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Until recently, hardcore pornography respected certain prohibitions: although it showed ?everything,? including real sex, the narrative providing the frame for these sexual encounters was, as a rule, ridiculously non-realistic, stereotypical, stupidly comical, staging a kind of return to the eighteenth-century commedia del?arte in which the actors do not play real individuals but one-dimensional types ? the Miser, the Cuckolded Husband, the Promiscuous Wife. Is not this strange compulsion to make the narrative ridiculous a kind of negative gesture of respect: yes, we show everything, but precisely for that reason we want to make it clear that it is all a great joke, that the actors are not really engaged? Although there has been a trend, more recently, to undermine this prohibition with serious pornography, that is, pornography combined with (what tries to be) an engaging story ? for example in the work of Catherine Breillat in France ? the censorship reasserted itself with the simultaneous rise of so-called gonzo pornography. Gonzo occurs when the author cannot ? or does not want to ? remove himself from the subject he is investigating: The reporter becomes part of the event taking place. In some cases ? such as tornado chasing, where documenting is done by the person driving the car and holding the camera ? the gonzo element is inherent; however in gonzo pornography, it is a deliberate and voluntary choice ? gonzo pornography is embedded hardcore, the pornographic equivalent of embedded journalism. It is characterized by a filming style that attempts to place the viewer directly in the scene: gonzo pornography puts the camera right into the action, often with one or more of the participants both filming and performing sexual acts, thus suspending the usual separation characteristic of conventional porn and cinema. Influenced by amateur pornography, gonzo porn tends to use far fewer full body/wide shots and more close-ups. What is more important, however, is that the actors themselves constantly address the camera, wink, comment on what they are doing, all in an easy-going ironic and self-mocking style. In this way, gonzo?s highly reflexive realism signals a higher level of repression: while, in classic hardcore, the stupidity of the conversation was constrained by the fictional narrative, in gonzo, the narrative fiction is undermined we are all the time reminded that what we are watching is a staged performance ? as if to protect us from the danger of getting too involved in what we see.
Slavoj Zizek.
I hope that helps....
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