Shelton Waldrep - The Space of Sex: The Porn Aesthetic in Contemporary Film and Television

Tout lart est rotique.

Adolf Loos, Ornement et Crime,
Les Cahiers daujourdhui, no. 5 Juin, 1913

This study examines how the fragmented body is represented in various media via its position in space and the illusion of the built environment created by sets, camera angles, and other aspects of filmed culture that contribute to the representation of gender and sex on the screen. My argument is that mainstream, independent, and foreign film and prestige television in the United States are increasingly preoccupied with the human body as an erotic object. As film and television become ever more focused on the pornographic gaze of the camera, the human body undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming both landscape and building, part of an architectonic design in which the erotics of the body spread beyond the body itself to influence the design of the film or televisual shot. The body becomes the mise-en-scne of contemporary moving imagery. This book looks particularly at what might be considered a second wave of influence of pornography on mainstream film and television that has taken place since the 1970s.

An interest in researching and writing about adult film grew out of the final chapter and coda of my book The Dissolution of Place, where I looked at images of the body in the late films of Stanley Kubrick and at the architectural metaphors that are a part of virtual communities, especially pornography. This work has become the central focus in The Space of Sex. I argue that the pornification of culture, especially nearly all forms of visual representation, marks a further intensification of what I have termed elsewhere self-invention, the constant performance of a self as a way to advertise and publicize a constructed persona.

This books three-part structure begins with a discussion of Kubricks final film and his career in general (including his work as a still photographer); moves on to a consideration of porn in contemporary film, literature, and theory; and ends in a final part with case studies from film and television of the twenty-first century. The second part (and to some extent the first) is intended to put forward the theory I am working from, with the last part comprising the examples. The first part has a relation to the last part that is similar to the one that Fredric Jamesons A Singular Modernity(2002) has to The Modernist Papers(2007). While all three parts discuss individual movies, the last functions mainly as an attempt to illustrate what has come before in the book in a more theoretical or historical context.

The examples of film and television that I use here to examine the vicissitudes of the body and its moving image are taken purposefully from pornography, action film, and the late cinema of Stanley Kubrick. What they have in common is gender and sexuality, especially the representation of the body in relationship to architecture and design. The erotic nature of these spaces is connected to their reflection of and uses by bodiesspecifically, sexuality and its ability to leave traces in the designs we fantasize about as much as the people who are supposed to inhabit them. Indeed, the two cannot be separated. In terms of the first, I am especially interested in porn as both content and subjectthat is, films and television that deal with erotic material, the emergence of porn as a genre or influence, and actual pornography itself.