A Scholarly, Accidental Look at Pornography : UCI Author Researching Another Topic Became Caught Up in the Motive Factor and Fundamental Change of Skin Flicks

As she points out in print and reiterates in person, film scholar Linda Williams didn’t set out to write a whole book on film pornography. Really.

“Well, I have a song and dance about that,” confessed Williams, the newest addition to the staff of UC Irvine’s growing film-studies program, during an interview in her campus office. “Because of the volatility of the subject matter . . . I don’t want to say that I directly entered into the project of writing a book on pornography.”

“Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ ” (University of California Press), she says, grew out of another planned book documenting how the human body has been portrayed in a number of film genres, pornography being just one of them.

“I thought that I could do a quick-and-easy chapter in which all the self-evident ‘truths’ about (pornography) would be dispensed with rather easily,” the professor said. “I thought, like everyone, if you’ve seen one porn film, you’ve seen them all.”

What she found instead was an unexpected complexity of motive in representing sex on screen, and a genre that is undergoing some fundamental changes. “I got fascinated,” Williams said, “and, lo and behold, a book came out.”

“Hard Core,” now being shipped to stores, is both history and analysis. Its first printing is 2,500 copies--typical for this type of book, according to a UC Press spokeswoman. Further printings, she said, are likely.

Although her book tackles an emotion-charged subject, Williams says that she did not set out to enter the debate on pornography and censorship--an age-old battle that has split the feminist community in recent years.

“My book is not about that argument,” she said. “What I discovered in writing this book is that there are so many arguments about pornography and hardly any analyses of it as a form. And so I decided I would fill that vacuum. . . .

“I began to get truly annoyed,” she added, “at the way people presume to pronounce upon pornography without having actually looked at it.”

For the record, Williams comes down squarely in the camp of the self-proclaimed anti-censorship feminists. And while she says her book is not about the pornography/censorship debate, she believes it is certain to enter that debate and raise some hackles: “I think that the anti-pornography feminists will see it as a horribly sympathetic approach to pornography. I’ve already encountered that reaction in some talks I’ve given.”

Her difference with feminists who seek to regulate pornography centers on whether hard-core films are symptoms of a patriarchal society or a cause of continuing degradation of women, including rape and other acts of violence.

“I would certainly agree with any feminist critique of pornography: that it is for men, that it is exploitative and . . . that it doesn’t, in its traditional form, really care about the pleasure of women, although it presumes to scrutinize that pleasure a whole lot,” Williams said.

“The larger issue is really this question of the presumed phallic power . . . that is in pornography that feminists have located and identified and pointed to for some time now,” she explained.

“Although it’s true--there is phallic power in pornography--nevertheless there’s an oversimplification if you point to these texts and say that they are the cause of the ills that are done to women.”

Ultimately, Williams said, she is uncomfortable with attempts to suppress representations of selected sexual practices: “Do you want to begin to prescribe,” she asked, “what is politically correct sexuality?”

“Hard Core” starts its history with the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, before the invention of cinema. “The truth of body movement is a kind of scientific quest, and it’s what drives a lot of the technological inventions of cinema,” Williams said. “What drives the early cinema, before we get narrative films, is this compulsion to see more of the world . . . (which is) consistent with what drives pornography.”

Early film pornography--brief stag films that were illicitly shot and distributed and usually viewed by groups of males--eschewed more than the barest attempts at narrative and instead concentrated on “meat shots”--close-ups of female genitals and sexual coupling. These persisted until the late 1960s, when the first full-length narrative pornography began to appear.

The new breed of pornography, which reached a new audience in 1972 with “Deep Throat,” borrowed heavily from the movie musical form, in Williams’ analysis, with sexual “numbers” taking the place of song and dance routines.

“It’s almost as if, once (the pornographic film) becomes a feature-length narrative, you have to do something with all that time. The model of the musical sort of appears,” Williams said. “It’s one of these obvious things that kind of hits you over the head, but it was for me a kind of revelation to see that these films really do work very much the way movie musicals work: narrative stops, performance begins.”

These sexual numbers usually lead up to what is known as the “money shot”--a close-up of the male orgasm, sometimes filmed in slow motion. In her book, Williams quotes a 1977 porno film maker’s guide as recommending the use of at least 10 of these shots in a hard-core movie.

The ubiquitous “money shot” has been labeled by critics as the most flagrant example of the emphasis on “phallic power” in narrative hard-core films. While Williams accepted that interpretation initially, she came to re-examine it as she researched her book.

“It’s there to signal the authenticity of the pleasure. The genre is premised on the ability to visually show you the truth of sex, so you have naked bodies really doing it, no special effects, no faking. . . . If it’s hard core, you have to sort of see ‘it,’ ” Williams explained.

It is “a kind of substitution or compensation for what can’t be seen in the body of the woman--excessively shown in the body of the man, trying to convince itself of the truth of female pleasure, which of course is always fakeable in the film and in real life.”

But the hold of the “money shot” in hard-core film seems to be slipping and the genre as a whole is undergoing some fundamental changes. Films increasingly are being made with the idea of women as viewers instead of simply objects of sexual fantasy--not because of any sudden egalitarian impulses on the part of pornography merchants, but rather in recognition of a changing market.

Especially with the significant growth of home-video technology--many hard-core films are now shot directly on tape, and are never shown in theaters--consumers of hard-core imagery increasingly are women, largely as part of the expanding “couples market.”

“All of a sudden, there’s a need to appeal to women,” Williams said. At its most basic level, that might just mean clean sheets, but it extends to fundamental changes in the way sex is portrayed. One company, Femme, directs its marketing specifically at women.

“One of the hopeful things about the change is that there are now women who are making pornography--often ex-porn stars--who are, within the limits of the market, trying to construct the representation of sexuality and sexual pleasure differently,” Williams said.

The book quotes a film maker known as Candida Royalle: “Porn was always for men. Now that women are finally allowed to have a sexuality, we are looking for stimulus. . . . Well, now is the time to start making films for women. That doesn’t just mean quality and scripts. It means what’s the sex all about.”

Williams taught for 11 years at the University of Illinois at Chicago and turned down job offers from USC and the University of Chicago to come to the much smaller program at UCI. Part of the draw, she said, was the program’s emphasis on film history and theory rather than production, and part was the interdisciplinary approach. In addition to the film studies program, Williams teaches courses in women’s studies.

“Without a lot of hardware, we like to think we do more interesting and innovative things,” Williams said. The film-studies program at UCI, which now has about 80 undergraduate students, plans to develop a graduate program in the next five years.

“Hard Core” was developed while Williams was still in Chicago, and follows a book she wrote on surrealist film. There was a kind of liberation, she said, in writing a book on pornography. “It was in some ways quite fun,” she said, “to realize that I could write about this, that I didn’t have to be oppressed or afraid of it.”

While writing the book, she was interested in the reaction from friends and colleagues. “Every man I’ve ever spoken to about pornography says, ‘Oh, it’s so boring.’ They really complain about it. To listen to men about pornography, you can’t imagine how pornography exists, it’s just so boring.

“And then with women, I would get a reaction of pity: ‘Oh, I’m glad someone’s looking at it, but I couldn’t look at it.’ ”

Williams’ own reaction to watching the films was mixed. “Sometimes I found it disgusting, and I couldn’t look at what I was watching; other times, I will admit to being excited by what I saw. It’s somewhat unpredictable.”

Publication of “Hard Core” will be no surprise to film scholars, Williams predicted, coming as it does in the wake of serious treatments of such academically neglected genres as musicals and horror films. “There has been a tendency in recent film scholarship to turn to the genres that have not been taken very seriously,” Williams said.

The book is something of an anomaly--a film book with no illustrations. That came at the request of the publishers, Berkeley-based University of California Press, with whom Williams finally agreed. The material is so volatile, she reasons, that to take images out of context can “inflame the imagination” and distract from the book’s arguments.

Williams also bowed to a request from publishers to change her original title, moving the words “Hard Core” from a planned subtitle.

“UC Press really liked ‘Hard Core’ up front,” Williams said. “Quite frankly, I think it’s a solid academic book, but I think everyone wanted it because they saw that sex sells, so I don’t flatter myself.”

She emphasized her point, with a laugh: “The first book I wrote was on surrealist film, which I think is a fascinating topic, but no reporter from any newspaper came to interview me about it.”

Linda Williams will give a public lecture, “Hard Core Pornography: Power and Pleasure,” at 3 p.m. Monday at UC Irvine, Humanities Hall, Room 251. Admission is free.