#max hardcore

Extreme Omnisexual: Tex Porneau is the living embodiment of this trope, going so far as to create a breed of human-sized flying sperm so that he can, quite literally, fuck Los Angeles. The entire city. All at once!. Anders Klimakks, with his career as a porn star/bio-engineered sex god and his nearly 900-woman mating record, is also a perfect example of this trope, though it's implied that due to his background he really can't help himself and that it in many cases just kind of falls into his lap.

The antagonist of this part of the story is Tex Porneau, a director of ill repute with a penchant for spunking philosophical justifications into the middle of the action. While he may possess nature’s first digitally obscured male genitalia, Porneau’s not a particularly reserved or modest man, as evidenced by his moto (‘FUCK OR BE FUCKED’) and by the fact that his grand plan involves growing a swarm of gigantic hunter-killer sperm with which to terrorize the women of Los Angeles. Tex seems to be worried that his reputation as an extreme filmmaker is under threat from kids whose footsteps he hears whenever he turns the world into a set. Note the way he talks about his usurpers while preparing to film the city-wide carnage he’s wrought:

These new kids… with their sleazecore heroin vomit porn… these droopy punks they can steal the hardcore crown from Tex Porneau. Forget it.

Triple IMAX 3-D super-extreme hardcore. The ultimate equation… SEX = DEATH = BUCKS! I am the future!

The registers blur easily into each other here: paranoid old man babble becomes a pastiche of hip extremism which in turn becomes a crass technological boast that doubles as a crude parody of advertising. All in a day’s work for a Vice staffer in 2014, perhaps, but was The Filth just quick in with its critique or did it summon up that which it was trying to put down?

For all that Tex Porneua is very obviously supposed to be a send-up of porn director Max Hardcore from his cowboy hat on down, this speech makes me think of Transformers/Bad Boys/Pain and Gain director Michael Bay more than anything else. Bay’s aesthetic devotion to “fucking the frame”, to overloading the screen with rapid-fire cuts between scenes of carnage and scenes of sexual provocation, and his almost orgasmic commitment to advertising advanced and inhuman technologies on screen – from Michael Wahlberg arms to the dizzying murder machines that double as swanky cars in his Transformers movies – marks him out as a clear artistic relative of Porneau.

I’m reminded here of a rant that film critic Mark Kermode had about Transformers: The Dark of the Moon on his BBC Radio 5 Live film review show, in which he berated the ever-escalating speed and volume of Bay’s productions. Kermode argues that this technique results in the annihilation of the boundaries between women, cars and toys, “all just things to be leered at and played with” in Bay’s worldview. Of course, Michael Bay didn’t discover the potential for erotic overload in car advertising or commercialised violence any more than your parents invented sex, but Bay’s Tex Porneau-like tendency to push the form to new extremes is emblematic of his cultural moment, a moment that The Filth both amplified and went some way towards anticipating. What we are presented with in ‘pornomancer’ and ‘in the world of anders klimakks’ is a portrait of sex and entertainment stripped of any function or context and turned into a force of hateful misogynistic violence.

Seen in the light of Tex Porneau’s plan, the descriptions of the depths of pornography from Laurie Penny’s Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism sound tame:

The formal rules of late capitalist pornography are the fulcrum of modern sexual affectlessness: an endless parade of disembodied cocks going into holes, a joyless, piston pumping assembly line of industrial sexuality that seeks constantly to monetize new limits of ‘hardcore’, to milk more cum, to stretch sphincters wider and open orifices to double, triple, quadruple loads of faceless genital meat.

As one may infer from the above excerpt – if they didn’t already know from experience – male ejaculate has already been turned into a signifier of something beyond its mere biological function in pornography, what with the ritualised money shot being an act of completion that doubles as an act of degradation, depending on the nature of the production in question. Tex Porneau’s plan merely takes this to its unnatural conclusion. His model of porno-capitalism leaves the spooge-drenched battery farms Laurie Penny described far behind, creating in its place an environment in which semen has been turned into something that unambiguously hates, hunts and destroys women:

Curing the Postmodern Blues: Reading Grant Morrison and Chris Weston's The Filth in the 21st Century