It’s 1982 and the adult videotape market is just beginning to surge. Stephen Sayadian is in the process of making his second feature film, with the usual complications of the b-movie director: the entire film had to be shot over the course of eleven days in a small studio in the heart of downtown L.A.; electricity was being illegally patched in to power the equipment; and extras were recruited from a nearby blood bank and methadone clinic. The film was Café Flesh, a post-apocalyptic cult pornographic science fiction dystopian satire designed and directed by Sayadian (under the pseudonym “Rinse Dream”) and co-written by Sayadian and Jerry Stahl (credited as “Herbert W. Day”), most famous for his work on ALF, Thirtysomething, and Moonlighting, and later as the subject of the 1998 biopic Permanent Midnight.
Performance is one of Sayadian’s central themes, and his films feature styles of acting that are typically associated with the avant-garde. At that time, many downtown L.A. filmmakers were incorporating aspects of pornography into avant-garde film, and so it was a logical move for Sayadian to do the same thing in the opposite direction, bringing not only the acting techniques, but the surreal set and costume design associated with the avant-garde to his morbid pornographic vision. For example, a housewife getting it on with a milkman in a rat costume while gaudily made up men in high chairs look on and bang at their feeding trays with over-sized bones, or the executive with a giant pencil for a head doing it doggy style with his secretary. How did this happen?
One big element in the rise of Stephen Sayadian is the rise in porn. In the 70’s porn was a thing. It was riveting. It was cutting edge. It had weight.
Many of the great porns of the time—The Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Green Door, The Opening of Misty Beethoven—were striving to be more than just smut. (Especially the last of those three, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, which has been called the “crown jewel” of the Golden Age of Porn.) Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie, which ushered in the aforementioned Golden Age of Porn in 1969, pornogrophy felt that it too might have something to say.
But the film that most came through on that promise in those early years would of course have to be Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Russ Meyer’s masterpiece, that was largely panned at the time—with a script penned by critic Roger Ebert matter of fact—whose future co-host, Gene Siskel described as, "unfolds with all of the humor and excitement of a padded bra ... Boredom aplenty is provided by a screenplay which for some reason has been turned over to a screenwriting neophyte." It’s technically a sequel to Valley of the Dolls and follows an all girl rock-n-roll group who get caught up in the seedy world of LA drugs and sex, at the center of which is Z Man, who speaks in a kind of lowbrow Shakespearian (most memorable line of his, It’s my happening and it freaks me out!) and who contains a secret.
The film showed us love in all its forms and was thoroughly drazzled in irony, with a musical score that took the daytime soap and turned it up to “11” as our friends at Spinal Tap like to say. And an all-around good time.
The Golden Age of porn has been slotted at 1969-1984, but in 1973—on the heels of the iconic film, Deep Throat—in the Supreme Court verdict, Miller v. California, a ruling made “contemporary community criterion” the key factor in deciding whether a work of film or literature is pornographic and further held that pornography is not protected under the First Amendment—this was also the same year that the Devil in Miss Jones came out and a time when pornography was openly being discussed by celebrities and on television, when the term porno chic was being bandied about—but porns continued to tease out their one-dimensional storylines, always aching for something more.
Sayadian got his start during this period as Hustler’s creative director in charge of humor and advertising. This position entailed making the advertisements for Flynt’s novelty sex products. “When you looked at the advertising, you wouldn’t know if it was a parody or it was real,” Sayadian said in regard to those ads during a personal interview with Jacob Smith in August 2005, but it wouldn’t be till the early 1980s that he came into his own, when Sayadian teamed up with co-author Stahl and director Frank Delia, to create a new kind of porn: Night Dreams.
The narrative of Night Dreams is structured around sessions in a surreal sex therapy clinic.The first image we see is an extreme close-up of Mrs. Van Houton (Dorothy Le May), kneeling in a stark white clinical observation room, electrodes connected to her forehead. She looks directly at the camera and says, I know you’re watching me. I feel your eyes like fingers touching me in certain places. The camera cuts to a shot of a male and female doctor (Andy Nichols and Jennifer West) observing Mrs. Van Houton on the other side of one-way glass. For the rest of the film Mrs. Van Houton delivers direct-address stream-of consciousness monologues to the camera that segue into stylized sex sequences, while on the other side of the glass the exasperated doctors try to make sense of her behavior.
In one segment we see Mrs. Van Houton in a kitchen, preparing a pot of Cream of Wheat. Mmm. I love Cream of Wheat, she says. It’s so hot and creamy. It feels so good when it goes down my throat. Then. In response. It really fills a girl up. Nutritious and delicious, exclaims an African American man wearing a cardboard Cream of Wheat box. As the soundtrack plays the Ink Spots’ light jazz version of Old Man River, Mrs.Van Houton performs oral sex on the Cream of Wheat box, intercut with images of Wonder Bread. The scene ends when Sayadian appears dancing and playing the saxophone dressed as a slice of white bread.
Café Flesh has the same abstract element, but combined with a compelling storyline, in which Sex Positives hide from the authorities. I’m a virgin, a woman shouts as she’s being pulled away by undercover agents. It all takes place in the notorious sex club, Café Flesh, with its leering Negatives so reminiscent of the audience-members in Metropolis viewing the female robot as she comes to life for the first time, or the remarkable performance of Max Melodramatic (Andrew Nichols), the MC at the club where these shenanigans take place and clearly modeled after the character of Joel Gray from Cabaret.
In the world of Café Flesh, a “Nuclear Kiss” has rendered 99% of the population unable to have sex. The remaining one percent are required by the government to perform public sex acts in front of the frustrated Sex Negatives in a variety of dives like Café Flesh. The film exists in the same gritty alternative universe as Mad Max and Blade Runner—Blade Runner came out the summer before, and Mad Max three years previous. Between interspliced faces of sickly club-goers and the main characters in the back oozing boredom with every breath they take, we’re caught in a nightmare bizarro porn version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Big deal. Rico fucks. We watch. What else is new?
Good evening mutants and mutettes, and welcome to Café Flesh. That’s Max Melodramatic, a cigarette-wielding hand concealing his disdain. Max is the voice of the film, playing it quiet and disgusted one minute, or flipping off the audience in a bonnet and dress while hanging from a swing. He’s the pusherman who gives you what you want while he spits in your face.
But the plot centers on a Sex Negative couple, Nick (Paul McGibboney) and Lana (Pia Snow, later the scream queen Michelle Bauer), who are addicted to the nightly shows at Café Flesh. Nick keeps trying to make love to Lana, but he gets violently sick. Lana fakes being ill—unbeknownst to Nick, she’s actually a Sex Positive who has stuck with him out of love, but her hidden lust is starting to get in the way. The slow-mo shot when she finally can’t take it any more and makes straight for the stage is like something straight out of an Italian horror film, like The Beyond or Suspiria. Ooh. Wyoming huh? Where a man can still be a man if he doesn’t mind sleeping in lead pajamas.
The concept of “sex-positive” can be traced back to Willhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution” back in the 1930’s and believed he could capture sexual energy in quantifiable units or “orgones”, but this concept is also a key component of Second Wave Feminism, and is tied specifically to the idea that sexuality does not necessarily lead to male dominance—that sex can and should be central to women’s liberation.
But how does this all relate to Café Flesh?
The film presents itself as a kind of dystopian vision of a sexual future in which the world is divided between the watcher and the watched—a sort of cross between Mad Max and Brave New World—pleasure is everything, our bodies are not our own, and the nuclear holocaust is here in all its post-punk glory. And at the center of it all is this distinction, between those who are free to fully experience their sexuality and are forced to do it for the viewing pleasure of the sexless masses. Is that Second Wave Feminism or a commentary on it? Is that the dark and final chapter of Wllhelm Reich and his “sexual revolution”?
There is another film I always pair with Café Flesh in my mind, and it is Liquid Sky. Sex also plays a key component in this film, and it is also a coerced non-consensual sex. The sex in this film is brutal, not surreal of kinky in any way. It is a horror of sex, of male dominance and cruelty and what it can do to a person. And the world is New Wave New York fashion, not post-apocalyptic, but the tone and style is the same—the same dead delivery and the same bizarre camera angles and costumes.
I would argue that coercion is the key component, not only to Sayadian’s Café Flesh or Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky, but to the history of taboo in erotica and its aftermath. Sayadian presents us with fantasies of coercion (à la De Sade), albeit couched in the most outlandish of social satires, and Tsukerman presents us with realities of coercion wrapped up in a stylistic b-movie bow.
Taboo is the place where desire and disgust meet. It is the location of the holy, and the location of the profane. It is both Hustler and God.
But is there a purpose to porn beyond the most obvious ones? What does porn do? And why is it?
Maybe the answers to these questions seem obvious, but, like its younger brother, advertising, pornography serves a manifold purpose. It has a surface purpose, but along with it comes a power to modify and adapt the person. Arousal, like pain, can be a great incentive to pain, and when new fantasies are presented, new areas of potential sexuality appear. These are areas that were arguably always there, but not accessed because the individual had yet to have followed his or her sexual interests down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Pornography can be revolutionary, but it is a revolution that you will not see on the surface. It is a revolution that occurs in private and is happening every time another adolescent searches “momdom” or “hentai” on the Internet. There is always another layer to be explored, and with each new layer, the hook digs deeper. Addictions to internet porn come in all shapes and sizes, but in all of them, the algorithm of arousal invariably leads to extremism, and in the teasing out of the more extreme elements of a person’s fantasy, a larger addiction to fantasy could arise.
Porn can draw a person towards action, but it can also manipulate the pathways of thought into more vibrant channels. The point is that whether porn is not revolutionized as Russ Meyers and Stephen Sayadian attempted or if it evolves in a less conscious way, porn does evolve, and can directly affect the brain due to the simple shock of the imagery as presented and the chemical processes that can accompany.
Sayadian vanished from the scene for a while. Then, in 1989, he released Dr. Caligari, an attempt to move away from pornography and into pure cult, but also in many ways a return to Night Visions. Like Night Visions, it takes place in an insane asylum, but revolves around the mad scientist who runs C.I.A (Caligari Insane Asylum) as much as the patients. Dr. Caligari’s treatment is to transfer glandular brain fluids from one patient to another. This film is like the offspring of Cronenberg and Troma.
Two of her main patients, Mr. Pratt, a cannibalistic serial killer, and Mrs. Van Houten, a nymphomanical housewife, are the primary subjects of her mindswapping. Mrs. van Houten becomes the cannibal and Mr. Pratt the nymphomaniac; although, they seem to still retain some elements of themselves as well. Apparently Caligari’s unconventional idea is to cure people by introducing equally opposite traits to balance out disturbed minds, but this is never implicitly stated in the film. Several other doctors, a married couple Mr & Mrs. Lodger, become concerned with Caligari’s experiments and approach Mrs. Lodgers father Dr. Avol, who confronts Caligari only to fall victim to her mindswapping and receive an injection of Mrs. Van Houtens fluid turning him into a transvestite nymphomaniac. Sex is a very prominent theme throughout the movie, especially for Mrs. Van Houten who appears topless and performs masturbation at several points, but there are no hardcore graphic scenes as in his previous releases.
By the end of the film Mrs. Van Houten has injected Dr. Caligari with her own nymphomanical fluid and herself with Caligari’s ancestor’s (the original Dr. Caligari from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) thus the patient becomes the doctor, the doctor becomes the patient and the inmates are left running the asylum.
And watching porn in general is a lot like letting the inmates run the asylum.
Since Dr. Caligari, Sayadian has slipped back into the world of mainstream porn, but he still retains his distinctive style. For example, at one point in Party Doll A Go Go Part 2, Jezabel (Jeanna Fine) says, I know you’re watching me, just as Randy Spears is about to orally ravage her labia and surrounding girl area.
As a much younger man, I loitered in art houses. I drank them in. Their Art Deco veneers. The projection booths held together with duct tape. The arthouse concessionaires with their variety of hair colors and piercings and action movie pitches and other hang-ups. We reveled in cynicism back then and vintage porn seemed a natural extension of that. We stapled the toy figurines of our youth to the wall. We hated with such a refined hatred.
And during this time, both Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Café Flesh were films I embraced with an almost embarrassing eagerness.
The first time I saw Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, I was probably not old enough to go, and I remember being so enthralled by the audacious licentiousness of Z Man. I wanted to embody the same androgynous universe and what curiosities were to be found within, but Café Flesh somehow spoke a deeper truth to the adolescent with the knotted heart. If Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was the sunny skin of pornographic filmmaking than Café Flesh was its dirty heart.
They bookend the Golden Age of Porn and they show the two extremes of what porn could be—from the kitchy ironic romp of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to the bleakly surreal social satire of Café Flesh—they both took porn to the edge, and jumped off.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
