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The Art of Baloney
12/15/2003

I've held on to this one so long that I had to spend a whole two minutes on Google looking for a way around the New York Times's pay-up barrier. In part, the delay is attributable to my packed schedule, but I also had a feeling that I wasn't yet able to articulate the real substantive issue that the article raised. Well, it came to me as I walked the dog on Saturday night.

The article in question is "Keep the Sex R-Rated, N.Y.U. Tells Film Students," and as you may have heard, it tells the story of NYU film student Paula Carmicino:

Her professor approved. The student, Paula Carmicino, found two actor friends willing to have sex on camera in front of the class. The other students expressed their support. But then the professor thought he should double-check with the administration, which immediately pulled the plug on the project.

The discussion orbiting the proposed project casts out instances of corrupt thinking at every level. On the surface, having to do with language and how we characterize different activities, Ms. Carmicino's "art" is more to be found in her efforts to excuse the inexcusable than in the craft itself. In other words, it's a con more than art. Says the 21-year-old's mother:

Nor was the controversy a surprise. "Paula's always pushed buttons," her mother said, but she has always backed up her contrarian positions with sound reasoning.

Her professor puts it more academically:

Professor de Jesus said he supported the film from the start. "It did have redeeming values, and it was fine with me, especially having seen her previous work. She's a young woman with lots of integrity."

Putting the label "art" on pornography, then, is a strategy for getting away with something. It's an adolescent's view of art — immature and facile. Giggly. (It also "pushes buttons" in such a way as to get one's name in the New York Times.) As a matter of critical analysis, Carmicino's project doesn't match her premise:

In Ms. Carmicino's view, the university was censoring a work about how people censor their own behavior. She said her video, titled "Animal," was supposed to depict the contrast between public and private behavior: "The whole concept of it was to compare the normal behavior of people in their everyday lives versus the animalistic behavior that comes out when they are having sex."

She planned to intersperse 30-second clips of passionate sex with scenes of the couple engaged in more mundane activities, like watching television and reading a newspaper.

Simulating the sex would have defeated her purpose, she said. "That's censoring the sex part. My thing is how we censor ourselves during the day when we're not having sex."

Yet, in order to capture her "thing" on film, she went to great lengths to ensure that the sexual act itself would be as self-aware and self-censored as possible. A little more imagination, and this objection could have been mooted, but the intricacy of the idea isn't important; the excuse need only be as applicable as the authorities require. Ironically, a message of actual intellectual and artistic merit may have been possible if Carmicino's "thing" had been to illustrate how much more true to our natures we are in casual, "mundane activities" than while having casual sex, during which the masks are much more heavily layered. The "animals" in this variation could be the audience, the professor, and the filmmaker herself. But then, an anti-casual-sex message wouldn't do for universities to present to the impressionable minds under their care.

The next problem is on the layer of rhetorical construction. Very much as with gay marriage, all of the proponents of Carmicino's film ignore the most basic underlying factor. With gay marriage, what is ignored is the fact that marriage is the arrangement settled upon over the course of human history through which to unite the two most fundamentally distinct groups in our species — men and women — like the buttons and loops that keep the social fabric together and ensure its perpetuation. Rather than admit this, advocates for gay marriage break the world according to sexuality and complain that marriage accords with one group's sexuality and not the other's.

In the case of the classroom pornography, the basic factor being ignored is the difference between showing sex on film and showing sex being filmed. The Times and all of Carmicino's supporters simply pretend that there is no line here. To illustrate that "explicit content in classroom work was not unusual," the Times lists as examples clips from porn, the content of scripts, and the simulated sex of puppets, as if filming live sex in the classroom were categorically similar. If they weren't so blinded by this oversight, the libertines would realize that Carmicino's prank really provoked a policy that reaches far beyond the walls that she sought to erode. Not only did she not get away with her own affront, but she ruined the party for everybody else.

Nonetheless, the intellectual elision relates directly to the problem having to do with substance. Over time, pornographic material has worked its way toward acceptability in stages, each of which pushed the envelope with at least a flavor of the "how-different-is-it?" argument. Roughly, some stages of the progression were implied sexuality in writing, explicit sex in writing, implied sex on film, and explicit sex on film. And at each stage, further steps are said to be circumscribed by some obvious line — like that "obvious difference" between two-dimensional television sex and the real thing live. And yet, when the push comes for increasingly loose reins, the argument reverses to "what is the difference, really?."

Well, what is the difference between allowing students to have sex in the classroom for credit and encouraging them to do so? This bridge is already being built, and the comparison is what made the substantive objection click for me: consider "cybersex," or those new virtual reality games online in which people actually take on the roles of simulated characters, who seem inclined to progress toward naughtiness. Arguments have been had over whether such activity represents cheating on a real-life spouse, mostly splitting physical behavior from emotional behavior — a rift that is erroneous and dangerous to make.

One who makes infidelity a purely physical thing will miss the reality that psychological and spiritual behavior matters, both emotionally and practically. On the other hand, one who makes infidelity a purely emotional thing may argue himself into believing that casual sex isn't cheating. The incoherent folding together of these possibilities, separating body and spirit only to apply them selectively rather than as representative a unified person under all circumstances, is the corruptive, perhaps inevitable, result of the initial split. Consider the students in a potential future being encouraged to have sex on film in the classroom. They would already have been emotionally complicit in the sexual acts of others in the classroom (by viewing it and being arroused by it), yet their own inclusion in the act, once sanctioned, could be excused as academic — lacking any real emotional investment.

Surely the Carmicinos and Professor de Jesuses of the world realize, on some level, what they are really about. The only question is how deeply down the realization exists that they're merely trying to get away with something that they really oughtn't do. What I don't believe they realize is how much damage they're doing to the very thing that they're putting on their celluloid pedestal: sex. They cheapen it no less than they are cheapening the ideal of art. They are making it as mundane as watching television.

I wouldn't presume to psychoanalyze specific people with whom my experience is this limited, but one could easily imagine that, deep down, these people are really the prudes who are afraid of sex. But it is not the "animal" that they fear sex will awaken in them, but rather the human being, naked and vulnerable. For once, without pretense.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:01 PM EST