Movie Review

Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

Universal Pictures

Inside Deep Throat is not the documentary stuff of your father’s History Channel. It’s not quite Discovery Channel fare, either, though some scenes on the finer points of procreation and the location of genitalia might lead you to believe otherwise. In fact, I can’t quite figure out which TV channel might eventually air the documentary Inside Deep Throat once it’s had its run in theaters.

Inside Deep Throat combines recent interviews with extracts from period movies, music, and television to recreate the rocky history of Deep Throat. The low-budget pornographic movie became both “the most profitable film in motion picture history” (according to the film’s tagline) and the cause of a national moral and legal debate. The culmination of this First Amendment contest was the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling that pornography be defined by “community standards” and kept from the public arena except in cases of “redeeming social value.”

Part social commentary, part history lesson, part reality TV, plus a liberal sprinkling of honest-to-God pornography, Inside Deep Throat hops in and out of genres faster than Linda Lovelace’s character hops in and out of bed.

Despite its colossal box office success, the original Deep Throat left a wake of disaster for its creators and stars. Inside Deep Throat gives a whirlwind account of the manic blend of glamour, controversy, and despair that arose from just a six-day shoot with some low-grade cameras in southern Florida.

The now-infamous premise of the 1972 porno movie Deep Throat is that one young woman’s clitoris is inexplicably located very deep inside her throat, thus she can only achieve orgasm by performing oral sex. After scratching your head and thinking back to high school biology class, there’s only one thing left to do: laugh. And then maybe get curious.

According to Inside’s interviews with the film’s original creators, humor certainly contributed to the movie’s smash success, though the film’s embrace of new sexual values and its popularity among the elite of 1970s American society certainly also helped ticket sales.

Deep Throat, we are told, had something for everyone: men enjoyed the fantasy of believing that both partners could achieve equal excitement during oral sex; repressed housewives could see female sexuality magnified, glorified, and at last discussed; and the sexually ignorant could finally see what all the fuss was about.

Inside Deep Throat—which appeared in theaters just in time for Valentine’s Day—tries a similar approach by catering to multiple audiences at once, though with considerably less success. Frequently throughout the interviews or historical narrations, the movie suddenly cuts to a time-lapse sunset, cloud formations, or a Floridian seascape, for no obvious reason other than a desire for aestheticism. Perhaps the documentarians felt that the low-brow nature of their subject needed a few flourishes of artistic garnish to keep their film palatable to audiences.

After its initial tour-de-force presentation of an unusually volatile chapter in history, Inside Deep Throat begins to lose steam about two-thirds of the way through. Inside loses sight of its principal and most compelling storyline­—the rise and fall of Throat stars Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems and director Gerard Damiano—and begins grabbing at socio-historical miscellany to spice things up. The resulting mishmash of music, fashion, and other cultural trivia resembles a bad VH1 “I Love the ’70s” special, when the demigods of yesterday’s pop culture are dragged out and rehashed for those of us who either never cared or had long forgotten.

At its best, however, Inside Deep Throat depicts real human foibles and pathos with unerring honesty. The clips of Damiano and his wife, for example, when she berates him not only for his original role in the making of Deep Throat, but also for his cooperation in the documentary, could not have been improved had they been scripted and rehearsed by professionals, and would have lacked the ring of truth.

These moments of truth nearly made me believe in an unbiased, detached documentary crew, but the comparatively paltry breadth and depth of the interviews of the “other side”—those upset by the alleged immorality and/or illegality of the film—made me think otherwise. The precious few minutes devoted to exploring Deep Throat’s proclaimed nemeses—the prosecutors who drove it to the Supreme Court and the Christian activists who saw in Deep Throat the decadence and desensitization of an increasingly secular society—are jammed between long feel-good people studies of pornography’s early heroes.

Although I was aware of this intentional lopsidedness on the part of directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the same directorial team behind the sensationalist Party Monster and The Eyes of Tammy Faye, I couldn’t help but be swayed. By the end of the documentary, I found myself ruing the death of avant-garde art at the hands of mass-production and censorship, even as I still struggled with the classification of Lovelace, Reems, and Damiano as “artists” of the first rank. Inside Deep Throat, with its attempt to portray the American tragedy of the rise and fall of the self-made man (and woman), overreaches and ultimately misses its mark, but provides a thoroughly entertaining portrait of pornographic pop culture, its peddlers, and its consumers.

—Laura E. Kolbe