Watching straight
pornography as a gay man is strange but often fascinating business. Mostly unattracted by the women who are
presented as the central objects of the viewer’s gaze—and only intermittently
distracted by the men, the appeal of whom varies drastically in straight
hard-core—my attention is freed up to notice other aspects of these films, such
as their formal qualities (their construction, generic conventions, production quality),
as well as what we might call their political unconscious. Paying attention to both of these
aspects of a film like Debbie Does Dallas (dir. Jim Clark, 1978) helps us to understand its significance within
the hard-core genre. Debbie
Does Dallas’ status as a classic
(its popularity is arguably rivaled only by Deep Throat) rests as much on its formal components as on the
logic of its sexual economy.
One has only to watch the
film’s opening sequence, in which a bevy of nubile cheerleaders practice their
drills on the sidelines of the football field to the sounds of up-tempo
marching band music, in order to recognize that we’re in the world of a teen
comedy. Since teen comedies are
almost always about sex anyway, Debbie Does Dallas could be said to make manifest the latent content
of the genre it parodies. Much of
its comic pleasure lies in the cheekiness with which it conjures up the
sexually charged scenarios of the teen film (the pairing of star quarterback
and head cheerleader; boys in the girls’ locker room; sex in the library
stacks; etc.) and takes them “all the way,” so to speak. Where films like Porky’s (dir. Bob Clark, 1982) play such scenarios purely
for laughs, and where, say, Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) ends up twisting them into the stuff of
horror, Debbie simply lets them
unfold; it provides sexual release for the kinds of set-ups that usually
sublimate sexual pleasure into comedy or horror. In its climactic scene, a sexual tête-à-tête between Debbie (Bambi Woods) and Mr. Greenfeld
(Richard Bolla), the middle-aged manager of the sporting goods store where she
works, the film basically admits that it has been catering to the teen sex
fantasies of its audience, staging its scenarios as transparently as Mr.
Greenfeld uses Debbie to stage his own private football fantasy. This is to say that much of the appeal
of Debbie Does Dallas rests on
the eagerness with which it mobilizes a set of male heterosexual fantasies
thought to be “classic,” and which have themselves been cemented by popular
culture since the 1950s.
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| Mr. Greenfeld (Richard Bolla) prepares to tackle Debbie (Bambi Woods). |
But the logic surrounding
the film’s treatment of female sexuality is also a key component of its
popularity. Stocked with
fresh-faced, all-American girl-next-door types who insist that they’re “good
girls” even as they begin prostituting themselves in order to raise money for a
trip to Texas, Debbie Does Dallas finds
a way to have its cake and eat it, too.
The film thus fetishizes both female purity and female depravity in ways
that speak to the contradictory messages at work in the culture at large
surrounding female sexuality. The
ideal woman is both insatiable and innocent, “bad” and “good.” This, the film suggests, is a sexual
fantasy even more powerful than that of the quarterback bagging the head
cheerleader.
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| "Good girls"? The cast of Debbie Does Dallas. |
