The future has arrived

2019 is the setting of the original 1982 Blade Runner. While we don’t have replicants or flying cars yet, we do have something that Deckard may not have had: unlimited access to every kind of pornography imaginable. If I’m in the mood for it, I could sit in Bryant Park on a sunny afternoon with a laptop and link to categories like Ballerinas, Prostate Massage, and Uncensored (isn’t that redundant?). While I would be well-advised to wear ear-buds during a public viewing, porn has become a commodity. In fact, it’s gone beyond that. As was once predicted for electricity, a lot of it has become too cheap to meter.

Back in the day, which for me means the 1970s, explicit images were hard to obtain – or at least they were for an introverted young guy like me. The Sexual Revolution may have been underway for a while, but I didn’t have the nerve to enter a porn theater or bookstore. I thought the clerks would know I was going to masturbate with this material. It didn’t occur to me that they must have used plenty of free samples for themselves.

Perhaps not surprisingly my closest friends were equally diffident. We found out about the more subtle aspects of human sexuality in accidental bits and pieces. At one point my mom left a paperback copy of John Updike’s Rabbit Redux lying around and I got some new information from reading that. (After going through the “good parts” I decided it was worth reading the whole book, and then Updike’s entire Rabbit series.)

Around the same time, a guy in my gym class sold me a copy of Terry Sothern’s Candy for a few bucks. But I still entered my college years lacking quite a bit of knowledge. The first time I fully understoot that BDSM could be part of erotic life was when I saw the cover of National Lampoon’s September, 1975 “Back To College” issue. It showed a naughty coed with a failing grade getting a bare-ass spanking from her professor. It was openly displayed at a newsstand in Penn Station, but of course, I couldn’t bring myself to buy it. Today anybody can do a Google image search and find at least a half-dozen places to look at it and then download the file.

School spirit

The Sexual Revolution did affect the City College of New York in at least one notable way. The Student Senate allocated a portion of the eighty bucks per year student activity fee for movie nights. About once per month during the academic year one could go to the student center building and see a film like Walkabout.

About once every year they went erotic with their offerings. In my freshman year, I missed their selection of samples from the New York Erotic Film Festival. In 1974, I forgot if it was the spring or fall, I did get there to see The Devil in Miss Jones.

Perhaps we have regressed in that I couldn’t imagine a public university, or in fact any university, having porn films on their list of officially sanctioned (or at least tolerated) student activities. There was some irony in that the student center building, Finley Hall, had been built in the 19th Century as the main building of a Catholic women’s school called Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Once nuns and the (presumably) chaste young ladies they taught – including Ethel Skakel, later Kennedy – had occupied the place.

On the evening for erotic cinema, the Grand Ballroom was filled to its capacity of several hundred. A cross-section of our very diverse school was present, males and females including representatives of every race, creed, and ethnicity. As for myself, I was in my last year of a rather long-persisting virginity. About four of my friends from one of the college newspapers filled a row. All of us, I guess, expected to be both enlightened and entertained by what we were going to see.

The opening act was an erotic cartoon that I think was in German with English subtitles. A few people in the audience did laugh a little but for the most part, it was less funny than the average Merrie Melodies product. During the showing of the main feature a respectful silence fell on the audience as if we were watching The Grand Illusion. I think now that although we didn’t know what was coming in the manner of a Rocky Horror Picture Show event, some loud audience feedback would have made the whole thing more fun.

I did know something about The Devil in Miss Jones, including the ending, from reading about it somewhere - perhaps in The Village Voice. In the intervening forty-six years, I’ve forgotten a lot of what was in it and I’ve had to do some research to fill in the gaps in my memory. Here I will try to give my impressions of the movie as I saw it while annotating that with details I’ve found out more recently.

I was pleased to see that the opening shot was in my hometown; it was of some unremarkable avenue in Manhattan. One could image Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck walking down the sidewalk. If the filmmakers had more wit they might have including some sight gags of that nature but none were forthcoming.

The gory suicide of Justine Jones (Georgina Spelvin, actually thirty-six-year-old Shelley Bob Graham) in her bathtub was convincingly filmed but got the story off to a downbeat start. I now know that the filmmakers wanted “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to be on the soundtrack during this bloody spectacle but they couldn’t get the rights to the song. Perhaps I wish they had because it seems like an idea that’s so bad that it’s good.

Immediately following this Justine was shown talking to an ordinary-looking middle-aged man in a very nice suburban house. (It was actually owned by porn star Harry Reems.) My recollection was that this guy was either Satan himself or one of his minions and the house was the antechamber to Hell. No attempt had been made to build sets or provide costumes, but I soon understood that it wasn’t worth the bother.

Anyway, during this conversation, Justine reveals that she is a virgin. My memory must be somewhat unreliable because I’ve since found out that this Mr. Acaba guy was some kind of celestial personnel flunky (I thought St. Peter had that job) and the scene was in that nebulous place called Limbo. Even the Pope probably doesn’t know exactly what Limbo is supposed to look like (the Church has downgraded the concept recently) but it must be fairly pleasant if it’s like Harrison, NY in Westchester County.

From what I’ve also read recently Acaba gave Justine a choice of either staying in Limbo or going to Hell after getting her fill of all the sexual experiences she missed. That went against the Catholic beliefs I grew up with, namely that suicide is a mortal sin and unconfessed souls have no choice about the outcome. (The get all-you-want sex card can be accepted to get the plot moving.)