Hard to Swallow: “Inside Deep Throat” (2005)

 

  Regarding sexuality in popular culture, if there’s anything more annoying (and dishonest) than priggish cultural puritanism, it’s sanctimonious moral liberalism masquerading as open-mindedness when, in fact, the canonical emphasis diverges into a campaign of ulterior agendas. With this participatory caveat in mind, we now approach the Brian Grazer (Opie’s lesser half) produced documentary “Inside Deep Throat” which purports to examine, not the “Woodstein” deep cover informant of the Watergate investigation, but the unlikely financial success of the 1972 smut film, the resultant social and political ramifications surrounding the evolution of “porno chic” based upon that success and the subsequent legal and socio-sexual (especially among the feminist camp) wave of outrage, coupled with technological advances that combined to detour subsequent predicted  advances in mating explicit sex and cinema art instead into an assembly line cookie-cutter industry of interchangeably anonymous gynecological thrusts and couplings. That’s quite an agenda for any one film to handle and so it’s probably no surprise that “Inside Deep Throat” fails miserably on all counts. However, it’s a fine excuse for a major Hollywood studio peep show which pretends to document and celebrate a revolution in sexuality, while its jaded attitude reveals a documentary that is both uninformed and patently dishonest: a film that cannot wait to ridicule the purveyors of their subject film while simultaneously mocking those opposed to its creation, and, by extension, the original film’s (and the documentary’s) disregard for the obscenity laws of the United States.

 To read the entire review, click the following link to: https://chandlerswainreviews.wordpress.com/sexual-politics-in-the-cinema/