Throat culture Inside goes Deep BY PETER KEOUGH
	Inside Deep Throat Written and directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. With Gerard Damiano, Harry Reems, Erica Jong, John Waters, Norman Mailer, Camille Paglia, Ruth Westheimer, Dick Cavett, and Hugh Hefner. A Universal Pictures release (92 minutes). At the Kendall Square.

It’s a pity that Christopher Guest can’t make a mockumentary on the subject of Deep Throat now that Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato’s "serious" investigation into the legendary porn film is in release. He wouldn’t have to make much up, to judge from some of the loony, lovable characters the filmmakers interview here. And I’m not just talking about Dr. Ruth, Dick Cavett, and Norman Mailer.

The film’s wizened director, Gerard Damiano, reflects on the good old days when those in the porn trade had become "filmmakers." A retired Florida theater owner talks about how the mobsters collected their share of the box office for the film (estimated at more than $600 million, none of it accounted for) as his wife across the room scolds him for being foolish. It’s a cast that would do justice to Waiting for Guffman or Spinal Tap, and Bailey and Barbato, whose flippant and wry (and sometimes condescending) wit has fizzed in such documentaries as The Eyes of Tammy Faye, know what to do with such ripe material. So Inside Deep Throat, like the movie that inspired it, can be enjoyed just for laughs. But you’ll probably be tempted to look deeper.

It might take a leap to regard Deep Throat as a landmark in American society and culture, but the filmmakers make their case. Shot for $25,000 and released in a midtown Manhattan adult movie house, it became one of the top-grossing films of 1972. Not just skulkers in raincoats went to see it but big names in society and show business. "Porn chic" was born, and it seemed, to the consternation of the legitimate film industry and moral watchdogs everywhere, that the world was ending. A flurry of raids and court orders, a decision by the Nixon-packed Supreme Court in 1973, and a criminal case in 1976 that sentenced actor Harry Reems to five years in prison put an end to all that. Now we have to resort to the Internet, DVDs, and hotel pay-per-view to indulge the craving for smut that has grown into a $10 billion industry.

Bailey and Barbato relate this history with zest and, when suitable, gravity, using (occasionally glib) montage, funny and apt archival footage, and period music in making their points. They also include talking-head commentary from the usual suspects, not always to the best effect. Helen Gurley Brown is a little frightening when she digresses about how all women know about the restorative power of semen for the complexion. Camille Paglia seems irrelevant as she waxes eloquent about how this was the first time in history middle-class women lined up to see a blue movie. A turning point, indeed.

It could have been. True, as Damiano recalls, Deep Throat is not a good movie. But it had a sense of humor, irony, and genre. The fireworks when Linda Lovelace finally gets what she’s been looking for are a homage to those of To Catch a Thief, and is Busby Berkeley getting a nod when three or four partners go at it with hydraulic precision backed by honky-tonk music? The film amounts to a musical, with sex taking the place of the production numbers.

And though Damiano might not assent, as Berkeley professor Linda Williams notes here, Deep Throat is also a subtle analysis of women’s empowerment. Here’s my take: the heroine lacks not only a penis but a clitoris, or so it seems until stalwart Doctor Young (Reems, evoking a pantless Groucho Marx) locates it in her throat. Her sexual empowerment is her voice! Anyway, she discovers that oral consumption of nine-inch-plus cocks is the way to satisfaction.

As you’d expect, feminists like Gloria Steinem (present here in a tape of an old Tom Snyder Show) and Susan Brownmiller (debating Hugh Hefner on the Cavett Show as well as following up her statements in the present day) disagree with that assessment. Especially given that Lovelace (real name Linda Marchiano, née Boreman — she died in a car crash in 2002 and is represented here by her scary, very bitter sister) published an autobiography claiming she had been drugged, hypnotized, and forced into performing her prodigious acts on screen. The anti-porn feminists found in her a poster child for the wages of smut.

Is porn the patriarchal exploitation of women? And if so, why are the patriarchs in the Supreme Court so eager to get rid of it? Other questions come to mind as Inside beguiles and delights. Was the downfall of the rising porn industry necessary for the survival of Hollywood? What is the relationship between the repression of sexuality and the manipulation of power? Are we a more moral culture now because we indulge this vice in private rather than in public? And what ever happened to the $600 million? Inside Deep Throat answers none of these questions, but I can’t think of a more entertaining way to provoke people to ask.