Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [36]
“Today,” Postman concluded,
we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.3
The Las Vegas Strip is a monument to our nation’s cult of eternal childishness. It plays off of our fear of growing up. In Marc Cooper’s portrait of Las Vegas, The Last Honest Place in America, he wrote:
In a television-marinated society in which the boundaries between childhood and adulthood have been blurred if not erased, increasingly and dismayingly, children and adults dress the same, eat the same, and often talk the same, where they certainly endlessly watch the same TV shows, where simulation is often valued over authenticity (look no further than the acrobatic contrivances of so-called “reality TV” or the reclassification of steel and concrete hotels into “scenery”), it should come as little surprise that the phony lava eruption and the staged pirate-show next door should bring equal glee to the ten-year-olds and their parents. Add to that a certain solace Americans find in the worship of technology, even technology at this infantile level, and the Strip begins to make perfect sense.4
Porn films frequently build their themes around reality shows or popular sitcoms. I stand at the AVN expo in front of a display where the newest release is called I’m Dreaming of Genie. The company has also filmed Paris and Nicole Go to Jail and Getting It Up with the Kardassians. Jessica Lynn, twenty-three, plays the role of the porn Genie and for the convention is dressed in a replica of the television character’s costume.
“I usually do whatever I want and think later,” she says. “I won’t do anal yet. I basically do boy-girl, girl-girl.” She does do ATM, although she says, “I don’t like to. There are a lot of infections.” She says she can climax on the set, something most ex-porn actresses, including Lubben, insist never happens. “I can come if there is a vibrator.” She says her parents recently discovered what she is doing and have asked her to get out of the industry. She has a boyfriend, whom she later calls her husband, who “is cool with it,” and she says she sometimes “brings girls home for him.” “I love watching my husband fuck other girls, watching him make her feel good.” She has been in scenes, she said, that “got too violent and rough and one where one of the men began to eat his own come.” She said she is saving money for college and has stayed away from drugs. “A lot of girls have breakdowns,” she says. “They call me. I have had numerous calls. They are freaking out about their life and they are usually on drugs.”
Jeff Thrill, who uses the pen name of Roger Krypton, writes porn scripts for the Hustler Video Group. He wrote Not the Bradys XXX, This Ain’t the Munsters XXX, Very Happy Days, This Ain’t Gilligan’s Island XXX, and This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX. The logo on the poster for This Ain’t the Partridges XXX has a line of little birds shaped as penises with wings.
“There have been parodies in porn forever,” he says. “In the past, it might have been Forrest Hump. But they were not true to the original show. In my films we make sure the actors look like the characters and, God willing, deliver dialogue like the characters.”
Thrill’s big hit this year was Who’s Nailin’ Paylin: Adventures of a Hockey MILF, shot with a porn actress who resembled Sarah Palin. The actress, Lisa Anne,