The Space of Sex: The Porn Aesthetic in Contemporary Film and Television

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As film and television become ever more focused on the pornographic gaze of the camera, the human body undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming both landscape and building, part of an architectonic design in which the erotics of the body spread beyond the body itself to influence the design of the film or televisual shot. The body becomes the mise-en-scne of contemporary moving imagery. Opening The Space of Sex, Shelton Waldrep sets up some important tropes for the book: the movement between high and low art; the emphasis on the body, looking, and framing; the general intermedial and interdisciplinary methodology of the book as a whole. The Space of Sexs second half focuses on how sex, gender, and sexuality are represented in several recent films, including Paul Schraders The Canyons (2013), Oliver Stones Savages (2012), Steven Soderberghs Magic Mike (2012), Lars Von Triers Nymphomaniac (2013), and Joseph Gordon-Levitts Don Jon (2013). Each of these mainstream or independent movies, and several more, are examined for the ways they have attempted to absorb pornography, if not the pornography industry specifically, into their plot. According to Waldrep, the utopian elements of seventies porn get reprocessed in a complex way in the twenty-first century as both a utopian impulsethe desire to have sex on the screen, to re-eroticize sex as something positive and lacking in shamewith a mixed feeling about pornography itself, with an industry that can be seen in a dystopian light. In other words, sex, in our contemporary world, still does not come without compromise.

Reviews

As part of the team that helped create 500 Days of Summer, I would confess that we were not necessarily trying to make a work of art that would busy cultural critics and academics a decade later. Rather, we were trying to take a beloved genre and turn it on its head. To do so, our writers, directors, editors, and actors reinvented the narrative structure of the romantic comedy, bent (to a degree) the gender expectations of the form, and utilized architecture, music, and California's urban landscape to invoke an earlier generation of films--Annie Hall and The Graduate--but also to signal something new. What is so exciting about reading Professor Waldrep's work is that many of the decisions that we made that were instinctual, he makes explicit. It is almost surreal to learn so many new things about the film that I was honored to help make, and to understand better its place within the culture. * Jessica Tuchinsky, Producer, 500 Days of Summer *
In this wide-ranging, illuminating study, Shelton Waldrep shows how pornography has thoroughly infiltrated mainstream cinema and television, influencing visual representation formally as well as thematically. Pornification, rather than the object of jeremiad, is subject in The Space of Sex to thoughtful critical analysis. A most welcome book. * Tim Dean, James M. Benson Professor in English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA *

Author Bio

Shelton Waldrep is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, USA. He is the author of The Dissolution of Place: Architecture, Identity, and the Body (2013) and The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (2004), the co-author of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995), and the editor of The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (1999).