Look around you. If you are in close proximity to at least three other people, one of you has seen at least screenshot from “1 Night in Paris,” if not the entire thing.
Chances are that none of you have ever met the heiress who stars in this once-private home video, yet you’ve seen her in night vision in all of her naked glory. There are countless other sex tapes and inappropriate snapshots that have been released to the public in recent years (Kim Kardashian, Colin Farrell, Vanessa Hudgens, etc.). Now, thanks to Kevin Smith’s new film “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” the masses are getting exposed to the art of taping a sex act.
People have a tendency to chronicle their own lives, be it via journal, blog, copious Facebook albums, video or otherwise. The question is not why sex tapes exist, but rather, why complete strangers feel the need to view them? Steven Handel, a junior psychology major, said a sex tape featuring a fellow Binghamton University student might spark his interest.
“I would [watch] it out of curiosity, just to see what it was all about,” Handel said. “I would probably not watch the entire thing.”
His response proposes that a natural human curiosity may be one of the driving forces that motivate people to view materials of this nature.
English graduate student Devon Branca said sex tapes can be a form of amateur acting. Branca is currently teaching a class called Love and Sex.
“The sex tape speaks to the way in which sex, both for good and bad, has for many become a performance,” Branca said. “A performance that, according to the porn industry’s own statistics, seems to be increasingly moving towards an amateur expression. An expression perhaps more democratic and culturally heterogeneous than mainstream pornography.”
Victor Caligiuri, a sophomore industrial engineering major, said many people watch celebrity and amateur films because of a realism issue.
“It is more realistic,” he said. “It isn’t as fake and overproduced as the professional ones. Celebrities are always posing for the cameras and acting a certain way, but behind the scenes they let their guards down.”
Viewers do not want their “stars” to be unattainable, plastic Barbies and Kens acting in a studio; they want them to be real people in their living rooms with a desk lamp and a webcam.
“As the technology increases and the cost of [it] goes down, one can perhaps expect a more democratic expression of sexuality,” Branca said.
If this is so, then perhaps as the sex tape grows more common, it will lose its “taboo” connotations. “Zack and Miri Make A Porno” is a good example of such a “democratic expression.”
In the film, two people, Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks), set out to produce a pornographic movie in order to pay their overdue bills. Rogen and Banks are prime examples of aesthetically “regular” people. This comedy is portraying the subject matter in a light-hearted, fun way.
While traditionally, those who condemn such displays may have you believe that these materials are produced solely for the purposes of inciting physical arousal, this film offers another side to the story.
Deep down, people record themselves because they want to be watched. And people want to watch them.