Russ Meyer: Mr. Tits' n' Ass Forsaking Pornography for Obscener Pastures

WHEN THE JUNK artists come out from under the table, traditionally insular critics are pressed into finding a new vocabulary. You would not discuss Mickey Spillane and Ernest Hemingway with the same terms. Hence the meta-language of criticism has to be stretched beyond the usual valuations and interpretations in order to examine the structure of the creator's perceived world. The perceived world of a Spillane or a Russ Meyer becomes as important a tool for understanding our melieu as the far more complex world of Hemingway.

Russ Meyer describes with immediacy and candor the ethos of the majoritorian American. He is not an artist, he makes few aesthetic decisions, rather Meyer is a story teller with the same preconceptions and prejudices as his characters. Though his ambitions for film as a creative medium are minimal, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls crystalizes a moment in the history of American aspirations and manners.

Up from the skinflicks, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls had a budget twenty-five times larger than any of Meyer's previous films. The impact of his new 20th Century-Fox backing is obvious. Less than two years ago Meyer's privately produced Vixen, his largest financial success, was set in a cabin somewhere in the Canadian woods. Vixen was so erotic that you were embarassed to have other people in the theater; as if they were watching you have sex. It was held over for 58 weeks in Atlanta, which has to be a record of some sort.

But with a new national prominence, Meyer expanded his interests and moved full steam into the excesses and perversions of modern suburbia. In the new film everyone drives a Rolls Royce, wears well-coordinated clothes, and sits in livingrooms with impressive views. But along with Meyer's new ambience his characters have lost some of their old verve. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls lacks Meyer's notoriously tantalizing abandon. Disappointingly he has acquired serious pretentions.

The film takes an unbelievable story and makes it-strangely believable. Four midwestern kids head for Los Angeles for the conventional reasons-they find nearly instantaneous fame and fortune, but at the price of orgies, perversions, drug addiction and other box-office attractions. Though stunned by a culture they are not ready to understand ("I'd like to strap you on," is repeated in three conversations, each time to the same dumbfounded guy.) somehow things work out.

Ending with a triple marriage hard on the heels of a quadruple murder, the film never seems absurd. It is to a large degree an accurate indicator of a new American ethic, an ethic that makes it altogether conceivable that a magazine like Playboy in the near future will have pictoral specials for homosexuals. And like Playboy Meyer has left raunchy sexploitation in favor of sexual spectaculars which focus not on the content and images of sex but their variegated forms.

For years it has been clear that the only morality Hollywood knows is sexual. It's the difference between Green Berets going into immediate distribution and Ulysses hobbled by censors and X ratings. Meyer goes to the underbelly of the dilemna and shows little old ladies with their shopping baskets in their laps just how nasty sex can be. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a middle-class handbook on the limits of sexual experience, and if you can't squeeze the lessons out of the narrative, Meyer recants the dilemnas of each character at the end of the film. The announcer says of a lesbian "it was not because of her strange tastes that she died, but it had a lot to do with it." In the end, Meyer would argue, his brand of erotica is its own social redeemer, its own justification.

A PSYCHIATRIST told me recently that contemporary culture has moved the fig leaf from the genitals to the face. With his new film Meyer has gone against his own grain. His Valkyries have lost much of thier sexual authority and at times in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls there are moments of restraint. But this surprising equilibrium only reflects the common-sensical questions that have begun to creep into Meyer's films. Meyer as social philosopher, as promulgator of popular tastes, as moralist, sees in his sexual fireworks not only profit, but the bitter lessons of modern liberalism.

At one point a nymphomaniac stands up and says she likes sex best when she feels guilty. In Good Morning and Goodbye, Vixen and Harry, Cherry and Raquel, Meyer is too involved in the power of titillation to worry about guilt. Men and women come together like harried thunderclaps, unconcerned with motivations and consequences. But the new Meyer has begun to ask the questions he never had the time or money to ask before, and he has saddled his characters with the anxieites of the Silent Majority.

Sadly, the new world of Russ Meyer is facile in the same way Billy Graham's world is facile. When Graham spoke to the Honor America Day crowd they cheered not for the old lies about America but Graham's unabashed earnestness. Similarly Meyer's new film reveals his obstinate faith in an ethic no more applicable today than tufted furniture and gas chandeliers. If all along the fire-breathing amazons of his earlier films have wanted the kind of suburban respectability Meyer poses as an ideal, then we have been badly mislead. Good pornography, and there is such a thing as good pornography, will feel the loss.