Throughout the 90's when Gregory Dark
was pulling double duty in both the hard and softcore worlds, a
conscious decision was made to keep the two separate with the
“Gregory Dark” moniker reserved strictly for the adult films
whereas the erotic thrillers were typically singed with “Gregory
Hippolyte” or a variation on said name. Primarily done for
marketing purposes, it made sense as Dark's adult films and erotic
thrillers are two very different animals, though there are instances
where certain parallels can be drawn, the concept of the interview,
or interrogation, being a constant obsession of Dark's. Several of
Dark's erotic thrillers like Carnal Crimes (1991), Secret Games 2:
The Escort (1993) and the Animal Instincts trilogy (1992-1996) all
feature their protagonists narrating their tales to an interviewer or
breaking the fourth wall and confessing to camera while Body of
Influence (1993) approached the confessional angle through a
psychoanalytical lens. Dark had previously incorporated interview
cutaways in both The Devil in Miss Jones 3 and 4 (1985), though he
would bring back the interview in a hardcore context in a big way
beginning with Snake Pit (1996), which psychoanalyzed its performers
before and after their respective scenes. Dark would once again step
into the role of grand interrogator in the Shocking Truth videos,
with the interviews coming to the forefront in two of Dark's most
challenging and ahead of their time video experiments.
Unlike Snake Pit which, although being
one of Dark's most inaccessible and abstract works, did have somewhat
of a reoccurring, albeit obscure, thread running through it, with
Shocking Truth Dark dispenses with narrative entirely, his focus
being squarely on the interviews and sex. Dark's line of questioning
is similar to the ones he asked in Snake Pit, the headline question
of the former “Do you think you're a slut?” being central to
Shocking Truth as well and existential topics like fear and death are
broached often. Dark goes even further than he did in Snake Pit
however, getting the performers to open up about their families,
asking what makes them feel shame and occasionally throwing in a
hilariously crass question. Like Snake Pit, Shocking Truth is
especially fascinating due to how the performers respond to the
questions, some playing it coy and trying to avoid answering honestly
while others really got what Dark was attempting and hold nothing
back with their answers, getting uncomfortably personal at times.
Like Roxanne Hall in Snake Pit, it's Chloe who steals the show in
both her interview and subsequent scene and gives the most revealing
and worrying response to one of Dark's questions, saying “It's not
the darkness outside the scares me, it's the darkness inside that
scares me.” Speaking to Psychotronic Video, Dark commented on that
particular scene, saying “And her interview is so strange because
she's so self-abusive... and she further portrays that self-abusive
nature in the sex scene... It was really sort of unpleasant.”
Shocking Truth 2 takes the same
approach with a new line of similarly themed questions for a new
group of performers and is as equally interesting as the first when
it comes to the performer's various responses to Dark's questions.
This time around however, Dark opted to shoot the second half of the
interviews immediately after the sex scenes have concluded, making
the film even more loaded given some of the topics being discussed
with many of the interviewees going to some fairly distressing
places. While not without style, the production design in second film
is dialed back a bit when compared to the first, which had the girls
being interviewed on an electric chair, heavy blue lighting at points
reminiscent of Dario Argento's Inferno (1980) and a strong voodoo
influence with Dark once again dressing up his performers in skeleton
and devil costumes. Dark even spliced in footage from voodoo heavy
Melvins “Bar-X the Rocking M” video he directed while also taking
a visual cue from the album art of Stag, the Melvins album which
“Bar-X the Rocking M” appears. The second film does take off
where the first one left off in terms of Dark's trademark unorthodox
approach to the actual sex which by 1997 had become more intense and
deliberately un-erotic, with many scenes veering off into the surreal
with performers in animal masks and both films feature adult starlet
Star Chandler as a nude Satan-esque character, painted red
head-to-toe occasionally wandering into scenes to bark orders at the
performers.
Although Dark's videos did consistently
good business, Dark speculated on how viewers would react to Shocking
Truth, stating in the same Psychotronic piece “But, lets face it,
when people rent porno, they want to jerk off, right? Now all of a
sudden I'm dealing with a lot of issues, a lot of questions, a lot of
commentaries on what we see as sexual and don't see as sexual, and
how the starlets relate to what we consider standard morality. And I
think this format makes some viewers uncomfortable... When viewers
are exposed to questions “What is sin?” or “Where will you go
when you die?”, they begin to have thoughts about these things. And
I think that's sort of this antithesis of porn in general. But, see,
there's such a distinct level of mediocrity in the whole porn market
that, in order for me to push the envelope of pornography as it
currently exists, I've got to go to these different places.” Dark
would continue to go to different places for a few more years before
bowing out of hardcore in 1998 to focus on music videos, but his
continued ability to find inventive ways of subverting a medium even
after what it had become far into the 90's made Dark the last of his
kind, with the Shocking Truth films being stand out titles from a
period of immense creativity for Dark.
No comments:
Post a Comment