"Cocker had been watching a lot of porn movies in various deluxe hotel suites around the world, finding himself with a lot of dead time on his hands (and all over his body) during the longeurs of long tours. Beyond their prurient use value, Jarvis typically homed in on the pathos: the emptied-out eyes of the veteran porno performer going through the chafing motions, that same dead look you see with croupiers in Las Vegas. “I found it fascinating wondering what happened to these porn stars…. what happens to the older people when they've been used up and had everything done to them? … I wondered about the people and whether there's any way back into normal life for them.” You can why Cocker might have felt a twinge of solidarity: isn’t the pop singer a kind of sex worker, a strip-tease artist, an exhibitionist acting out a pantomime of erotic excitement and yearning? No wonder that in olden times, entertainment of any kind was disreputable, the distinction between the actor and the prostitute moot at best."
- from the director's cut of my essay for I'm With Pulp, Are You?
You are hardcore, you make me hard
You name the drama and I'll play the part
It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream
I like your get-up, if you know what I mean
I want it bad
I want it now
Oh, can't you see I'm ready now?
I've seen all the pictures, I've studied them forever
I want to make a movie, so let's star in it together
Don't make a move till I say "action"
Oh, here comes the hardcore life
Put your money where your mouth is tonight
Leave your make-up on and I'll leave on the light
Come over here, babe, and talk in the mic
Oh yeah, I hear you now
It's gonna be one hell of a night
You can't be a spectator, oh no
You got to take these dreams and make them whole
Oh, this is hardcore
There is no way back for you
Oh, this is hardcore
This is me on top of you
And I can't believe it took me this long
That it took me this long
This is the eye of the storm
It's what men in stained raincoats pay for
But in here it is pure, yeah
This is the end of the line
I've seen the storyline played out so many times before
Oh, that goes in there
Then that goes in there
Then that goes in there
Then that goes in there
And then it's over
Oh, what a hell of a show
But what I want to know
What exactly do you do for an encore?
'Cause this is hardcore
The video was filmed at Pinewood Studios, with scenes redolent of scenes shot there for Peeping Tom.
"The inspiration for this video was a book entitled Still Life, edited by Diane Keaton and Marvin Heiferman (Calloway, New York, 1983). This beautiful book contains photographs of stills and publicity shots of films produced in Hollywood between 1940 and 1969. All possess a fantastic, super-real quality, reproduced very accurately in the Pulp video. Many of the scenes in the video reproduced specific stills, substituting members of Pulp for actors." - Pulpwiki
Interview with Cocker, Peter Saville and John Currin on the artwork of the This Is Hardcore album
Piece on the book Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp
There are a few channels on Youtube that interview porn stars, and they seem to come (no pun intended) in two types:
ReplyDeletei) phlegmatic breadwinners, and
ii) genuine don't-give-a-shit loons.
The main thing that tends to come across is that porn is basically kayfabe.
Kayfabe - well yes, they are only pretending.
DeleteBut it is a bit like wrestling in so far as it's all very strenuous. I should imagine you need to be incredibly fit for some of the angles and the staging of bodies.
There's probably a fair amount of work-related injuries and just physical wear and tear in this profession. I imagine the porno performers in a sort of locker room situation pre and post match, as it were... not talking about anything sexy, but sharing tips about ointments and procedures done after the game to accelerate recovery.
And of course the rampant use of artificial performance enhancing drugs for erection stamina and such like. Relaxants and what have you.
There is a genre of contemporary porn that resembles the old Mack Sennett silent movie capers - it feels like the film has been sped up for extra Benny Hill routine hilarity. There's an element of West End farce - characters trying to sneak a copulation in inappropriate places, discovered in flagrante, scarpering, trying again somewhere else. Absurd positionings, exaggerated expressions in the absence of dialogue. Sexual clowning - it's hard to imagine for whom this works, but I guess it takes all sorts.