving us the subjective of the “being blown” perspective. Or rather the perspective of a witness standing right behind the receiver. For sure that is something evoking the female envy. I would love to be able to see so much of my organ being treated orally, without a mirror that is. But alas, one cannot have everything. Be happy with your ability to have 7 – 10 orgasms in a row, woman, and shut up! So one would expect that such a perspective so pleasant for the male genital narcissism would make Brent completely hard, but for some reason he never is in the Donner films.

So lets focus again on the face, the centre of expression, and the hands playing the accompanying bass of a melody of gestures. I gave you the whole sequence of major changes in facial expression and hand gestures above. You can see that Irene in her enthusiasm has actually performed something that Freud has discovered in the semiotic logic of dreams and has called “Verdichtung”/Condensation. http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/psychoanalysis/freud3mainframe.html Condensation shows that dream does not know time in the sense of linear causality. It shakes up things that should come first and things that should come afterwards. Therefore, I assume, Irene keeps mentioning Brent touching his “cheeks”, which cannot, as the sequence of stills proofs, refer to the cheeks of his face (even though they are very touchable too, a fact his then still macho partner takes advantage of in a quite mind-blowing finger sucking situation at the beginning of the scene). Yet right before that sequence there is a short bit of bottom close ups in which one hand of the co star and one hand of Brent’s share the task of spreading the posterior cheeks to show the puzzled audience a surprisingly natural spread of reddish hair in the crack, an original prop to make Brent look more like an adult medical doctor (just let that connection of professional adulthood and perineal hair sink into your mind). Be that as it may, and I would so very much beg Brent to re-post his famous instruction for the thorough removal of unwanted hair from intimate places from his former blog, Irene must have mixed up those shots with the face shots right after that; and so she constructed an amazing unheard-of reflex:

“he, as it seems, had squeezed his cheeks for a moment and then quickly moved his hands down to his thighs, doing it so violently that his shoulders in the process had jumped right up to his ears.”

A touch of buttocks and thighs that makes the shoulders lift violently! As a person professionally busy with questions of dance and choreography – maybe one reason for my over the top detailed observations – I love such a mad mix of artificiality and spontaneity. It is as if the eccentric fantasy of the beholder could invent a whole host of new “tourette syndromes” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette_syndrome for the sexual act. In dance it is one of the most demanding and fascinating concepts to develop a “dance language” that in the end resembles a new system of physical reflexes that do not look “done” but automatic, yet utterly artificial.

What I see in this sequence is a set of beautiful but rather made up expressions and gestures. There is the lip licking and mouth opening routine. The lip licking nicely hovers in between a completely self indulging premeditated yet futile effort to make the lips look even more wet and rosy, and the natural complement to the aroused mouth opening reflex.

And there is the arm lifting, an act that can never be a spontaneous reflex, exposing the arm pits as one more convention of porn to show the hidden places of the body. Strong arms being lifted give an ambiguous sign, as the very display of the strong arm muscles puts them in a position where they are completely useless. It is a posture of both swank and submission, thus nicely mirroring Brent’s character in transition. Several comments have shown us how obsessed he is with the girth of his upper arms.

And then the sudden lift of the shoulders adorned by an exquisite opening of the mouth and finally ending on the note of Brent’s characteristic animalistic flaring of the nostrils he might have borrowed from his beloved horses.

This self touching routine is accompanied by such blissful facial expressions that it almost seems like a spontaneous urge. As if the merely staged arousal caused by the blow job would have a mysterious sexual effect that forces him to touch himself. That absurd little logic is one good example for Brent’s high art of sexual performance. He is playing the piano of our fantasies that sometimes are as mysterious as they are widely spread. In both straight and gay porn we can observe a profound obsession with the narcissistic solo scene and the eroticism of masturbation and self touching. There are quite a lot of porn consumers who prefer the solo scene to any real action between 2 and more partners. I am almost one of them. There is something utterly intriguing about a fantasmatic object of desire being completely focussed on itself, a crazy masochist enjoyment in the thought that the very lust of this person for herself completely excludes the other, excludes us from the scene we are nonetheless staring at in longing. Or it is the gratification to be presented with the structural truth of porn, that we are in fact excluded from the action presented to us, also on the level of the content. However, as I pointed out in my first post on “The Look” the situation is more complex than that. At least with Brent who includes both the cameraman and the audience into his solo scene on “Just the Sex” with his flirtatious looks while he is playing with himself.

Brent is a master of the solo scene, no doubt. And the routine he is using in “PI” is learned. It traces back to the early Cobra days, to a solo scene on “Naughty Boys Toys” where he was told to fantasize about Brent Everett’s muscles while gently touching his still fragile torso. No wonder he had to run to the gym to overcome this humiliation.

And there is this opening masturbation scene in the notorious “Take it like a **** boy” where Brent is already showing some acting talent by embodying a rich daddy’s son who is, quite improbably, trying to get some work done in his daddy’s hotel suite. While impatiently waiting for his friend to get back to him on the phone he starts squeezing his dick in his pants. We can see that his hands are as attractive as the organ they are busy with. After a while he takes the thing out and an impressive shot from below shows the pale, slightly curved shaft tower over his torso. So far so good, so conventional. But now comes the extra hot and strange “Scorpio moment”, as I would call it (being quite familiar with the depths and twists of that zodiac sign not only from friends and relatives but also having Scorpio as ascendant myself) – young Brent casts a very melancholic glance at this strange thing that nature has miraculously attached to his boyish body as if he would see it for the very first time, but then, as if he nonetheless would feel some tender emotion for that alien little beast, he licks his finger, and in a move both distinct and absent-minded traces the outline of his circumcised glans. A gesture that does not serve any function of masturbatory friction but performs a pure sign of indexicality, circumscribing and indicating what is already the center of attention while giving this fixation an odd melancholic twist.

[Ok, here I went over the top once again; if I keep upping the ante I wonder where the actual part 3 will have to end up.]

Just some final considerations about this little sequence of “PI”. Even though I love to see and praise the sheer perfection of Brent’s neither regions like anyone else does, here it is clearly the face and the hands that are the most exciting erogenous zones. I do not know if anyone has ever tried to do without them but porn just does not work without facial shots. On the one hand I love (the idea) of a reorganization of the body in porn, the creation of a polymorphous, “acephalic” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ac%C3%A9phale body with more than one center of gravity, liberated from the symbolic (here I used the term, first time) order of being upright, symmetrical and ruled by the head. The ass and the genitals (of both men and women) look expressive and individual to me, like a second or third face. On the other hand I could never be interested in their adventure without seeing them mirrored in a face. Maybe the reason is not or not only the trivial fact that the face shows the most expression, but also the ecstatic quality of a body that is not one but many; as if the power of enjoyment could explode the very unity of the body and create a melting landscape of a physico-expressive manifold. And in this chaotic state of the sexually divided, erotically shattered body the left hand might not know what the right hand does (to quote the holy book, why not http://bible.cc/matthew/6-3.htm), but still the glazed eyes seem to be a far echo of an almost autonomous itching in a far away region of that sentient landscape.

Speaking of indexicality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexicality and reference: that funny little film takes the liberty to stage the all male action on the usual sofas in front of a very large nostalgic b&w poster showing a Forties babe of generic “Parisian” frivolity. The contrast between contemporary male flesh and this female icon of the past is distracting not only to the performers. The camera even cuts to this poster full frame to create a transition from the oral action to the anal intercourse. What does this use of female imagery in a gay porn movie tell us? Is it ironical? Indexical? Random? Or does it indicate that female guests are welcome in this all male world of campy gangsters and slightly intimidated but nevertheless horny doctors?