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There's a lot of interesting stuff that occurs there, all kind of hung on a kind of charmingly over-stated transition between the 70s and the 80s, but the thing that always gets me is the rival producer bringing his kind of scuzzy, absurdly young looking actors to the party and pitching Jack on the virtues of videotape. The new actors offer a refigured view of sex-on-film which is tagged as something more realistic but which is actually (as we'll see when those actors start showing up in Jack's movies) something more abusive and contrary to what Jack understands as beauty. Similarly, videotape offers a solution to the industry's financial problems, but at the expense of beauty.
You've kind of got to apply a thick layer of irony over this whole thing. It's still porn. In spite of Dirk's "it's not cool and it's certainly not sexy" speech when he develops the Brock Landers character, it's not like they're constructing that statue of St. Theresa or something.
Anyhow, Aquinas' aesthetic has three characteristics of beauty: integrity, consonance, and clarity/radiance. This movie... isn't the place to really explore these ideas in great depth, but I like the idea that the current underneath the whole movie is a conversation about what beauty is, what it isn't, and the stakes for human believers in this discussion. The view of sex that Horner, etc. is trying to get on film is something idealized (at least to them) and beautiful, a weirdly cracked "holy sadness" that prompts the ascent of the soul. Not well, since it's still porn. But that's why it's funny.
Anyhow, all this is overlayed with Dirk's fall. It's a pretty modest reading. He's a wondrous performer and a gracious person, until he makes a willful self-assertion from the Horner "family" - prompted by a small mountain of cocaine. I don't think there's something necessarily "right" about pretty straightforward Christian themes like these, but for the sake of getting to talk about a movie I like it seems worth it to give in to conventional wisdom that Christian thought is the same as conservative thought. ______________________________
"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"
--Walleye's Dad
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