Eager to leave the slums and the cigar smell of the rooms reserved for men, porn wanted to arm itself with a minimum of argument in the early seventies. The person in charge of providing it was Gerard Damiano, a hairdresser from Brooklyn who supplemented his salary with photographic reports of weddings, communions and baptisms, and had a certain talent for kitsch comedy. He wrote the script in a weekend, and the story, while witty, was vile nonsense: a woman can't reach orgasm until an eccentric gynecologist discovers her clitoris is hidden down her throat, leading to an amazing feast. fellatio in which the protagonist behaves like a skillful sword swallower for the sake of her own satisfaction. Summarized, the well-worn masculine fantasy embodied in a woman who ate everything.
Released in 1972 and filmed in just six days, Deep Throat became against all odds one of the most lucrative films in history. With a budget of just $25,000 (courtesy of the mob), it grossed more than $600 million. New York's liberal elite (from Warren Beatty to Jack Nicholson, Truman Capote and Jacqueline Onassis) went to theaters barefaced, proclaiming that sex is revolutionary and acting as godfathers of what the New York Times critic Ralph Bluementhal would dub as the birth of “porn chic”. But the film infuriated puritans and feminists, and President Nixon savagely attacked it in his crusade against "obscenity," even as Washington Post reporters gave it a path to immortality by using its title to name its source. Secret of the Watergate case.
Fifty years later, Deep Throat is back in theaters. Damiano's children – who kept the crumbs and died penniless in 2008, trying to survive as a golf caddy – have put into circulation a high-resolution restored copy that is colliding with the indifference of theater owners both in the United States as in Europe. But in countries like Belgium, where it has found distribution, it raises new storms. I'm not sure we're less sanctimonious about sex now, but it's clear that half a century and a MeToo have turned our angle of vision around. Our eyes sting for other things.
Linda Lovelace, the leading actress who sported bruises and cuts on her legs, received $1,200 for her work that she had to give to Chuck Trayn, her husband at the time. A pimp who held her at gunpoint every time the camera light came on on the set. “Every time someone watches the movie, they are watching me get raped. It is a crime that it continues to be exhibited ”, she declared in 1986, condemning that old myth of sexual liberation as an emblem of rape culture. Chic porn?
