Last year, former porn star Michelle Sinclair got a text from Joaquin Phoenix, asking her if she’d like to audition for an upcoming Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Sinclair queried whether the role – a small but pivotal one in Anderson’s inscrutable Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice – would require her to undress, and when Phoenix said it would, she politely declined. According to an interview Sinclair gave Vice earlier this year, Anderson himself was bewildered by the decision. “Paul was like, ‘What are you talking about? This is a major motion picture. Are you crazy?’”
Sinclair ultimately relented, but it’s not hard to see why she might have been reluctant to disrobe in her first mainstream performance. While Hollywood has finally started taking its sibling industry’s calls, the roles afforded to porn retirees remain shallow and cynical. Just ask Sasha Grey, who made her Hollywood debut six years ago in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, a film that frequently (and clumsily) alluded to her real-life career as a sex worker. Since then, Grey’s roles have grown more and more lazily self-referential, none more so than her latest turn as a B-movie starlet in the high-concept tech thriller Open Windows.
The film sees Grey’s character blackmailed into performing a variety of salacious acts via webcam in order to save a kidnapped lover. As she bares her breasts for an unseen assailant, we’re tediously encouraged to consider how the scene parallels the voyeuristic mechanics of Grey’s earlier career. The implication is as smug as it is reactionary: in the film’s eyes, Grey is forever tarnished by her work in the adult industry (note how many journalists still think it’s hilarious to refer to her as the star of Anal Cavity Search 6, or similar) and now exists solely to lend mainstream productions some spurious sense of edginess. The overall effect is about as transgressive as a 16-year-old showing off their hickeys.
Koch Media, DVD & VOD
Also out this week
Annie Resolutely unharrowing orphan saga.
Cobain: Montage Of Heck Scattershot portrait of the Nirvana frontman.
The Duke Of Burgundy Arthouse BDSM romance, mercifully helicopter-free.
