Deep Throats, with Jack Handy

It is something every man, woman and child should see: the epic, yet quietly humane legend of a woman who overcame all odds to realize her heroic destiny, and became nothing less than a pioneering Florence Nightingale, offering comfort and solace to those poor, drifting souls whom society has marginalized, cast aside like rotted fruit. Nothing less than a watershed moment in cinema history, it shows, with courage and honesty, the rewards of indefatigable zeal, invincible optimism and incredible stamina. Psychoanalytical, deconstructionist, marxist, feminist (biological essentialist AND social constructionist), formalist, cultural materialist, postmodern, Deleuzoguattarian and (of course) Aristotelian in its sympathies, it constitutes a glorious olla podrida of critical theory, a veritable textbook for any student of the discipline. The French, in their inimitable way, call it "Gorge Profonde." We who know better call it...

Deep Throat.

Well. There are scarcely words to describe such splendor. You know I never, ever use hyperbole (I think it's the worst thing in the world), but hand to God, friends, it's the greatest thing I've ever seen. You know the story. You must. Firstly, there is the obligatory cap-tipping to our literary forefathers when we have the moment of prologue: a short paragraph of cursory exegesis appears on screen, in which the coming saga is described to us as being a Freudian fantasy, an exploration of the interrelationship of the genital, oral, and anal phases of development. Then we meet Linda, this poor woman, played with heartrending empathy and infatuating depth by the late, great Linda Lovelace, who is in a terrible rut. It appears she like just doesn't get off from sex, like you know? She like gets a tingle here and there, and like it feels good and all, but just when she's like reaching her peak, something in her just like goes fuhh. It deflates. Nothing happens. In a touching speech to her sympathetic roommate, Helen, she tells how all she wants is to hear bells, see fireworks and feel rockets. Truly a universal theme. Helen, bless her, does what she can, organizing a roomful of obliging men to take their turns ministering to her friend Linda, while she herself (in a clear moment of deference to the Naturalist master, Henrik Ibsen) indulges in some fun of her own, because why shouldn't she? It's a frank, unflinching assessment of the power of the fundamental human impulse. But tension ensues when between the friends when Linda, even after being serviced by twice seven stout males, remains unfulfilled, while Helen, who has no such Sinai to scale, is clearly awash with postcoital pleasure. There is no evident rancor in the conversation that follows, in which Helen recommends that Linda visit a psychologist named Dr. Young, but we may infer it, based on our knowledge of human jealousy, and the empirical evidence before us, which is that Helen does not appear again in the film. Much to the audience's dismay. Clearly there is a minor Aristotelian catastrophe which occurs offstage, as any Aristotelian catastrophe must, in which there is a final rupture between the friends, one of the most common and devastating tragic techniques of all, and which sends the poor bereaved Linda straight into the welcoming arms of Dr. Young. The protasis is ended. Here begins the epitasis.

Dr. Young, an exceptional rendering of the motley fool (minus motley), speaks with an accent as quizzical and witty as his language, a curious marriage of the Teutonic, the Anglo-Saxon and the Muscovite, reminding the ever-forgetful, and necessarily stupid audience (for an audience, as a species, is a stupid thing, that believes everything it sees and hears, and wishes only to be lied to more) of the Freudian psychosexual themes, iterated in the prologue, at play in the narrative. It is a sublimely simple technique, quietly effective, as technique should often be. But it is at this point, indeed, that the story makes the leap to the postmodern. We have mined the iron ore of antiquity; now it is time to forge in the smithy of her throat a gleaming new paradigm.

He tries the conventional psychoanalytic channels, asking about her childhood and so on, but all to no avail. Having exhausted the dominant mode of therapy of the era, that of the mind, he does something radical. He says, "Maybe eet's physeecal?" He returns to the empirical, the reified, the certain--the earth beneath our feet. What Heaney calls "the stable element." He is, with one swoop of his speculum, savaging the contemporary weltanshauung, which turned our eyes to outer space. Remember we are in 1972. Three short years ago, the fantasies of our nation were realized, as 94% of all American television sets received, processed and projected images of a human being leaving footprints on the moon (Dave Barry, the eminent scholar, has this to say: "this begs the question: what were the other 6% watching? "Hee Haw?"). The invisible, secretive cold war and arms race were threatening to boil over. Mathematicians and theoretical physicists were our new G.I.'s, bravely arrayed at the front, our first line of defense. The earth was forgotten as we placed our faith in the sky. But hic e nunc, the good doctor is making a stand. Insatiable in his lust for truth, he wholly defenestrates the going gestalt and goes for the one thing that never changes, that we never lose: the human body.

And of course it works. He unsheaths his pocket telescope, a latter-day Magellan, and has a look at the afflicted area. What he sees boggles the mind. "My word!" he exclaims. "You haven't got a cleetoris!"

Our heroine is understandably reduced to tears, but the doctor is mystified and fascinated. "Dees is extraordinary! Don't deespair, my dear. Dere may be some explanation. Tell me, where do you most enjoy sex?" Linda gestures to the locus of the oral fixation. The doctor turns his telescope to the indicated area, and lo and behold, the moment of epiphany is upon us! "Dere it is!" he cried, elated. "It's deep down in your throat! How marvelous" For all the doctor's delight, however, this discovery does nothing to console the wailing Linda, who sobs, "Whaddaya mean, marvelous? How would you like it if your balls were in your ear?" One can see the twinkle in his eye. The doctor flashes his ancestral fool-genius: "Den I should hear myself coming!"

He then goes on to suggest practical therapy, as this is what a doctor does. He recommends the technique of "deep throat," which he then explains with a level of detail that ineluctably suggests homoerotic overtones. This, though, is natural enough for the time period, the early seventies being what they were. She appears trepidatious, so he proposes that she give it a test run in the comfort and security of his office. She readily consents, wiping the tears from her eyes. He then unsheathes his OTHER pocket telescope, which soon extends rapidly under her eye-popping tracheal ministrations.

Let us leave these two in peace for a moment while we return to the enormous significance of the doctor's discovery. The fact is that the psychosexual implications of Linda's own anatomy's preference for the oral over the more developed genital stimulation, her apparent--and appropriate--childishness when she learns of her arrested development and the questions raised about the interrelation of anatomy and destiny (remember we are only a year before Roe v. Wade, smack in the middle of the Feminist wars between the biological essentialists and the social constructionists, and about to see women marching with anti-Freud placards, fighting his insistence that "anatomy is destiny"), are almost entirely beside the point. The point is the degree to which the clear poststructuralist sympathies of the movie are manifest in the random situation of Linda's organ of stimulation amid her vocal chords. We say "random" because even though her clitoris has been displaced from its "natural" habitat, it preserves its function. So long as it does so, it makes no difference where it gets relocated to. It could just as well have found itself in her armpit. It is the acknowledgment of the fundamental randomness and meaninglessness of systems and their parts which makes this concept of clitoral transplantation so vitally important. Furthermore, though, the clitoris doesn't even need to preserve its function--it doesn't even need to exist!--for there is no hymen between existence and nonexistence, because Derrida has already deconstructed the binary opposition between presence and absence (in brief, presence exists only in the absence of absence. Without absence, there is no presence. Presence necessitates absence, begets it. There is no clear distinction, only the play of possibility. Nothing is here or there; a thing is, to the extent that it "is," only (t)here. Schrodinger's cat is another fine example of "play". Coming as it does only six years after Derrida burst onto the scene, Deep Throat is remarkable in the zest and fluency which which it renders the freshly fathered-forth brilliance of Deconstruction. It is truly a poststructuralist masterpiece.

But it doesn't end there, oh no. It's only warming up. The doctor's assumptions were right, of course; a hearty dose of his therapy, and soon enough Linda is finally hearing those bells, seeing those fireworks and blasting off to the moon (incidentally, as the filmmakers elect to show us this climax visually, in a witty metaphoric montage of Dantean length, this author, for one, will never be able to look at the mechanical bell ringers above the arch in the Central Park zoo the same way again; seeing Mister Bunny Rabbit banging away, as it were, up there was somehow comforting, if jarring at first. There is something in that). This is the moment of climax, but the filmmakers have learned their lessons too well to try and end a story with the climax. A writer who ends his tale at its climax is guilty of tremendous mendacity. There is always a next morning.

But, as after any good climax--and a mighty fine climax it is--there is a shift in Linda's character. It is unequivocally a rebirth, the reanimation of a thing that had gone dead inside her. She leaps up from the bed (of COURSE there's a king-size bed in a doctor's office! What, wasn't there one in yours'?), ecstatic, and, right then and there, proposes marriage to Dr. Young, who is delicately putting his telescope back in its case, as it is fragile and not accustomed to such punishing exercise. Dr. Young, so exhausted from the strenuousness of his therapy that he can scarcely stand, remains gallant as ever as he says he is sorry, but he is forced to refuse, as his nurse would not like it. This is clearly a highly parodical critique on the social compulsion to commit and conform by marrying, a trend indicative of both our need to reify the more or less abstract, that is, the mysterious convulsion of the gastric juices we vaguely call "love", by shackling it to the concrete, in this case the law, as well as the patriarchy's growing sense of urgency regarding its gyno-slaves, who were at that time militating fiercely for independence, which impels the dominant male to tie the rebel would-be Boadiceas down in that most tried-and-true of ways, matrimony.

As a sidebar, the doctor's relationship with the nurse (as well as his accent and quirks, such as his fondness for blowing bubbles--though in the context of the film's soundtrack, which generally indicates arousal with the sound of bubbling, this last takes on another meaning) is a heartwarming acknowledgment of the debt American theatre owes to the once-thriving vaudeville industry, in which any wacky old doctor was bound to have hired a blonde, spectacularly female nurse, who generally found the doctor irresistible, for, as Kissinger said, power is the best aphrodisiac. There is a twist on that old standby, though, as it is made very clear, from the first time we meet the two, that she thinks the doctor is what is colloquially referred to as a doofus. She rolls her eyes when he calls her in to "take these bubbles away." We do not know how the two first got involved, but it is most likely safer to assume that the nurse initiated congress, rather than the doctor plying seductive arts learned from Kissinger. If we remember that Nixon was in office at the time of the film's release, it is no great leap to perceive their relationship as being a jab at the Kissengerian realpolitik of the Nixon administration.

But to return to our heroine. She is crushed when the doctor has to turn her down (remember how mercurial she is, given her state of arrested development, a theme to which the filmmakers adhere faithfully throughout), but he soon cheers her up by selflessly offering her a position as his, um, physiologist. She is overjoyed.

The next we see of her, she is dressed in a uniform. She has meaning, direction, and drive (as opposed to the opening sequence, which consists of her getting in her car and driving circuitously, aimlessly it seems to us, only reaching home as the final director's credit rolls). This is a recognition of the stern presence of the Protestant ethic (and yes, the spirit of capitalism) that suffused, and still suffuses, the American work force. Simply, it is depicting the importance, the unshakably central role, that work has for our society.

Our heroine's first assignment is not to provide therapy, though, only to cooperate with one of the patients, a man--clearly a member of the bourgeoisie, as indicated by the relative stateliness of his domicile--with the socially innocuous, endearingly fetishistic, yet ultimately counterrevolutionary condition of being obsessed with finding out if everything, and he means everything, really does go better with Coke. The scene involves the most original use of a shot glass and a straw this author has ever seen. Pity this fellow will be first against the wall.

From there, the film proceeds, banners flapping wildly in the wind, into the then-uncharted waters of Postmodernism, specifically, the Postmodernism (heaven forbid there should only be one) as defined by Jean-Francois Lyotard: a concerted splintering of the metanarratives (or "grand narratives"), such as science, religion, the authority of the state apparatus or, in this case, the inherent coherence of a storyline, which define themselves by their own internal logic, and set their own rules, into mini-narratives, scene-specific, which constitute an infinitely better reflection of the impossible variegation of quotidian existence in this postmodern age. Postmodernism urges us not to construct summary aesthetics and slap them onto every situation we come across (a man cursing God after his puppy gets hit by a car is an example), but instead take every situation as it presents itself and analyze the dynamic immediately present. Take it on its own terms. The car came from that way, and the puppy from the other. But the most postmodern thing in the world is the shuffle function on the iPod: take a randomly generated playlist. It seems to have no internal logic. No reason presents itself as to why those songs should go in that order. How can P-Funk follow Schubert? No reason presents itself, nor should it. Postmodernism tells us that in looking for an 'internal logic,' we are still afflicted with the obsession with overarching, convenient meta-narratives. Instead, one has to listen to it, and find that every song (the song being the mini-narrative, relative to the playlist) defines its own parameters. It looks weird from outside, but inside, we are comfortable with every song; no matter how jarring the transition may be, that unpleasant sense of aporia fades as quick as it arises, as the song which has come on adjusts us to its new logic, and habit slips silently, insidiously over our senses again.

With that in mind, we can briefly assess the temporal and spatial convolutions, as interwoven as a lanyard, that follow the Coke fellow. But we must bow our heads in reverence first: this film came seven years BEFORE Lyotard! If anything, the latter was stealing his ideas from the film, and was just too prudish to admit it.

The visit paid to a widower who so pines for his wife that he has not even considered the chauvinistic game of chasser-la-femme in years (that is, he has remained celibate), a visit which so completely cures the man that he asks to see our Linda as many times a week as she can, no matter what the price, which Linda gently informs him is quite high, is a clear vituperation against the grotesque ludicrousness of the masculine pretense to feeling and sorrow, to say nothing of his congenital faithlessness.

But now there is a moment of counterpoint: while Linda is making her rounds, her star ever-rising, the valiant Dr. Young is miserably laid up in bed, destroyed, he says, by the attentions of his employees. Though it pains us to do so, we must for a moment leave aside his endearing personality and objectively consider his position as the controller of the mode of production, the bourgeois in his element. For all his goodness, no self-respecting Marxist can turn a blind eye to his position of power, which means necessarily that he exploits the lower classes, here represented by the nurse and Linda. But to see him lie there, his phallus, reified symbol of patriarchal potency, and by extension, bourgeois exploitation, pathetically bandaged and limp, is to see a prophetic vision of the aftermath of the revolution. It is the inevitable result of the political struggle: he lies there prone, helpless, emasculated--hoist on his own petard.

But humanists that they are, and cognizant of the poor doctor's fundamental humanity, his nurses ply their own craft, bringing him, in their own inimitable way, back to health again. Interspliced (as said before, like a lanyard) with scenes of the recovery process are scenes of the original causes of the debility, and these two form a dialectic which progresses with such alacrity, that soon it becomes impossible to distinguish between cause and cure. One simply can't tell the difference. Thesis and antithesis swim smoothly together, attaining such splendid synthesis (helpfully indicated for us by the filmmakers' selfreferential reintroduction of the bells/fireworks/rockets imagery) that before long, the doctor is back up on his feet, functional as ever.

Appeal to fantasy is a major element in the most enduring literature. In Milton's Paradise Lost, for instance, the moment where Adam and Eve, lubricated by apple juice, duck behind the bushes for a little original hanky-panky, is not only the beginning of the human race, it's also Milton very knowingly delivering to his audience the thing they've been waiting to see: two indescribably beautiful people, Eve in particular, romping around naked and alone? It's like the classic, cheapened "last-man-on-earth" porn scenario. The audience is reading, in large part, to see them get it on. And get it on they do.

And so finally, we come to the end. William Carlos Williams once said that some poems, the great poems, end "with a click." What he meant is that the greatest poems shut the door on themselves, having said everything there is to say, having no further business on the page. So it is with Deep Throat. There is, indeed, one final flare of genius at the end, in which all these flighty filaments are snared and strung together into a sturdy fasci, symbol of proletarian glory. The final scene involves a patient of Linda's who entertains fantasies of rape, finally trotting out our Venus in furs onto the stage of our great postmodern pot-luck opera. Linda tries her best to be the ideal object of her patient's sadistic phallacies, but the latter is so absurdly farcical in his play-acting that she cannot help but lapse out of character and collapse into laughter. As do we. The filmmakers, it is made abundantly clear, understand the need for our culture, our culture of velocitous lunacy, to possess a true comic epic. Henry Fielding, in the preface to Joseph Andrews, proclaims that this novel is the first great comic epic. However, as Joseph Andrews is little more than a parody, and therefore 'low' art, we can safely dismiss Fielding's claim. But Deep Throat, coming as it does in step with the Pop Art movement, a movement which claimed humor, the technique of riffing on convention above all (cf. Lichtenstein, Roy), to be a cardinal virtue, seems to fit the bill immaculately.

But the end is so much more: the patient breaks down, unable to continue his charade. He proclaims his abiding love for Linda and proposes marriage, reviving the marriage-farce of the epitasis portion of the narrative. Linda replies that she loves him too, and deeply, but that her hands are, as it were, tied: she cannot marry a man of virility shorter than nine inches. This is a perfectly valid point: it is a statement about the importance of a woman's ability to sexually express herself. Linda cannot be satisfied with less; she should not put herself in a situation which is not gratifying to her. It may seem hardly radical now, and it wasn't much more so at the time of shooting, given the fierce postmodernism we have shown to live within the narrative, but nevertheless, the quiet affirmation of the power of womanhood is a respectful nod in the direction of the Woman's Lib movement, which had been causing riptides in the hitherto placid waters of American gender-consciousness.

But the patient knows what to do: he calls Dr. Young and asks him, How are you at plastic surgery? And a smile spreads across his face like a sunrise over the fields. Again, we see this theme of the return to the physical, the 'stable element.' Size does matter. A common cliche, reassessed. This is what good art can do: validate cliches as though they were food stamps. The doctor performs the surgery, changing the meaning of the patient's manhood from a thing that is not viable to a thing that is, thus emphasizing the fundamental plasticity of the relationship between signifier (virility) and signified (viability). Loose threads tie themselves off. Conflicts ease and settle. Things, fallen apart, return to order.

As the closing credits rolled the audience rose as one to applaud. We cheered for Linda and her redemption. We cheered for the redemption of the art form in the divine genius of the filmmakers. But more than anything, we cheered for our bodies, ourselves, for the glory and brilliance of our own era. Deep Throat is the story of the post-war era, an era where woman stood on her own two spread legs, an era where meanings blurred and all that came to matter was Play, an era where anything was possible, so long as it was ironic. An era the likes of which we may never see again. The cheering was nostalgic. But it was also hopeful. For if it came to us once, the brightness of this liberated era, then we can make it come to us again. We just have to put our lips together and blow.