SCENE: A buxom young lady is being led by a ridiculously handsome young man down to a swimming pool. They’re on a palatial-looking estate, full of columns and rills and fluted architecture. They enter the pool, and she begins to remove her top. Suddenly, the pool is full of blood.
Cut to a shot of a clown sadly nailing Jesus to the cross in a room wallpapered with stories about the stock market. He turns to face the camera and shatters the fourth wall by winking and honking his nose once, twice, thrice. He’s not wearing any pants, and has a sizable clownhood.
SCENE: A series of sensual love sequences between several men and women are repeatedly interrupted by scenes of horrific violence, such as the female lead being sawed in half with a chainsaw.
SCENE: The future. Marie and Lily are exchange students from Switzerland, and they spend all of their time penning manifestoes against their tyrannical government, under which all pornography is banned on the grounds that it corrupts youth. Every so often, a tender yet deeply erotic lesbian love scene is frustrated by the entrance of the secret police, who wear leather singlettes and wield clearly phallic batons.
The second part finds the two sealed off from each other by a glass wall, repeatedly violated by robotic penises.
(Excerpted from a Playboy interview with adult film star/director Bonus Viri)
Playboy: So tell, us, Mr. Wiri — or is it Viri? We’ve heard both a lot recently…
Bonus: I pronounce it “wiri,” as “viri” is the liturgical, and not classical pronunciation.
Playboy: Yes. Well, that brings us nicely to what I was going to ask you — what’s caused this change in the wind, this rethinking of an entire industry.
B: Well, it’s kind of like we’ve said everything that we could say with the old forms, the old methods. We had a good run of it — a couple of thousand years worth of standard erotica and other adult entertainments, and a lot of people enjoyed it, but it’s always been, you know, looked down on by the common man, as if it’s just pulp.
P: It’s much the same with us.
B: Well, yes, there you go. So what we’re trying to do with this is explore new avenues, give people something to think about while they’re getting their rocks off.
P: Tell us about your name. A lot more people find its meaning more confusing than its pronunciation.
B: Well, in the Latin, it means “the good of man.” It’s apparent to anybody familiar with the language that bonum hominis or possibly beneficium hominis would have been a smoother translation, but it doesn’t have the same ring.
P: Or the pun.
B: Right, and that’s integral to what we’re trying to do here. From now on, you’re going to see a lot more intelligence in adult entertainment.
P: I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s story, The Whore of Mensa, which is a satirical short story about a private investigator looking into an illegal intellectual escort service.
B: See, that’s a big part what we’re fighting against. This conception that what we’re doing is evil, that it’s immoral, that it’s mindless dreck. I predict that you’ll be seeing, in the near future, not just Debbie Does Dallas, but Debbie Does the Met.
SCENE: Two hours of smooth jazz music played over an image of a field of daisies, waving in the wind, splattered with goats’ blood.
SCENE: We see the Oval Office, fully decorated with posters depicting politicians and rock stars from the mid-1980s. However, through the windows, we see a stylized version of northern Africa, perhaps Libya or Egypt. A triumphant love scene between Ronald Reagan as Aeneas and Margaret Thatcher as Dido ensues, punctuated by the sounds of day traders screaming as their hopes and dreams are dashed by the minute fluctuations of the market.
The film ends with a gigantic papier-mâché scale model of Reagan’s penis spraying money all over his Dido. We’re left to ponder the metaphorical connections between the pornography industry’s adoption of the money shot in the 1970s and the heady me-first economics of the 1980s.
A sampling of adult films made in 2006:
SCENE: A university exchange student sobbing after finding out that due to her host country's hyper-conservative politics, she cannot take emergency contraception, and must carry her new baby to term, thus voiding her hopes of being on the fast track for medical school and continuing her studies of neuroscience.
In 2006, the millenia-old erotica industry collapsed. Nobody really noticed, to the delight of its exhausted writers.