Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)
View Askew / Weinstein Company DVD (region 1)

From director Kevin Smith comes Zack and Miri Make a Porno, an amiable adult comedy about two friends who, when faced with the inability to pay their bills, decide to make an amateur porno movie in order to make some quick dollars and ensure that they can at least remain in a heated house during a harsh winter. 

They assemble a willing cast (including porn veteran Traci Lords) and also plan to have sex with each other on film.  Cast and plan assembled they look to find sets, props and a willing cameraman to capture the action.  There is only one slight problem – Zack and Miri fall in love and questions of trust and monogamy interfere with their well-laid plans to complete the porno as intended.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about the demystification of pornography.  The adult world here is not some monstrous exploiter of women or some sinful alternative to God-given “sacred” sex.  

It is a viable industry comprised of amiable people whose morality although not exploitative is perhaps unconventional.  Director Smith goes to some lengths to make his two leads likeable and credible characters – post-sexual revolution ordinary American every-people burdened by increasing financial pressures.  Smith takes for granted the validity of pornography as a legitimate film discourse and industry – as he is entitled to do as porno is after all protected free speech in the USA – and comically depicts the efforts of what might be termed the amateur porn movement.

The film got into trouble with censors in the USA not only for its quotient of sexual content (although non-pornographic in itself it does feature much nudity and simulated sex) but for its underlying attitude.  Pornography is accepted as normal here – an everyday part of American society and likewise the morality and sexually promiscuous ethics of those involved in its performance and production are accepted non-judgmentally in what emerges as a warm treatise on sexual ethics.  As such, the film examines two inter-related principles – the difference between “fucking” and “making love” as they relate to such traditional concepts as monogamy and fidelity in inter-personal relationships.  Indeed, although there is much coupling on film between the actors involved in the porno production, when the two leads copulate it is clear that there is an emotional commitment between them that separates their sexual encounter from the others that are filmed around it.

The point which Smith brilliantly illustrates here is that “porn” is fantasy, for the actors as well as the audience.  The sex is referred to as “fucking”: it is fun for the participants as it has every right to be but it is a staged presentation of sex removed from any real commitment or emotional correlation. 

What Zack and Miri discover is that their emotional connection makes their sex a meaningful inter-personal action between them in a way which separates it from the “fucking” necessary to make a porno film – it is real and although they try to make it just a fantasy, cannot do so.  Even the filming of their scene is different – the rhythms, the attitudes, the camera placement – suggesting that the porn fantasy of sex involves no real emotional commitment (though all the participants are friendly and amiable with each other) while making love is a separate form of sexual act that involves emotional connection and brings with it a different set of expectations regarding commitment.  With this emotional connection come the traditional expectations of fidelity and monogamy.

Both the promiscuity involved in the creation of the porn fantasy and the monogamy which director Smith considers integral for genuine emotional connection are presented as equally valid.  The contrast between them is handled brilliantly by Smith in this film, easily his best, warmest and most provocative to date thanks in part to an engaging, humane cast led by Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as the title duo.  The fantasy of porn sex may finally be wholly different from the actuality of making love but both are legitimate sexual expressions representing the diversity of human sexuality.  Indeed, such diversity is well-represented here, with hilarious homosexual characters, a plethora of jokes concerning anal sex in particular (leading to one classic “frosting” scene) and a clever behind-the-scenes account of the logistics of amateur porno movie-making.

The underlying humanist morality to this treatise on the difference between sexual fantasy and sexual actuality (and the differing ethical expectations of each) ensures that Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a warm, gentle if crudely humoured film.  The evident protests put forward against it are simply narrow-minded reactions to the mere reference to “porn” as if such meant immoral or wicked, which this film definitely is not. 

To which: yes, this film is about porno movie-making but does so in such a way as to explore the warmth of human inter-relationships that exist in the creation of adult entertainment and the divisions between the fantasy of adult entertainment and genuine sexual relationships – the former can separate emotional commitment whilst the latter cannot.  It is important that the distinctions between actual sex as screen fantasy and actual sex as the basis of an emotional interconnection be explored and director Smith deserves tremendous credit for doing so here.

In that, Zack and Miri Make a Porno is the first Hollywood film to accept pornography as a legitimate form of filmmaking and demystify its often morally problematic elevation of sexual fantasy above the reality of sexual relationships.  Indeed, in its own way, Zack and Miri Make a Porno re-examines a question put forward a generation ago by Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner in When Harry Met Sally: can two friends have sex without it ruining the friendship?  Smith’s film is the date movie for the children of baby boomers raised in a world which has legitimized pornography and in which pornography as a genre offers financial, sexual and inter-personal opportunities for sexual and self-fulfilment on a variety of levels seldom if at all acknowledged in the radical feminist or Religious Right hoopla that continues to condemn this misunderstood art-form. 

Copyright (C) Robert Cettl All Rights Reserved Last modified: April 6, 2009