MOVIE REVIEW : ‘RATE IT X’: THE FACE OF PORNOGRAPHY

Pornography viewed without lust can be humorous or disturbing, silly or terrifying. A sick joke, or a sad reflection of the darker edges of the subconscious.

In “Rate It X” (Nuart) we’re shown a variety of men who deal in soft or hardcore pornography, and other representations of women for profit. We see them through the eyes of the women film makers--co-director/editor Lucy Winer, and co-director/cinematographer Paula De Koenigsberg--and their crew. They’re obviously dedicated feminists, and, to a certain extent, their task here takes them into the belly of the beast (Porcus chauvinismus.) They’re dealing with subjects who often don’t choose to conceal their hostility, disagreement or complete indifference.

Yet these men are always altered by the interview. They give different answers, in tone if not in content, to the ones you feel they’d give another man--and that accounts for the movie’s undeniable humor. Sometimes their demeanor becomes softer, more defensive. Some seem to be almost regressing to childhood as they speak. Others peer out from a pose of calculated macho (like the tattooist who specializes in naked women knifing snakes that twine around their loins). Some become, either subtly or not so subtly, seductive or provocative. All but one or two confront their interlocutors through a web of evasions, rationalizations or comfortable cliches.

Who are they? A brassiere manufacturer concerned with his daughters’ bra-burning sentiments. Ad men who design computer ads with bosomy blondes. Ugly George--an ex-political science teacher who roams the sidewalks of New York in shorts, with a portable camera, and tries to persuade young women to partially disrobe for his cable TV show. The editors of explicit magazines. And--the film’s outer limit--the proprietors of sex emporiums with live acts.

Winer and De Koenigsberg might have had a gamier, more effective, film if they’d concentrated exclusively on the hard-core and sex-for-sale crowds. But that obviously isn’t their intention. They want to create a sort of integrated cultural field, show how attitudes on many levels are linked by a common theme: hostility to and degradation of women, masked as sexual desire or “blue” humor. And their subjects obligingly fall into the same traps. It’s a movie which, when it’s working well (which isn’t always) should make women laugh over a shudder, and men laugh over a cringe.