YE OLDE SMUT SHOPPE

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These days, nostalgia's queasy longing attaches itself to any artifact older than Dharma & Greg. So why not porno films? "Ah, the good old days," one writer recently opined, "when the words 'shot on video' were unheard of, and they actually had budgets to shoot an adult movie. ...Heck, they even were known to have occasional rehearsals."

The passage was taken from a Website devoted to the so-called Golden Age of Porn, which the author (a smut-loving emoticon user?!) considers to have ranged from 1977 to '82. Maybe you didn't know that porn had a golden age, but among aficionados it is common wisdom that the genre's best days are behind it. This is the very same argument made by Boogie Nights, the recently released mainstream film about porn, which has received some of the year's best reviews. Despite its epic length, the movie has only one real villain: videotape, which in the early 1980s transformed dirty movies to an even greater degree than talkies did mainstream filmmaking. This dawning sense of temps perdu has also inspired prominent Hollywood producers to initiate projects based on the lives of real '70s pornographers like Linda Lovelace and the Mitchell brothers. All of which hints at an interesting aesthetic question: Can nostalgia blunt pornography's ugly power? Can filth become quaint?

"You can really see a strong and distinctive line between '70s and '80s porn, not just in quality but in the spirit behind it," claims Paul Thomas Anderson, 27, the writer and director of Boogie Nights. For one thing, he says, the ease and cheapness of videotape obviated the discipline of shooting on film, of having to think through and craft even something as rudimentary as a sex scene. And given the reality of fast-forward buttons, most videomakers have chucked narrative (i.e., clothed) interludes, intensifying the genitally drawn gaze. Not that hard core hasn't always been an industrial-strength product designed to meet a very specific need. But with nearly 8,000 new videos saturating the market last year, porn, like the rest of American culture, is a marketing-driven business selling to demographic--or in this case fetishistic--niches, as a few recent video titles suggest: Awesome Asians, Granny Bangers, I Can't Believe I Did the Whole Team!

We have surely come a long way from the era of "porno chic," that brief moment in the early 1970s when hard-core films first flourished on the national scene. Perhaps because of the novelty, intellectuals chose to take them seriously, and middle-class couples flocked to Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones as if they were pretentious corn like The English Patient. The movies' formal crudeness wasn't necessarily a drawback in a day that still took Andy Warhol verite seriously and made hits out of the sloppy likes of Easy Rider and Billy Jack. From today's perspective, it's more than just sideburns and poochier bodies that date '70s porn--it's the lingering hippie notions of free love and liberating sensuality that inform the films, the idea that indiscriminately "getting it on" served some kind of social good. In 1997 this has quaint charm indeed.