"This [needle] was my dick and I fucked her with my dick. And she loved it. And I waited for this fucking relationship to mature.” or "You have to keep creating new holes."Some quick research shows that this is almost entirely staged. Storyboarded but unscripted, shot improv/verite starring people playing themselves and edited by a guy who claims he didn't know the footage wasn't real. Totally fascinating in its presentation of a porn industry riddled with drug abuse, narcissism, and misogyny but also populated mostly by professionals interested in merging their craft with a sex-positive (by 1986 standards) environment. Things get even more uncomfortably engrossing as the IRL romantic relationship between the two leads (real life porn actresses Sharon Mitchell and Tigr Bennet, essentially playing themselves) totally implodes in reality just as their characters' does in the film. Fairly naive about its intrinsic exploitation of its subjects but also completely unvarnished...it may have been scripted that they shoot coke together on camera, but that's also really two junkie porn actresses interrupting their breakup fight for a blast. Frequently pretentious and still totally searing. Great shit.
The contradiction at the center of the sex film: that real acts are being performed in works that are otherwise pure fantasy. Here, Bashore takes that contradiction and applies it to documentary, blurring the lines between storyboard and reality to create a piece that's as honest as it is staged; a movie within a movie within a movie.Pretty sure that Sharon Mitchell is my queer icon.
Early in this porn-world doc/fiction hybrid, porn star Sharon Mitchell tells a striptease audience that she’s making a movie tentatively titled Truth or Fiction, because "I don’t know whether I’m more truth or more fiction." Elsewhere, Tigr, a production assistant and sometimes-porn star, says of Mitchell, “She fucks off-camera the way she fucks on-camera, so you don’t ever really know what’s real.”Pornography lends itself to this sort of inquiry, being a genre built on the documentary appeal of seeing private acts performed “for real," while also making the acts seem stylized and artificial. Characters talk a lot about truth, fantasy, and the grey area between them throughout this film, which chronicles the dying days of a real love affair in the San Francisco porn industry. Mitchell and Tigr (billed onscreen as “Tigr Mennett”), who worked in porn on- and off-screen throughout the ‘80s, star as versions of themselves. According to a 2014 oral history by The Rialto Report, the film was lightly scripted and heavily storyboarded, but with dialogue largely improvised, like in a Christopher Guest movie. It takes place during production of a porn film that was never actually made, and behind-the-scenes characters are played by a mix of actors and authentic porn-world technicians. Nevertheless, the film seems to have served as something like couple’s therapy for the star couple, whose real-life personae, dynamics, and demons are faithfully reproduced.Mitchell is a commanding presence on set, while the younger Tigr is more reserved. For Mitchell, to have sex in public is to perform power, but her tough, forceful persona is undermined in the industry by rumors of an increasingly severe drug addiction. She alludes to having had aspirations of a mainstream career, but Kamikaze Hearts takes place in the unglamorous era between the "porno chic" ‘70s and our modern-day pornotopia. Tigr is more consciously ambivalent about the industry, but has stayed in because, among other reasons, of her relationship with Mitchell. Like Mitchell, she has picked up a drug addiction, and the film’s harrowing final scene captures them arguing in a haze after shooting cocaine on-screen, reportedly for real.In an earlier, goofier porn-world pseudo-documentary, Exhausted: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes (1981), Holmes played himself as a 40-karat star. Mere days after it was filmed, his drug addiction led to his involvement in the infamous Wonderland massacre; Exhausted was released while he was a wanted man. If that film possesses any "truth," it is in the campy cognitive dissonance of seeing a hagiography about a man days away from rock bottom. Within the more self-aware Kamikaze Hearts is a tension between Mitchell’s gregarious, self-possessed affect and her deteriorating professional and personal surroundings. Unlike Holmes, Mitchell eventually chooses to puncture the fantasy. Nudity has become like a suit of armor; the only way she can really be naked on camera is to inject cocaine. "This is fuckin’ real," she says to the camera. What have we learned from watching this "reality"? What do it amount to? Nothing more or less than what it looks like. Take it or leave it.
