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Sex - The Annabel Chong StoryRating:
Release Date: 03 December, 2002 Retail Price: $29.99 OUR Price: $26.99 You SAVE: $3.00! Cast: Complete Cast (11 total) |
Sex - The Annabel Chong Story Reviews
The Real Scoop in 5 Seconds
Let's get real folks. This movie is not about a womens movement to accept female sexuality. Women aren't getting "power" by allowing 70 MEN to have sex with them one after another. This movie is about a very screwed up girl and her screwed up life and trying to make it seem like there is a point to it all. It's interesting nonetheless, but don't look for something really deep... it's just not there. No matter how sorry we may feel for her you can't force there to be a deep reason for partaking in the worlds largest gang bang.
drawn in despite all
Part of what makes this a decent documentary is that there is no certainty about the filmmakers biases--not to me, at least. At times I think he admires her, at others, I think he despises her, and I am never entirely sure.
And so, absent a forceful guide, a viewer will view this film through her own theoretical and experiential lenses. A young porn fan might find it light and fun. My view is my own, filtered through my mind, my education, my experiences.
Seen through that lens, the film took me on an interesting journey. Ms Chong's putative reasons for her choice to be a porn star seem, at first, convincing. Yes, it would be a wonderful thing if women in our society were to take control of their own sexuality and celebrate it. No, women should not feel shame about being very lustful or sexually active. Indeed, some religious traditions other than the ones Westerners know do celebrate sex as way to mystical union with the All. Good thoughts, every one.
As the film progresses, however, it became obvious to me that while Ms Chong may talk the talk (though always fumblingly), what she is walking is not the walk, but a hike through hell. Drug use, painful shyness, an inability to maintain eye contact with anyone, subjecting herself to an orgy with the ugliest collection of losers ever to appear naked on screen, financial exploitation at the hands of the sleazes who film her, empty relationships with personality disordered others, lying to and (unconsciously?) intentionally hurting her mother, the only person in her life who actually does seem to love her, the self-mutilation scene.... gah! By the end I felt I had sat through a session in a "Treating Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse" seminar (and I'd not be surprised to find this film is used in that milieu).
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing--or at least, in this case, an embarrassing thing. Chong's education (not a hearty recommendation for USC, this film, nor is their unctuous professor who appears several times) has taught her a few feminist phrases and a pat Marxist deconstruction or two which she parrots badly while she desperately tries to act out her skewed MTV vision of a liberated woman. "I'll do [this and that]," she says in one possibly scripted scene, describing degrading sex acts, "if I like the girl" (apparently loathing the men who sodomize her is just peachy with her) "but I'M ANNABEL CHONG and I want at LEAST a thousand dollars!" Her actions, at best, contradict her "feminist" and "marxist" rhetoric.
But I'd be simply a coldhearted leftist academic to notice that dissonance without also noticing that no sane person with an ounce of self-respect would take a million dollars, much less argue their way up from 800 to 1000, to do what Chong has just agreed to do. Her rhetoric is either a scam or a self-deceptive lie. Her scream of "I AM" seems a scream from the soul of a lost little girl wanting to believe she exists and matters. That the name she screams is not her own makes her desperation and failure to believe in herself more poignant.
I watch the film as she replicates on herself on a daily basis, horrifically, the buried trauma that must drive every sex worker. The film ends up convincing me that the porn industry is exploitive and evil, populated solely by victims and abusers. It convinces far more powerfully than a year of dogmatic anti-porn lectures ever could. I leave the film feeling some compassion for the woman, some revulsion, but little hope that she'll ever find her way back from her chosen hell.
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