The Problem with Porno

I tend not to subscribe to the Obligatory State Fandom Rule, which clearly dictates that if someone famous is born in the same state as you, you have to adore them. I suspect this works more in less populous states, or at least in less overtly beloved states, but if you're from New Jersey, for instance, the law of the land is that you must love Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, and Kevin Smith.

Sorry guys, but Bon Jovi has always been way too cheesy for my tastes, and Bruce never could sing and still can't. Kevin Smith, on the other hand, can write and direct a damn funny movie, and he was doing the "crude but good-hearted" flick long before Judd Apatow became a household name (and, with the exception perhaps of the unfortunate Jersey Girl, has consistently done it better).

So I'm incredibly stoked about K.S.'s upcoming feature, which grabbed my attention (and, apparently, the Weinstein Brothers' as well) by the title alone:

Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

Straightforward. Blunt. To the point. Gotta love it.

Unfortunately, that same title has been causing a number of problems with promoting the flick, including newspapers and TV stations who have flat refused to carry ads because of that pesky five-letter P-word. (No, not that one, you sicko.) And while I'm all about freedom of expression -- and especially in this case, as the usually-rigid MPAA approved a green-band (or all-ages) trailer for the film that includes its complete title -- I suppose I can understand why some people may not like that word.

Except when they say stupid shit like this:

Diane Levin, an education professor specializing in child development at Boston's Wheelock College, said the posters at city bus stops send a message to children that working in the porn industry is an acceptable occupation.

"It's drawing attention to a movie which is mainstreaming and normalizing pornography, saying if you need money, this is what you do," said Levin, co-author of "So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids."

The stick-figure images are especially appealing to youngsters, since "stick figures are something for children," she said.

Read the whole article here.

Consider me officially enraged.

I'm endlessly amazed at how little research talking-head academics do when cited for mainstream stories. Because, as a recovering academic myself, I know that the academy typically demands extremely rigorous research before anything is even considered a possibility for future publication.

So it's astounding to me that Professor Levin could level such a harsh charge against a movie that I'm almost certain she has not seen. (After all, it's not being released until October 31.) In fact, reading any of the copious available interviews with Smith regarding the movie -- which can be easily found using that most primitive of academic search engines, a little site called Google -- would quickly reveal that the film is not intended to glorify pornography whatsoever, and that it is instead both a skewering of the over-the-top world of internet porn as well as a thinly-veiled jab at his own experience independently making his first feature, Clerks.

And as for the bit about the stick figures, that too was part of the joke: just look at the freaking caption! "Seth Rogen & Elizabeth Banks made a movie so titillating that we can only show you this drawing." It's clearly not meant to try and attract children; rather, it's again a clever jibe at the MPAA, which felt that the original version, which still exists as the official Canadian poster, was too risque for all audiences despite it just barely toeing the line of inappropriate.

(If your virgin eyes can handle it, you can look at it here.)

It seems pretty clear to me that Smith has made a movie that's very clearly skewed towards adults and that is meant only for mature audiences. After all, anyone going to see a movie with "porno" in its title has to know what to expect from it. (This point, in fact, was a key part of Smith's ultimately successfully appeal to have the original NC-17 rating reduced to an [ironically] more advertising-friendly R.) And as I've already said, I'm all about freedom of expression, so if the MPAA is cool with it, I don't see why that single word should be such an issue.

Of course, there are parents who don't see it that way:

One complaint came from a man watching a game in September with his young son, who did not understand a suicide-squeeze bunt the Dodgers tried, Rawitch said.

"He was explaining to his son what a squeeze bunt was. Commercial break, the ad comes on, and the kid asks, `Dad, what does porno mean?"' Rawitch said. "Dodgers baseball has always been about family, and we've always been sensitive to the type of advertising that runs on our games."

So let me get this straight: it's perfectly legitimate to play highly-suggestive commercials hocking Viagra and Cialis during sports events, and that's less "family-friendly" than this commercial for a raunchy comedy? I smell bullshit. If this guy's kid watched one of those commercials and asked, "Daddy, how do I know if I have a four-hour long erection?" would he wig out just as badly? Or would he, like any normal parent, come up with a perfectly plausible explanation that doesn't reveal too much information and then quickly change the subject before the kid realizes this is something that's inappropriate for his age and thusly totally worth fixating on for the foreseeable future?

I'm not interested in turning this into a "parents should freaking parent" argument (though I stand by that thesis), and frankly I think this is mostly the case of the media turning a non-issue into a front-page story in the entertainment section. But what it continues to prove to me is that we are a country of raging hypocrites -- the kind who love our skin flicks and buy our perfumes and colognes based on how sexy the models look, but inexplicably wig out when we hear a single word, and one that isn't even a dirty word or a patently offensively word to boot!

"Porno" doesn't make us uncomfortable because it's a "bad word," but because we have a cultural rift over sex that is spiraling more and more out of control with each new day. We're trained from an early age that it is morally degrading and ethically wrong to think about sex or willingly seek it for pleasurable purposes. We're made to think it's ugly and awful and worth shunning. And we're told to ignore it, while on billboards and in even the most well-lit corners of the Internet, it grows and thrives and expands while we look at it through the slits between the fingers on the hands that cover our eyes.

It took a lot of balls for Kevin Smith to call his movie by this title precisely because it asks us to confront the issue head-on. And yet here we are, placing it on the pedestal of newsworthiness while pointing an accusatory finger at it and shouting, "Not on my bus stop!" It seems to me like Mr. Smith is making his point loud and clear, and he's getting lots of free press out of it, too. And if you care at all about freedom of expression, you'll support the cause by buying a ticket opening weekend. I know I will.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is in theatres October 31.

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EDIT (10-22-2008, 4:00pm): Not to be a braggart, but I love being right. Click here to see Kevin Smith himself use the same argument I employed in the fourth-to-last paragraph.

From This Day Forward

I still remember July 1, 2006, like it was yesterday.

The event was less of a surprise to me than to most, since I was one of the few people let in on the secret. It was meticulously planned and intricately organized, but in the end, to my great surprise, my brother was unable to contain his excitement and popped the question earlier in the afternoon, rather than waiting until sunset like he'd planned. A few days later, over the Fourth of July weekend, a holiday barbecue was the ruse through which two families came together to celebrate a long-awaited engagement.

I remember that day when my brother asked me to be his Best Man, a role I graciously accepted with no hesitation because a) he's my only brother and this would probably be my only shot, and b) the wedding was to be over two years away, and I imagined the workload, when distributed over that length of time, wouldn't be nearly so overbearing.

The past week has disproved a few of what I'd held as fundamental axioms of weddings -- namely, that no matter how long an engagement is, it will inevitably sneak up on you when you least expect it; and that the work of a Best Man is far greater than I'd anticipated.

The four days leading up to the wedding -- including, though through no fault of the bride and groom, the arduous late-night trek from Central Pennsylvania back to the friendly confines of North Jersey -- were among the most exhausting and chaotic days I've experienced in quite some time. So much so, in fact, that I needed several hours on Sunday just to gather up the energy needed to extricate myself from the floor and get back into my car for the return trip. Those same four days were also, as it turns out, some of the most fun and rewarding days I've experienced in my life.

Perhaps I should have anticipated the lack of rest and relaxation that would come out of this weekend, but it is, I suppose, my own fault too for naïvely believing that Friday, which was designated on all of our schedules as "breathing day," would instead be spent running even more last-minute errands. The list of things that needed to be accomplished won't be repeated here, for not only would it prove to be horrifically boring reading, but it also was so extensive and happened so quickly that it's all but a blur to me right now.

Suffice to say, however, that the payoff of Saturday was well worth the days (and weeks and months and years) of work and trouble that led up to it.

I knew on Thursday that my typically stoic stance would be drastically challenged, as the rehearsal of the ceremony at the church raised more than a few quivers on my lips. I had not expected to be so moved, particularly since the priest was mostly adept at keeping the tone humorous and jovial, and I anticipated anything from single tears to full-fledged bawling come 2:00pm on Saturday.

Shockingly, I kept my composure together, though it would be challenged well enough. Photographs at my parents' house went swimmingly, and considering how goddamn dashing I look in a tuxedo, I can't be blamed for allowing a bit (okay, a lot) of hubris to get into my system and present itself as a front to the emotional firestorm brewing inside me. (It should be noted that one needed only to touch me and feel the absurd amount of sweat pulsing from my body to realize that my faux machismo was strictly faux.) A few interesting incidents involving the rings kept me on my toes, and kept my hand in my pocket every few minutes fumbling with the box to make sure it was still there. And, naturally, though I plastered my best confident shit-eating grin for my own stroll down the aisle, watching my brother escort my stone-faced father and my extremely emotional mother threatened my moxie to the core.

I survived that first onslaught with flying colors, but when my brother spoke his vows with a quaking voice -- the same brother, mind you, who almost always refuses to take himself seriously in my presence; the same brother whose taste for cursing and fart jokes easily rivals my own; yes, the very same brother who, after the ceremony, put on what I affectionately call his "doof-face" in the picture I took for my cell phone background* -- I was fucking jelly.

My own speaking -- much later at the reception, as I toasted he and his beautiful bride -- was, so I was told, coherent and beautiful. Which surprised me because that speech, which I'd been planning since that very same summer day over two years before, had undergone many manifestations since that time. So many that, when it came time for me to begin writing down the final copy, I simply couldn't find the words. Instead of having a complete written text, I woke up on the morning of October 4, grabbed an index card, and wrote myself a "road map" of sorts, so that I would have points of reference for where I needed my speech to go.

As it turned out, I didn't need the card at all. The words came right from the heart, just as I suspected they would, and they spoke volumes about the work, the luck, and the joy that I've been seeing on their faces for over nine years now. I meant it when I said that I can't imagine two people more perfect for each other, and I meant it even more earnestly when I said that we should all be so lucky to find in our lifetimes what they found in just a few short years.

So while I freeze in the suddenly bitter-cold State College autumn and they enjoy the equatorial pleasures of 90-degree highs and 80-degree lows in sunny Aruba on their honeymoon, I can't hate on them too badly. They deserve nothing but the best, and if I'm to believe the reaction of one of my brother's fellow firefighters, the wedding was nothing short of that. For as one of Wayne's bravest so eloquently put it:

"This was one for the record books."

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* I submit, for your approval, the picture in question:



Is that not totally doofy?