Oct 21, 2010
Many sides of porn
There is food porn, nature porn, torture porn, poverty porn and even divorce porn
Porn is a strange four-letter word.
Beyond a salacious connotation that's more commonly known, the word boasts many creative tie-ups - from food porn and nature porn, to any instance where we witness an unhealthy indulgence in a particular subject.
So, what's food porn? An example would be how Singaporeans have this curious habit of snapping photographs of their food before digging in.
Some of my friends diligently post on their Facebook pages appetite-arousing photos of dishes they've cooked at home or sampled in acclaimed restaurants.
I also recall how a former colleague once bought me lunch at a posh eatery and, as each course arrived, promptly whipped out his SLR camera to take close-up shots of the artfully arranged cuisine from every possible angle.
The same voyeuristic fervour can be extended to the best that nature has to offer, in the form of 'nature porn' - which, as a friend kindly reminded, is a much better phrase to use than the more easily misinterpreted 'animal porn'.
Some may associate it with lingering images of wildlife on the National Geographic Channel or nature-fixated documentary films such as Earth (2007) and Oceans (2009). And no, you don't necessarily need to watch animals or insects copulate for nature to become porn.
Then there is 'torture porn', a phrase coined by smart-alecky critics to describe a trend in which violent slasher flicks, such as James Wan's Saw (2004) and Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), pile on gratuitous images of people having their assorted body parts severed.
Both Saw and Hostel were popular enough to spawn sequels.
When Slumdog Millionaire (2008) became a hit and subsequently won the Oscar for Best Picture, critics were quick to invoke the term, 'poverty porn'.
But Vikas Swarup, author of the novel which director Danny Boyle based his film on, was quoted in an interview saying that the film, like his book, 'neither trivialises nor degrades poverty'.
'I just don't buy this concept of poverty porn,' he added, with regards to his tale of a former street kid from a Mumbai slum taking part in a TV gameshow. 'Who likes to see poverty and who gets pleasure out of seeing poverty?'
Just when I thought critics couldn't get more creative than 'poverty porn', I was tickled to find Julia Roberts' recent film, Eat Pray Love, labelled as 'divorce porn' in a New York Times article.
Based on the 2006 memoir of American author Elizabeth Gilbert - described in the same article as the 'Hugh Hefner of divorce porn' - the film has Roberts playing a divorced woman who goes on a year-long journey of self-discovery across Italy, India and Indonesia.
With a New York Post review describing the book as 'narcissistic New Age reading' and 'the worst in Western fetishisation of Eastern thought and culture', it's perhaps no surprise that the film didn't succeed in elevating the story above its perceived indulgence.
At this point, I decided to take a break from writing this column and examine the 128-page report that the government-appointed Censorship Review Committee released last month.
The word 'pornography' appears many times throughout the report.
I'm just glad that the committee has chosen to restrict the definition to that of the sexual kind - otherwise, no online filtering service in the world would be able to block out all the different types of porn that we've discussed or missed out on.
To complicate matters, just as art can easily degenerate into pornographic excesses, porn has also made its crossover into art.
If one wants to be prudish about it, wouldn't Giambologna's sculpture of The Rape Of The Sabine Women - along with many old masters and statues in world-class museums - be considered explicit and provocative?
French film-maker Catherine Breillat's Romance is an arthouse film which contains explicit sexual acts and even features porn actor Rocco Siffredi in its cast.
Shown in mainstream cinemas in Europe, the 1999 film is credited for sparking a trend of arthouse films featuring unsimulated sex.
For example, The Brown Bunny (2003) is notorious for its scenes of real sex between writer-director-actor Vincent Gallo and actress Chloe Sevigny.
Another film, 9 Songs, was described by The Guardian newspaper as the most sexually explicit mainstream film at the time of its release, due to graphic unsimulated sexual scenes between the leads, Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley.
Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the 2004 British film resulted in much debate over whether the sex scenes add anything to its artistic merit or are, in fact, pornography.
But just when I was about to decry all forms of voyeuristic debauchery and proclaim how dwelling excessively on a theme will yield cliched results, I found myself enraptured by Italian writer-director Luca Guadagnino's haunting and visually arresting masterpiece, I Am Love.
Filled with all kinds of 'porn' - nature porn (close-ups of insects and flowers), food porn (Italian dishes on proud display) and fashion porn (actress Tilda Swinton and her co-stars wear Jil Sander and Fendi in the film), with a little sex thrown in for good measure - it turned out to be one of the best films I've seen this year.
Famed critic Roger Ebert calls it 'an amazing film' that's 'deep, rich, human'.
I call it an amazing example of how art continues to astound us - and how sometimes less can be more while at other times, less is simply not enough.
Yong Shu Hoong is a poet, freelance writer and Singapore Literature Prize winner.
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