Hi Everyone,

Here is a written text of my presentation.

Please watch the clip before reading the speech.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2soQqo40cX8

Softcore? Hardcore? Mediumcore?: The Deuce, Drama, and Porn

The Deuce (2017-2019) is one of David Simon’s more recent television series. The TV auteur first earned critical acclaim for The Wire in the early 2000s and then more fame for shows like Generation Kill and Treme, and most recently, The Plot Against America.

David Simon exemplifies what Martha Nochimson calls in her 2019 book, Television Rewired: The Rise of the Auteur Series (which Ellen Seiter has assigned the undergrads for 191) the David Effect. David Lynch, David Chase, and David Simon (and I would argue David Milch who created Deadwood, to whom Nochimson omits but OK) are the pinnacle of auteur TV creators. Lynch changed TV forever with his show, Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks showcased nonconventional story arcs, bizarre characters, and intricate camera movements. David Chase married the mob genre with the soap opera in his foundational premium TV show, The Sopranos. R. Colin Tait (“The HBO-ification of Genre”) states that the main reason why HBO is able to produce quality TV is because the company can blend genre via freedom of censorship. The HBO programs no longer have to adhere to the rules and regulations of broadcast TV. The Wire is most certainly this, and it is what Michael Kackman claims the show to be-a part of cinema; a mature drama. The show is not a traditional police drama where the crimes are solved. The purpose of show is to display that crime cannot be resolved. We are all complicit. The Wire is a bleak look at American politics and police work. The system fails, everyone loses in the game of cops and robbers. Kackman states that shows like The Wire are marketed towards a quality audience. These programs are created for people who are not interested in fart jokes or shootouts. But rather texts that investigate the irony of everyday life. This is how the David effect works. By auteurs creating stimulating serialized art.

In the late 2010s, David Simon reworked TV again by creating a show that embodies an academic look at porn. Like Linda Williams examines pornography in a professional manner in her 1989 book, Hard Core, so does Simon in his show, The Deuce. The Deuce is a program that is absent of any “meat” shots which Linda Williams states is essential to hard core porn. They display coitus. “Money shots,” on the other hand, show the male ejaculation–the assertion that the male was aroused, and that sex did indeed occur. For porn to work there cannot just be meat shots. There has to be an end. The money shot is where and how the intercourse concludes. Without the money shot, there is no porn according to Williams.

The Deuce is not the least bit interested in being an excuse for people to watch a TV show with good looking actors having sex. It is the opposite. It mixes melodrama, soap, and highly simulated sex without semen for an in depth look at the organized crime that is involved in the porn industry, and the lives of the sex workers who answer to the pimps and porn agents to which the show argues that both are the same.

In the clip that I provided I wanted to exemplify how The Deuce explores the innerworkings of producing porn and how a feminist, Candy/Eileen, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, tries to find her own way in the industry. First a prostitute and later an acclaimed porn director, Eileen finds her voice in the porn business because she is not solely interested in producing “meat” and “money shots.” She wants to transform porn into art. Eileen believes that pornography can be arousing for men and women, and that the genre can also be considered Avant Garde. Even amidst the second wave of feminism that is displayed in the show (specifically the late 70s to the early 80s), Eileen contends that porn is not purely shameful. Women can have power in the industry. They can divert pornography from becoming a stigmatized form of stimulation and lead it to the New York art scene.

As we see in the clip, Eileen debates with Harvey, her co-director/partner, that porn can take multiple shapes, it does not just have to be a documentation of coitus. She uses allegories for male genitalia such as the swinging light switch attached to the ceiling fan. She exemplifies the animalistic side of sex via a wild lion running in the brush. These are intercut with sex scenes to which I would point out do not fall into what Williams would call “money or meat shots.” Eileen showcases multiple cuts to display an increasing momentum which insinuates an orgasm.

In this way, The Deuce explores porn’s potential by experimenting with what TV can be. Simon blends the serialization of the soap opera drama with porn/sex work to showcase Eileen’s long character arc. From sex worker to influential filmmaker, she is given the time, space, and detail to ground her character. One who lives within the epoch of second wave feminism while experimenting with porn. The Deuce showcases this historical period and the discussion of porn being a part of the the Avant Garde film scene, which Eileen yearns to be a part of. Her film in the clip provided references Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma which was filmed in NYC in 1970. We see these allusions to Frampton’s film via the burning logs and the quick cuts. Eileen’s friend in this scene advocates that her film is like Easy Rider. She is adding porn into the cannon of highly regarded experimental cinema.

HBO states that quality TV can be a place where porn can be freely examined via its production of The Deuce. Likewise, William’s book, Hard Core, argues that porn belongs in critical studies. In both situations’ porn becomes a product for quality audiences and this happens through the blending of genre. Academia with low culture, which porn has been considered, and TV with simulated sex. The meshes create something complex and serious for which the Davids are known for. Mob and soap. Policework and nihilism, and now porn and TV.