Inside Deep Throat

Not a rush-job response to last week’s Vanity Fair story, but rather an amusing, if sometimes hysterical, response to an extraordinary blow-job, this documentary takes the moral temperature of ’70s America via the clitoris at the back of Linda Lovelace’s throat in the 1972 porn flick, ‘Deep Throat’. There’s fun to be had from observing the array of associated misfits wheeled out to explain how a $25,000 porn film grossed $6 million, turned the mob into extortionate film distributors and kickstarted a moral outrage that went as high as the Supreme Court. Especially entertaining are the high-trousered director of ‘Deep Throat’, Gerard Damiano, who makes wild claims for his scrappy film; porn star-turned-born-again estate agent Harry Reems; and whiter-than-white prosecutor Larry Parrish who claims to be haunted still by images from the film. The pundits can’t be knocked either; Dr Ruth, John Waters, Camille Paglia, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Hugh Hefner all contribute their informed twopenny’s worth…But for all its partially interesting conclusions about the sexual revolution and ‘Deep Throat’s’ role within it, this is a schizophrenic film, veering wildly between light, detached nostalgia and indignant mock-gravitas. Historians will baulk at the lack of context and some flippant statements (wrapping up a section on Nixon’s resignation, Dennis Hopper’s sleazy voiceover declares, ‘This national nightmare over, the nation got down,’ cueing the briefest of sections on the rest of the ’70s). The almost complete dismissal of Lovelace’s claims of coercion and bullying on the part of her husband/manager Chuck Traylor are also a little hard to swallow. The directors clearly have Lovelace down as unhinged and untrustworthy. Not that she can defend herself: she died in a car crash in 2002.