Compelling Viewing in Movies and Porn

In the last few days I’ve watched some interesting movies. Some good (Gladiator, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises) some stinkers (Robin Hood, Prometheus).

I’ve been wondering why a team who can produce something as bombastic and yet sublime as Gladiator can go on to make such unsatisfying fare as Robin Hood and Prometheus, and what is it that makes Christopher Nolan’s work so excellent. What lessons can I learn for my lowest of low budget erotic films?

If you’re a regular visitor you’ll know that I have a fetish for image quality in my own work. This is a long standing quest from my earliest photos on toy cameras, a desire for stuff to look sharp and crisp and cool and colourful and perfect.

It’s necessary therefore for me to recognise that the importance of how good it looks comes a long way down the list of necessary qualities a movie must have. I think the most important elements are:

1. What happens. If nothing happens, you have no movie. The events that unfold have to be interesting and compelling to watch. We have to hunger to find out what happens.
2. Who it happens to. We have to care about the people in the movie. For mainstream movies, personally, I need someone to root for. There has to be a connection.
3. That it makes internal sense. Not so much in petty continuity; all movie makers make mistakes (e.g. the clock on the wall shows the wrong time. Who cares?). I mean in terms of coherence. Once you’ve established a character to be painfully honest, they shouldn’t start expeditiously telling whoppers a few scenes later unless they’ve undergone a major life changing experience.
4. That the rest of the movie making doesn’t obscure the top three. As long as you can follow the big three elements unfolding- you can see and hear what’s going on clearly enough- anything else is icing on the cake.

We can quibble over the relative importance of these. I’m sure you can think of a movie with characters we really care about that are fun despite them not making a great deal of sense, or where the awesomeness of the plot carries you over the fact that the characters are all dicks. I think a truly great movie has the big three ingredients polished to perfection, and the rest of the art, craft and spectacle of the movie merely serves to present the top three elements to you in as glorious a way as possible. If the spectacle gets in the way of the core ingredients, the film will be rubbish however big the budget.

Following Perfection: Even The Masters Make Mistakes

Gladiator and The Dark Knight are two films which rise above their genres to achieve perfection. Both managed to turn their potentially unlikeable lead characters- a billionaire
playboy turned violent vigilante, and an army general who participates with exhilaration in bloody battle- into nuanced real-seeming people we felt for. Not just the leads, but the support cast whose lives were touched by the main story (Rachel Dawes, Alfred, Jim Gordon, Proximo, Lucilla, Jubo). They were also elevated by two of cinema’s most intelligent, interesting and peculiarly plausible villains, in the Joker and Commodus.

Part of the magic was provided by the actors. One of the reasons movie stars are movie stars is that they bring that connection to the screen. Joaquin Phoenix, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Russell Crowe and the others gave stunning performances. Indeed, possibly career-defining performances. And there’s a clue- the actors can’t do it alone. They need the script to give them the what happens and the internal sense. Only then can they grab our emotions and run with them.

It is interesting what films the directors of those two films did afterwards. How do you follow perfection? Most particularly, how do you follow perfection when you revisit the same ground? Ridley Scott revisited the scenes of earlier triumphs with Robin Hood (another historical epic with Russell Crowe) and Prometheus (a prequel to a much earlier perfect movie, Alien). Christopher Nolan had the third film in his Batman trilogy to deal with. How did they do?

With all due respect to Ridley Scott and the teams of talented people who worked on the films, I’m afraid I didn’t like your movies. I thought they were stinkers. And it begs the question- how can a team capable of producing something a great as Gladiator make a movie as ragged and incoherent as Robin Hood?

My opinion? Bad script.

The story was rambling at best, with the most interesting element strangled of oxygen and buried under the weight of set-up and pointless spectacle. The interesting story? An imposter comes home from the crusades to Marion’s lands and bed, and she falls in love with him anyway. The film could have started an hour in and concentrated on that plot-line, taking all the tedious mucking about at the crusades as read. I think that would have transformed the movie for the better.

The characters were not made engaging enough: they were mostly indistinguishable boozy squaddies or indistinguishable arrogant posh knights.

The one character who really stood out (Marion) was immediately undermined as the plot demands temporarily rendered her incapable of rescuing a stuck pig without help from manly he-man Robin. Despite all her previous resourcefulness she didn’t think to order manly he-man to grab a rope and pull her out, which would have let him be manly whilst keeping her resourcefulness intact.

The film was a stinker because the script failed to provide interesting events, sympathetic characters, and lacked self-consistency in dozens of similar, character-undermining ways.

Dark Knight Rises? I thought that was a very good film. I don’t think it reaches the heights of Dark Knight, but really- how could it? Wisely, the things which Christopher Nolan concentrated on were an engaging story, engaging characters and making sure that everyone got satisfying closure without doing violence to self-consistency. If anything, the spectacle was turned down from the last one, despite the events being bigger in scale.

What Christopher Nolan did was concentrate on the essentials. He tried to find another great story to tell, not another spectacular movie to make. I’d love to be able to make a film that good!

Lessons for Erotica

Can we learn from this, even producing tiny budget erotica? Are the same elements are important? I think the rules apply, but not always in the most obvious of ways.

Here’s my take. In the field we primarily work in, female-sub BDSM, you need a pretty girl (rule 2), and BDSM stuff needs to happen to her (rule 1), and you need to be able to see and hear it (rule 4), and her reactions should be consistent with the sort of storyline you are filming (rule 3). Every website producer will tell you that content is king. Nothing matters if the material isn’t compelling viewing.

Characters

In erotica, instead of someone to root for, I personally need someone to fancy. As a heterosexual man, that means a pretty girl. Ariel says that she can imagine herself being in the position of the sub even if the sub is male, so a scene where a man is heroically resisting interrogation could be hot for her by transference. (She does like it to be a man being the top though, I think). If there is any transference for me, I’ll imagine myself in the position of the top, or more likely as the top’s boss watching the scene unfold. I know Pandora Blake is a big advocate of female/spankee gaze i.e. having a sexy dom, something which is at best irrelevant to me, maybe even counter-productive since I don’t want to feel annoyed and intimidated by watching an oh-so-perfect-chisel-chin-dom strutting about the place.

So there’s interesting difference number one: you may need different things for different parts of your audience, to an even greater extent than the mainstream.

Do I need to root for a character in the same way as I do in a mainstream movie? I don’t think I do. I don’t need to root for the dom- the dom could be the cackling cartoon baddy as long as he does appropriately bad things to the sub (and doesn’t do anything inappropriately bad- un-hygenic butt plugs being licked clean squick me, even in fantasy).

And rooting for the sub might be counter-productive since I’m definitely going to want bad things to happen to her (rule 1: that’s why I’m watching a female sub BDSM movie in the first place).

In our films we’ve been trying to expand on the characterisation a bit. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. It may be that finding out more about the characters might hinder the hotness- hotness is in the mind of the beholder. If you are a damsel-in-distress fan, you might want the sub to be innocent. Someone else might like her to be an ice queen who has done bad stuff and might deserve it. Another viewer might want her to be loving it. If we do too much storytelling, do we risk addressing too narrow an audience?

Should we leave the characters more enigmatic?

An enigmatic dom should let the viewer step more easily into their shoes. It certainly seems to have worked for the female leads (and their legions of female wannabes) in Twilight and (shudder) Fifty Shades of Grey.

And the perfect echo to those “step in” enigmatic doms? A superbly attractive sub, whose reactions might be sexy enough to pass for innocent fright, chagrined suffering or play-acted suffering-but-turned-on.

We’d end up with that most basic of bondage website videos- five minutes of a girl struggling in bondage, going “mmmpfh!” through the gag and not getting out, with barely a sight of any dom. Maybe that’s why that form is the most basic- it could be the most easily transferable.

Only one step removed from that is the “top-and-tail pro performer” BDSM video which is the staple of kink.com and their many imitators. In the “top” at the start of the video we meet the performers, they are excited, they are going to play out a hot BDSM scene in front of the camera. A plotless (but BDSM action filled) scene follows, “tailed” by the post-orgasmic interview where the performers say how like, totally awesome it was and how they had a great time and why, sure they’d do it again.

I must admit, if the sub is attractive to me and the BDSM action is something I want to see, I can find videos like that pretty hot.

So are we misguided in trying to stealthily add flashbacks, visual storytelling, and more overt characterisation into our movies? I honestly don’t know- one of the problems of producing your own erotica is that using it as porn becomes almost impossible. You can’t get far enough away from it to be able to view it that way.

Storyline, or just Action?

Do we also do our movies a disservice by trying to fit the hot BDSM action into a framing storyline? By trying to provide meaningful reasons for the hotness to happen, are we actually taking it out of the realm of erotica and making lame mainstream movies with a bit of bondage in them? I know that when I make a movie, I want to have it make sense and I want the story to move forward in ways that seem rational and motivated. But there doesn’t seem to be much BDSM movie erotica like that around, so I’m struggling to judge how good I’d find that as porn.

It’s the BDSM action and the girl that makes me click the buy button. A super-sexy girl getting hard bastinado and I’ll probably give it a whirl regardless of the framing storyline. However I find the monotony of top-and-tail or total lack of storyline gets stale fast, and I get bored before downloading more than a handful of videos. That’s part of the reason why I started making my own.

Satisfying Self Consistency

In a mainstream film I want the emotional high of a satisfying ending for the characters I care about, in a way which feels right and natural.

Cynics would suggest that no porn needs to have any content past about ten minutes in, as once you’ve come you don’t care what happens next. Is that true?

We’ve noticed in the stories we write for Restrained Elegance that we often have a beginning and a middle, but fade to black in place of having an end. Do we want the girl to live happily ever after? Or to fall in love with the dom? Or is it better that we leave it to the imagination, perhaps hinted at by a twist just before we fade out? Of course in bondage what always happens is that the girl gets untied, but this is definitely an anti-climax (in many senses!) We don’t particularly want to show them fucking (it just isn’t something we’re interested in filming) so where does that leave us?

So should we work on giving our characters closure? Or leave them in media res as though they dwell in a world of continuous hot BDSM sex?

Not Messing The Rest of it Up

Here at least we can be clear. Our job is to show the action clearly, with good sound, so we can participate in the film-maker’s objective of fancying the hot girl, enjoying the bad BDSM stuff that is done to her, and makes her look at her very best.

Without false modesty, this bit we now know how to do. We can improve, surely, but we’ve got to a level where we can show what we want to show on screen and make the girls look great. The question is- what should we be showing? Should we spend much longer working on the scripts before shooting, as I believe the Robin Hood crew should have?

Why I Think It Is Worth Trying

I think it is worth trying to draw from the lessons of mainstream movies, because we might end up hitting a sweet spot the way The Dark Knight and Gladiator did.

If your fantasy is the innocent damsel in distress, surely we can do a better job of a damsel-in-distress story by showing her innocence. If you want to be the evil baron who has her tortured, surely it is better to show him, and make his motivations clear. Each decision we make on the storyline and the characters can make the film better for you if that’s your thing. Sadly it might narrow the already niche audience even further, potentially excluding people who’d have enjoyed watching the hot BDSM action with the hot girl if we’d left the surroundings more enigmatic.

There is clearly a place for “context free” shorter videos of hot BDSM action. We enjoy making them as short Restrained Elegance videos, and sometimes we’ll be doing that for Elegance Studios films too.

But I hope you’ll agree that it is also worth trying to make erotic films that step beyond the context-free hot BDSM action and also tell a satisfying story where some interesting other stuff happens to characters you want to watch as well as just the BDSM. It doesn’t need to take up much screen time if we are smart about it. Doing that without compromising on the hotness is a key objective for Elegance Studio films at the moment (as we did in Slave Auction, for example). But are we right to even try?

I’d very much like to know what characters, action and story-lines you’d enjoy watching, or whether you think they are an annoying distraction.