Being a responsible member of the adult entertainment community, vigilant watchdog of mainstream porn-bashing, and otherwise not doing anything but my toenails on a Saturday night, I did what so many folks in the porn industry did and trundled off the the local stadium-seating cineplex to see the new film, “Don Jon“.
As luck would have it, one of my colleagues (Colin from Wasteland) was also free, so we arranged to meet in the cinema lobby to watch it as a little “company project” so it would be at least a tax write-off, and figured that between the two of us, we probably could formulate at least a couple of intelligent thoughts about a movie that in many ways promises to throw a spotlight on “porn addiction”.
Read on…
Haven’t seen it yet? Here’s the trailer….
After getting our tickets and the obligatory pricey snack bar items, we joined a VERY long line to get into the bowels of the cineplex. So far so good! A HUGE crowd! Even if the movie stinks, at least lots of people are going to go home and have porn on their brain! But, it quickly became apparent that the hoard of happy viewers were all lining up to get in to see “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2“, rather than a lighthearted romantic comedy about porn addiction. But, not discouraged, we went into theater #12 (completely EMPTY – I suspect that folks here in New England care a lot more about meatballs than porn) and took a seat.
After the endless previews of “coming on television this week” promos (hmm… how does that happen that the movie theaters are pushing TV shows rather than new theatrical releases?), the lights went down and the opening credits rolled for “Don Jon“.
The opening of the film was very promising. Fast edited expository showing all of the things that the movie’s “flawed hero”, Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote and directed the film) values in life. Also promising was the setting for the story – suburban New Jersey, mostly shot in what looked to be recycled locations from The Sopranos, complete with ovah da top Bwooklyn accent squooshed togedda with an even moah ovah da top Staten Eyelen accent. Almost everyone in “Don Jon” tawks as if he or she were raised in the middle of the Verrazano Bridge by amateur stand-up comedians. The usually talented Los Angeles native Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Joisey accent is a horrific exaggeration. He plays up the regional sounds and cadences to the point of belief-shattering extremity. He is joined in overdone accent purgatory by New York City native Scarlett Johansson, who should know bettuh, and Glenne Headly, who should get a Razzie nomination for playing the biggest Italian mother stereotype in the history of cinema. At least Brooklyn’s own Tony Danza gets the accent right, though I would have forgiven him anyway. Hearing the star of “Who’s the Boss?” drop about 500 f-bombs is one of the film’s few true pleasures.
Rolling Stones reviewer Peter Travers sums it up generously (maybe too generously), saying,
Don’t mistake Gordon-Levitt’s depiction of Jon’s family life for a salute to the late, unlamented Jersey Shore. For sure, Tony Danza, as Jon Sr., knows how to rock a wifebeater (who’s the boss, Tony? You are) and leer admiringly when his son brings home a “piece of ass.” But Danza’s tough, tender, nuanced performance goes deeper. Like the rest of the film. Glenne Headly excels as Jon’s mom, Angela, running a good Catholic home but using the rituals of faith, such as Mass and confession, as a substitute for communication. Jon’s sister, Monica (a terrific Brie Larson), worships at the altar of her smartphone, barely uttering a word. What’s Jon’s religion? Besides porn and his muscle car, it’s the gym body he builds as a temple to his own narcissism.
But wait….. Something was bugging me in a de ja vu way about this film. Haven’t I seen all of this before in a different format? About halfway through it, I figured it out. This clever movie was a derivative of a combination of prior works and styles and was simply using modern editing and porn-reference teasing as shiny new pair of shoes to distract the viewer.
EUREKA! This is a WOODY ALLEN MOVIE! One with all of the endless angst, self-absorption, obsession-with-something and mind-numbing conflicting interpersonal relationships, but with none of the charm, wit or writing expertise found in Annie Hall. Woody Allen was obsessive about getting to his psycho-analyst in between figuring out how to deal with his intimacy issues with Diane Keaton. Jon is obsessed with jerking off to porn a dozen times a day, and then hauling his ass to the Catholic confessional booth for absolution of his sins in between figuring out how to deal with the manipulations by his crazy, controlling girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson), a club babe who gets off on her own version of porn. That would be the Hollywood emo bullshit that promotes fake-ass romantic myths. She eventually dumps poor Jon in a fit of insecure rage when she discovers his browser history has a couple of thousand porn sites (art imitates life here).
Now, take Annie Hall and run it through the blender with Saturday Night Fever to get the “working class guy at the club” character vibe, and then liberally pour and gently stir that mix into the far superior 2010 film, “City Island“. Never heard of that great film? It’s the story, based on City Island, New York City (complete with heavy accents and suburban sets) in which Andy Garcia with brawny blue-collar dialogue, is married to vociferous stereotype Tri-State wife Joyce (Julianna Margulies), who’s convinced he has a mistress. Andy’s character is obsessed with becoming an actor and secretly takes acting lessons when he is supposed to be at work as a prison guard. His children hide secret lives. His daughter, Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido), has dropped out of college and is working as a stripper in hopes of saving money to reapply. His son, Vinnie (Ezra Miller), is hooked not just on any old Internet porn, but on sites featuring fat women who eat huge portions of food on live chat cams.
Take a peek at the City Island trailer. Does this all look rather familiar if you have seen Don Jon?
The resulting dish? Don Jon! Even with all of the recycling of Woody Allen, John Travolta, and City Island, the film actually is a rather fun, albeit thin movie.
The film does have a “happy ending” though (not a porn one). I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say that Jon finally finds intimacy and emotionally-driven passion with a woman and lives happily ever after (though it’s not clear if he cut back on the porn because that woman also likes porn!).
But. Where does the “porn addiction” angle fit into all of this? That was, after all, the entire reason we went to go see it.
Back in the days of Sundance, when “Don Jon” had a longer title (“Don Jon’s Addiction“) and an NC-17 rating, the consensus was that Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut was a more fun version of “Shame.” That film was about sex addiction, but “Don Jon” paves its road to hell with online pornography. Now shorn of one-third of its original title and whatever spiciness that pushed it over the NC-17 edge, “Don Jon” promised a glimpse inside the noggin of yet another poor hapless victim whose life is destroyed by porn.
I am no psychologist, but watching Jon’s porn viewing habits didn’t really feel like “addiction” to me. Obsession? Compulsion? Maybe better words for it. The guy just seems compelled to watch porn, a LOT of porn, as an escape hatch from dealing with those darned up-close and personal sexual and intimate relationships that require communication and emotion. And no, I am not dismissing real sex addiction here. Sex addiction is a real thing with real 12-step groups (even if the DSM-5 doesn’t recognize it) to help people recover from destructive sexual behavior. If you didn’t know, the DSM-5, short for the Diagnostic and Statical Manual of Mental Disorders, is the official publication of the American Psychiatric Association and if your “mental disorder” is not listed, fagetqboutit-it for getting your insurance company to cover therapy or treatment. Go join a pagan group and hump a tree and hope for ObamaCare to fix this. But that’s pretty far down their list for helpful intervention.) Regardless, if the DSM-5 didn’t include sex or porn addiction as a mental disorder, why the concern? It doesn’t exist! If a sex addict bear poops in the woods and no one hears it, is the previous Pope a Nazi brown shirt youth? Only Tom Lehrer knows for sure!
I’ll just leave it at that before people start yelling at me.
Hell, I know a lot of people that do this exact same thing with “hobbies” other than porn. Obsessive gardening, cleaning, car washing. Even Robert Downey Jr. did it in Iron Man III by hiding out from his gal and everyone else in the basement, building 42 new robot suits, to avoid dealing with the messy business of interpersonal relationships!
I realize that it has become quite fashionable to bandy about this “porn addiction” diagnosis these days for pretty much any ill of society. Those of us old enough to remember Flip Wilson’s signature line “The Devil Made Me Do It”, can nowadays hear the flip side of that, “Porn Made Me Do It” by pretty much every ax murdering sociopath in front of a jury facing life in prison for feeding his extended family to large hogs in the back yard. This all feeds into the current wave of corporate cowardice to repress and censor porn from search engines, mainstream publications and the like. I can hear the statement coming from board rooms around the world: “we certainly wouldn’t want any culpability for advertising or promoting anything that would cause THAT!“.
This all leads me to believe that Joseph Gordon-Levitt “played the porn card” for a little shock and titillation value (think James Franco of late) to create a compelling, timely film which had at its core what he thought was a good, hot button plot device – porn addiction. But, by the time it made it out of Sundance, his film was sliced and diced within an inch of its life by the studio and distributors to get all the porn out of it to shed that dreaded NC-17 rating in order to get a theatrical release. I’ve read that the original Sundance cut was a FAR better film, but they certainly wouldn’t want any of the more complex sexual issues playing in a theater near you!
The only other bone I have to pick with this movie is their choice of what source of porn Jon was polishing his nob to a dozen times a day: PornHub.
Now, I realize it would be unrealistic for this fellow to go actually BUY 12 porn clips a day at $6.95 each. He’d have to sell his cherished GTO to make it though even a month at that rate.
But come on guys! PornHub and the rest of the free porn tubes don’t need any help in attracting eyeballs these days! Free porn is what, if anything, leads some people down the bunnyhole of porn addiction/compulsion/obsession because it IS free! And, to complete the irony, one of the shots on Jon’s laptop of a porn scene featured Misty Stone. That clip I discovered has now been taken off of PornHub as it was stolen pirated content. Earth to Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Relativity Media: this isn’t helping the piracy issue on our side of the movie copyright protection fence! Come to think of it, did you get porn studio clearance, 2257 docs and model releases for all of those porn clips you stuck in the film? Yeah. It’s Porn, but it’s OUR porn damn it and we’d like to make a living from people buying it rather than stealing it.
To wrap up this convoluted pseudo review, I just want to say to Joseph Gordon-Levitt that I really did enjoy watching your movie. Yes, it pandered with the “addiction” angle, was a promo for stolen, undocumented porn videos on the tubes and was pretty derivative. Nothing wrong with derivative though! West Side Story is a direct rip from Romeo and Juliet and that all turned out pretty well!
Off to do my toenails and watch Iron Man III for the 11th time in 3 days now. How obsessive is THAT?
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I saw Don Jon and I’m sorry I didn’t like it. It’s about two people lying and manipulating each other, with very annoying accents. And way to much screen time of some guy who’s jerking off, except you don’t get to see the good stuff. The one saving grace of this movie was Julianne Moore.
Scarlett Johansson told Refinery29 – “In the film it is the element that destroys the relationship. Pornography can be degrading or can be sexually liberating, if you know how to use it and it is made from an artistic point of view. “But Don Jon is not a film about pornography, it is a social criticism against consumerism.”
Coleen, let’s have a discussion about that! Is artistic porn less pornographic or if you use it to better your own sex life is it less pornographic and more sexually liberating. Who gets to judge what is porn and what is not.