Smutty Little Movies

Truth be told, porn chic—the brief run of hard-core titles in mainstream commercial theaters—was never particularly chic. But it was remarkable. Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) were box-office hits in the early 1970s, briefly legitimizing a historically disreputable and clandestine enterprise. In Smutty Little Pictures Peter Alilunas picks up the story just as hard core is pushed back underground in the late 1970s and early 1980s, out of commercial movie theaters and onto videotape. Alilunas's history lesson reads, for the first hundred pages or so, like a procedural, offering two parallel and related teleologies regarding hard-core video as a business enterprise and as a cultural product targeted for regulation. The book is admirably annotated, and the parallel histories are clearly and carefully explored and explained. For the most part, Alilunas sticks to a basic objective premise—that while his book is indisputably “about sex, its representations and how those representations changed along with technology,” his focus “is more about context than content” (p. 30). The book digresses a bit (elaborating content, not context) in the third chapter's foray into female entrepreneurship, but it works its way back to context again in the final chapter on video stores “and the toxicity of pornography,” convincingly positing content regulation as less a moral regime than a legal process (p. 158

Art · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Hard core · Literature · Mainstream · Media studies · Political science · Pornography · Premise · Product (mathematics · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Law · Philosophy