Elliot Spitzer Makes a Porno, Part II 5 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

Despite his misgivings about seeing Zack and Miri Make a Porno, my husband Ben still met me, somewhat sheepishly, in Chinatown last Thursday night. Sitting in a Starbucks near the theater, someone’s forgotten coffee acting as our cover, we stole a table by the window and read until it was time to buy tickets. Every once in awhile, I looked up into the streets and the crowd, wondering which of the next block’s barely gentrified “clubs” was, in fact, harboring a man or woman whose story would cross my desk someday. I wondered which of the city’s dignitaries might be there, as well, setting himself up as the next player in a Spitzer parable.

And then we saw the movie.

Despite myself, I laughed—loudly, and more than Ben laughed, he would like me to report—much because, as A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times, Zack and Miri “follows a gee-whiz romantic-comedy formula that would not be out of place on the Disney Channel.”

Spoiler alert: Zack and Miri is the story of two childhood best friends who realize that they have always been in love. “Granted,” A.O. Scott says, “this revelation occurs while they are having sex in front of a camera, but it is so sweet and predictable that these potentially tawdry circumstances hardly matter.”

Exactly.

The sweet, predictable love story and genuinely funny dialogue made me willing, in the moment, to overlook a lot of degrading, gross humor, not to mention the annoying sexism of a beautiful Gracie and an ugly George.

But where I stopped laughing—where I knew I couldn’t laugh anymore—was the scene in which former child porn star Traci Lords, playing a character named “Bubbles,” pulled a trick that I thought I would never see performed by anyone but stone-faced child prostitutes in a glossy Bangkok bar.

Watching that scene, and hearing the theater audience shriek and laugh, I thought: this isn’t funny. I remembered those girls on the Bangkok bar room stage and all the their absurd tricks they acted out, strutting stiffly for smiling American businessmen and the occasional northern European family who attended, I supposed, to “broaden” their children’s horizons.

I remembered, too, the unending roster of young women and girls whose stories I had stewarded for the last year, and the way my Excel spreadsheet database anticipated that any field beginning with the word PROSTITUTION would end with the terms PORNOGRAPHY, STRIPPING, DANCING, CRAIGSLIST.

The difference is that for those girls, there wasn’t the happy ending of a good-hearted porn co-star, a sweet-faced buffoon who would come back to find her in her cold-water flat and tell her he loved her. Most of the time, there was only a pimp, who was usually a “boyfriend”—an abuser, a rapist—and a reel of johns who would never know, as she did, what it felt like to be arrested and jailed, arrested and jailed, and spit out in a rehab facility at the age of 19.

Maybe I’m being too serious about all this. Sitting in the theater, listening to the men—and a lot of women—around me laugh, I weighed my moralistic tendencies in my mind.

My inner debate included a scene from a comedy writing class I took in graduate school. The other students were mostly goofy undergrad guys, who were a lot of fun until they started laughing hysterically about a lot of un-funny things, like violent oral sex. On that particular day, the professor, a woman in her late thirties, caught my eye for a long moment and we shared a glance of disbelief and disgust.

Zack and Miri reminded me that what is presented to us as “funny” ingrains itself in our minds. In the memory, comedy’s moral drift is like music—you may forget the words to the song, but you hum the melody, and even if you don’t mean to think of the lyrics, they come back and you sing them.

A.O. Scott’s review ends with the disclaimer that Zack and Miri is rated R; it “has some nudity and sexual situations, but mostly just talk.” Just talk. Can’t hurt, right? Tell that to Elliot Spitzer, Randall Tobias, Bill Clinton, or any of the famous men caught on wiretap over the past decade, cavorting with women who, like Ashley Dupré or Deborah Jeane Palfrey, have a history more complicated and sad than their clients can imagine.