Art Is Now Porn
Culture has been replaced by a dopamine casino.
As much as I’m prone to start an essay with a personal anecdote, I feel it would be unfair to readers to start this essay by describing the last time I watched porn. Suffice to say, I have seen pornography at least several times in the past several decades, and so its structures and themes and styles are sufficiently familiar to me so that I can usually clock when something is porn even if it is not labeled as such.
Which is why I was surprised that it took me a few days to realize that that’s what Challengers, the new movie starring Zendaya and two gay guys and directed by older gay guy Luca Guadagnino, is. It is porn. I think the reason it took me a while to understand this is because the movie is very sexless. Not only in the sense that no sex happens in it, despite it ostensibly being about sex, but in its overall mood and tone.
Well, you might say, isn’t that the point of Challengers—that it’s about yearning and unfulfilled desire rather than sex itself? That could be true, but in order to have desire go unfulfilled, there must be desire in the first place, and in order to have desire, you must have emotions, and in order to have emotions, you must have actual characters with personalities, and Challengers did not seem very concerned at all with that.
So how can something be porn if it is deeply devoid of sexiness? I would answer: what makes porn porn is not (just) the sex, but its purpose; its utilitarian nature. You watch porn to get off, for a release, for a shot of dopamine. Porn is generally a frictionless thing—no human emotions get in the way of its ultimate goal. It strips out all the subtleties of human desire in order to get you from point A to B. Which is not to say that porn is inherently bad in some moral sense (“some of my good friends are porn actors!” I say in the most annoying voice imaginable), but that it, generally, serves a different purpose than good art, which is supposed to make you think and/or feel.
Art, at its best, causes friction—it not only reflects the complexities of life, but can refract them, potentiate them, combine them into something different.