Porno for Pyros

If you believe the circulating conventional wisdom, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has cracked open the soul of America with a movie about a man with a 13-inch penis. Boogie Nights has been described as an expression of the mythological American dream, as an interpretation of two extraordinary American decades and as a portrait of a uniquely American family. It is all these things in the capable hands of Anderson, who is rightly lauded as a virtuoso. Anderson's feat evokes an interesting question: Why does the modern essence of our country lend itself so nicely to the symbolism of hard-core pornography?

In Boogie Nights, Dirk Diggler (a.k.a. Eddie Adams) is the champion of the American dream. When Adams, son of an alcoholic mother and powerless father, reflects on his sizable endowment--"Everyone is born with one special thing"--it is a moment that deeply stirs our egalitarian passions. His ability to come on demand is a legitimate foundation on which to base his worth, and in America, even Eddie, a busboy from the San Fernando Valley, can make it big. He becomes Dirk and rides his broomstick o' love straight to the top.

Boogie Nights makes its broadest statement in its interpretation of an American era. The movie begins in the year 1977, when the carefree excess and self-indulgence of the "Me Decade" were at their peak. The movie's pivotal sequence, a New Year's party celebrating the arrival of 1980, climaxes when one tortured porn groupie executes his wandering wife before blowing his brains out at the stroke of midnight. During the 1980s, selfish gratification takes on a colder, nastier edge, and the consequences finally came home to roost. Boogie Nights sends its characters into a spiral of degeneration. As each character faces the ramifications of their depraved life, the porn industry turns to kink and violence in order to keep up with the changing times. Dirk, drugged out and desperate, turns gay tricks in a parking lot to earn money for dope.

After the dramatic decline of Dirk and his friends, one expects the movie to conclude. After all, you are supposed to reap what you sow. It is here that Boogie Nights delivers its most surprising, and most deeply, American turn. Anderson's menagerie of sleazy characters find redemption in family. Albeit, the family is "non-traditional," but Jack Horner, director of exotic cinema, presides over his brood of porn stars and crew with the patriarchal dedication of Ward Cleaver. By the close of the movie, all the chicks have come back to the nest. In the closing sequence, we watch Jack survey his abode, pausing to assure his wife, Amber Waves, and to chastise Rollergirl, the not-quite-angelic daughter-figure, for her unclean room. He proceeds outside to the pool where the aunts and uncles, more professional fornicators, frolic with a newborn baby. In America, wherever there's love, even if its not purely filial, there's family.

And the bonds of family heal all ills. Whether or not Anderson had ironic intent when he chose to find an American story in the sex industry is a matter for artistic interpretation. Regardless, as one watches the ideals of our nation so seamlessly grafted on to the foundation of hard-core porn, the patriotic heart must swell. Dirk Diggler reminds us that the American dream is no longer about hard work aided by a bit of good fortune. It's about rising on the wings of mediocrity and claims of entitlement. It's about gratifying those in the position to facilitate your climb, a widespread sort of prostitution euphemistically described as "selling yourself." Those who doubt my claims might consider the ostensibly merit-based recruiting season and ask themselves if Dirk really went much farther than some inspiring investment bankers would if that plum job at Goldman Sachs was on the line.

With regard to our recent national history, Boogie Nights is, again, right on the money. Our collective capacity to learn a moral lesson is non-existent. The flesh, drugs and rock and roll of the 1970s gave way to the rape erotica, harder drugs and Boy George of the 1980s. When we hit rock bottom, rather than mend our ways, we opted to re-define some terms. Redemption was no longer associated with reformation. It came free with apology. Broken families were simply replaced by a new definition of family. For those who left their wives and children penniless, the co-inhabitants of their crack house became their new kin.

If these lamentations sound like empty rhetoric, it is because they are, admittedly, impotent. In one of the more poignant scenes in Boogie Nights, two of the porn stars, now married and expecting a child, seek a loan to start a small business. They are turned down by the bank officer who cannot take them seriously because of their past. Outside the world of the movie, in our national political discourse, the pornographers run the bank and the stodgy proponents of a bygone era are laughed into the margins. I claim no basis on which to judge the rectitude of anyone else's character, let alone the morality of the nation. Who can tell where our contemporary state will ultimately lead us? It's just that by the end of Boogie Nights, you come to realize that Dirk, his pals and all that they represent have won the heart of our culture. When I think of future generations growing up in this country, I can't help but believe that they've been screwed.

Noah D. Oppenheim '00 is the Crimson's resident moviegoer.