Shark Porn: Film Genre, Reception Studies, and Chris Kentis' Open Water (original) (raw)

One of the canonical texts emerging in the discipline of pornography studies is Pam and Tommy Lee: Hardcore and Uncensored (1997). In the anthology, Porn Studies, edited by the discipline's founder, Linda Williams, Minette Hillyer studies the stolen home movie in which a Baywatch star and the drummer for Motley Crue have sex for eight minutes. Hillyer in turn reacts to another study of this videotape, "Pamela Anderson on the Slippery Slope," written by Chuck Kleinhans for an anthology which playfully mourns the death of the cinema in the 1990s. In an investigative area that has only begun producing scholarship, which studies a media industry that produces a staggeringly huge number of films, the crystallization of commentary around one text is remarkable. I have not seen this video, nor do I ever intend to. I instead want to use it to define a theoretical path for discussing a) my worries about the academic orgasm of interest in pornography, and b) my interpretive experience with a film which played at my local multiplex, Open Water (Chris Kentis, 2003). I find Open Water simply more interesting to talk about than I do pornography. Rather than engage pornography as a generic form, I want to use it as a reception framework for discussing a horror film I find more aesthetically engaging. I realize of course, that there are political matters at stake in snubbing pornography. Cultural studies rightfully fights against repression and censorship, whether 1 it comes from the Left (Andrea Dworkin) or the Right (Jerry Falwell). However, any sense of a center, of consensus, in American life has been demolished, both by the collapse of the New Left in the 1970s, and by the vicious neo-conservative onslaught of the subsequent years. I think it is the obligation of academics, as part of an institution of social life (and not as some fuzzy rebellion warmed over from the 1960s) to theorize and represent this center. While the applicability of this concept applies to many domains of culture, certainly our desperately dysfunctional political morass, I want to explore the benefits of the center with respect to pornography studies. As Linda Williams reports in her introduction to Porn Studies, "teaching the conflicts" about the feminist debate about pornography was not productive when she tried it in class. I am not surprised. I am actually quite hopeful about the world, not because of American politics, certainly, but because of the centrist level-headedness of my students. When I prattle on in class about Marxist theory, they tolerate my shenanigans, shrug their shoulders, and then set again about the work of producing the films they came to college to make. I do not find their lack of enthusiasm at all disconcerting: they respectfully learn the ideas and incorporate them into their world-view, exactly as I would have it as an educator (and specifically not an activist). Similarly, when I engage in my frequent diatribes against George Bush and conservative politics in America, they do not seem particularly disagreeable. The way pornography studies is developing seems to me to strike quite a different tone. The anti-pornography feminists are constructed by this new discipline as the straw men against which a wonderful politics of liberation are offered. While I respect Linda Williams' work very much, and will rely heavily on her "Film Bodies" essay to do my