Détourne Me On

[Please welcome frequent guest writer André Callot – now a formal contributor! With his own username and everything!]

Détournement is a stand-in for a noble revolutionary guerilla war. On one side, the forces of “the spectacle,” or capitalism: all of the power of constructed media language, the entire culture of representation and every image you’ve ever seen in your life. On the other side, the artist: a valiant resistance fighter, cursed with the knowledge that he alone must take the enemy’s ammunition and use it against them. By reshaping the palace of the commercial image into something ugly, something political, détournement takes the power away from the autonomous image and returns it to the people. All very romantic and sexy and French.

Speaking of pornography, there is a kind of combat at work in porn, too (and not just in the really good kind). The two sides of the conceptual battle in porn are similar to the ones I just mentioned: the performers/creators who do it for money or fame or what have you, and the “sex artists” who do it because it is their creative passion. As with “the spectacle,” pornography defaults to the system of power associated with capitalism, against which the few serious auteurs struggle.

A struggle between artists and capitalism? Yes, I guess I am talking about television. Specifically, the intersection of television, Situationist art and porn: the porn parody.

In September 2007, Not the Bradys XXX (a porn featuring the characters from The Brady Bunch) became a huge hit, drew mainstream media attention and started a porn trend that is entering its third year. When it became clear that major media companies would rather look the other way than draw attention to sexually explicit videos that exploit high-profile intellectual properties, porn versions of almost every successful show on television were produced. A Friends porn. A Scrubs porn. A Seinfeld porn. High production values (provided by near-guaranteed sales) allowed for the mimicking of the sets, the costumes and the casts of these shows, down to fine details like Elaine Benes’s big, curly hair. It was all really funny and novel and cute…for the first six months.

Now, years later, the novelty is gone. What isn’t gone is the business model. A Dexter porn? Well, all right. A Borat porn? That would have been a terrible idea when Sacha Baron Cohen still had a career. Today it’s just bizarre and unfortunate. At this point, porn parodies still sell a little better than “regular” porn, but not enough to justify the huge budgets and all-star casts of the past. Whether these parodies were ever détournement can be debated. The ones produced now, though, seem to have settled down to the level of harmless cash-in, bereft of the shock-of-recognition that made the first ones possibly disruptive to the power contained in the original television shows.

Maybe, maybe not.

The Sex Files, starring Kimberly Kane and Anthony Rosano as Special Agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, was released last week to huge acclaim in the adult film press. What made it so good? According to a fleshbot.com interview (NSFW) with the film’s director Sam Hain, it was “geekery.”

“I wanted it to fit into a plot hole in ‘The X Files’ that lots of fans were talking about,” he said. “We see Scully…leaving a room as she’s adjusting her clothes, and inside we see Mulder…on the bed. (I) tried to make it organic to the original show(.)“

Unlike the originators of the porn parody trend, The Sex Files began with the intention of creating continuity with the source material, not through a scrupulous application of out-of-work set designers, but through narrative and characterization. That is, through fan fiction. This strategy is a little odd for the super-commercial world of pornography, as the performers would have to be as committed to the ideology of the project as the fanboy director. Oddly, that seems to be the case. Kane, as Scully, squints into the sun like Gillian Anderson, crouches over corpses at crime scenes like Gillian Anderson, smirks with annoyed condescension like Gillian Anderson, as though she were doing the work of a real actress, which she is. If Kane’s twitter feed can be believed, she is a total sci-fi geek who was as excited about getting to play Dana Scully as she was about getting Galaxy Quest on DVD.

Here we get to the real question: when this “fan fiction” mentality meets the disruptive force of near-Hollywood-level production values, is that détournement? Or is it just the autonomous image reasserting its dominance over the viewer? When we watch Kimberly Kane play Dana Scully, is she playing Gillian Anderson playing Dana Scully, or is Kane simply another actress taking on the role? If Kane is playing Gillian Anderson, the movie becomes an attack on the illusion of narrative continuity, prying a wedge between our subconscious minds and the commodity of The X Files. Levels of representation separate from each other, revealing the complicated relationships between the “subculture” of genre television as another model for marketing trench coats and flashlights. On the other hand, if Kane is playing Dana Scully (which she appears to be), the movie neuters one of the tools of critical appropriation: the abjection of a narrative through explicit synthesis with the indescribable reality of the human body. It’s like taking the piss out of Piss Christ (pun!). By making it possible to have both the continuous illusionary space of sustained narrative (without it being undermined by non-realist acting) and the bodily sexual interaction of the constituting characters, the psychosexual crisis at the heart of puritan American television starts to disappear.

It’s unlikely that the porn parodies ever had much power as anti-spectacular propaganda. The “porn ghetto,” much like the animation ghetto, insulates the referenced work from direct critical interaction with the parody. For me, the most interesting take-away from The Sex Files is that one of the goals of the Situationists (a disruption of the separation between the individual and the physical experience of the reality of the human body) seems to have been achieved at some point in the recent past. Abjection, as great as it is as a tool for the political artist, is one psychosexual crisis I wouldn’t miss.

[Have porn parodies of mainstream pop culture transcended actual parody? Will The Sex Files have as many unresolved plot threads as the series that inspired it? Sound off in the comments!]