Behind the Green Door

There's no way I could have a blog about sexuality in film without saying something about pornography.  Unlike floundering Hollywood, the porn industry has managed to still stay afloat and as successful as ever

despite the ease of online pirating and digital media.  According to Forbes Magazine, the Adult Video sector alone is worth something between 500 million to 1.8 billion dollars. But because of obscenity laws, the world of American video pornography was almost entirely comprised of short, amateurish features that went straight for the sex scenes and ignored conventional movie devices like plot and storyline.  The standards for porn changed in 1972 with the release of Deep Throat, the first feature-length pornographic feature to feature developed characters and high production values.  However, the entire porn genre was still seen as at odds with the rest of the the film world, widely viewed as something of lesser artistic value.  The Mitchell Brothers' Behind the Green Door was an attempt to change that, melding the lowbrow hardcore sex scenes with artistic direction and cinematography for a crossover success that briefly bridged the gap between mainstream film and pornography while simultaneously changing perceptions on what constituted as "art" and even challenging racial barriers in film.   However, even in the controversial realm of pornography, the norms of mainstream society are still in place, making them much more of an excursion into pleasurable fantasy then something that dismantles cultural expectations for sexual conduct.

The crude plotline is framed around a story being told by two truck drivers to a cook at a greasy restaurant about their experience with the "green door."    What follows is a long series of sexual activity that begins with a young woman named Gloria (Marilyn Chambers) being kidnapped by four men at night.  They drive her to a lavish hotel where she is forced into sex with several women while formally dressed spectators wearing masquerade-like masks watch and observe.  The lesbian group sex is preparation for the entrance of Johnny Keyes, a black man who has sex with Gloria in what may be the first interracial sex scene ever shown on film.  The initially passive audience eventually turns into an all-out orgy after Gloria preforms fellatio on four men swinging from acrobatic apparatuses around her.  The climax of the long group sex-scene is a bizarre seven-minute money shot that utilizes a variety of innovative experimental film techniques.  The movie ends with one of the truck drivers from the beginning having sex with Gloria alone amidst a backdrop of city lights moving down the highway.

The surreal cult-like nature of the ritual sex scene that makes up a majority of the film feels very much like a product of the seventies counter-culture. But a deeper reading reveals the movie to be much less subversive than it may seem. The fact that the dreamlike sequence of events is depicted as a story being told by men is significant.  Is the entire orgy that is supposedly being recounted an actual memory or just a shared heterosexual fantasy?  Evidence for the latter is suggested by the romantic ending scene between Gloria and the truck driver.  Though the movie's main crux is showing scenes of sexual group debauchery, it appears to prefer imagining such actions as the stuff of imagination and daydreams, instead really supporting the ideal of a monogamous, loving relationship as shown by the much less psychedelic conclusion.  Take another look at the film's poster: there's a reason Marilyn Chambers is billed as an "All-American Girl".  She fits the "Madonna/Whore" notion perfectly as a woman who is both willing to partake in illicit sexual actions while remaining emotionally invested in being a romantic partner to just one man.  The anonymous audience present at her sexual awakening are us, the viewers: we are expected to don a different identity with different moral views while viewing pornography, only to take them off and resume our normal roles in monogamous, heteronormative mainstream society afterward.  The excessive surreal sexuality is simply another commodified product, similar to the food that the truckers are consuming at the dive diner - indeed, even before the sex scene takes place, there is a brief segment of two men discussing food that is seemingly unrelated to the rest of the film, other than to show that both are things that can be indulged in to satisfy instinctual urges.   Another factor of the utopian sex dream that I am only going to touch on here is the casting of Johnny Keyes in the film as Gloria's first on-screen hetereosexual encounter.  Portrayed as a stereotypically strong, dominating black male, his inclusion further reinforces American perspectives on African males as sexually dominating fantasy figures that represent a hyerpcharged form of the masculine sex drive.

Behind the Green Door proved to be a surprise success among mainstream reviewers.  Porn producer William Rostler was so excited by the porn-film renaissance that the picture was a part of that he proclaimed that "eventually [erotic films] will simply merge into the mainstream of motion pictures and disappear as a labeled sub-division."  This prediction proved to be somewhat off the mark.  What distinguishes art films that deal with sexuality like Shame and Fireworks is not just that the sex scenes are simulated or artfully suggested, but also that there is some kind of greater thematic meaning.  In Behind the Green Door, there is little deeper artistic intent to be discerned than the aesthetic experience of what is shown on screen.  The first words shown in the film are emblematic of this: a large marquee bearing the words EAT flashing above the diner.  The Supreme Court felt that the picture met the grounds for obscenity created by the 1973 Miller v California decision that it as sexually explicit material that lacked "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value". Rostler's prediction ultimately did not come true - even when it maintains the sexual norms of society, porn remains a culture positioned outside the mainstream, furthering the notion of sexual discourse as something meant to stay behind closed doors - whether they be green or otherwise.  

Works Cited:

Lust, Erika. Good Porn: A Woman's Guide. Berkeley, CA: Seal, 2010

Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "frenzy of the Visible" University of California, 1999