Pleasure Review: An Uncompromising Look at the Contemporary Porn Industry

It’s hardly surprising that the title of Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, an unrelentingly visceral drama set in the contemporary porn industry, ends up smacking of bitter irony. Viewers, like many of the characters here, are unlikely to experience any conventional sense of pleasure, as the film is a marathon of uncomfortable scenes pointing up the moral perversity of an industry at a particular intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and digital-age spectacle.

Pleasure suggests an update of Showgirls, minus some of the caustic irony and with a stronger sense of its female characters as human beings. The arc of aspiring porn star Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel) more than superficially resembles that of Elizabeth Berkeley’s Nomi Malone. Bella lands in L.A. from Sweden eager to make her way in an industry that makes its bank off of women’s bodies; her ambition eventually trumps the bonds she had formed when she was still low in the pecking order; and her jealousy of a woman at the top—an established porn star played by Evelyn Claire—leads to a moral compromise that she can’t come back from.

But where Paul Verhoeven’s film can be read allegorically—Las Vegas as concentrated microcosm of U.S. superficiality and greed—Thyberg and co-screenwriter Peter Modestij are interested in the contradictions and hypocrisies endemic to this particular business of pleasure. The script often juxtaposes the written law of porn with its practice. An early scene has Bella verifying her age and signing consent forms, with Bear (Chris Cock), a member of the production, helpfully guiding her. Bear will turn out to be one of the industry’s good guys, but as Bella makes her way toward the top, she finds that the sensitivity and professionalism of individuals like Bear serves as merely a screen for the bad behaviors of others.

Pleasure, though, couldn’t be accused of being prudishly anti-porn. One might wonder at the Swedish pedigree of a film that’s set almost entirely in L.A., but, ironically, it’s hard to imagine an American production taking such a frank look at the sights, sensations, and abuses of an industry concentrated in the U.S. as Thyberg’s film does. That Pleasure’s second shot is a close-up of Bella roughly shaving away at the cream-lathered, seemingly already hairless folds of her vulva is nothing if not a statement of intent on the filmmakers’ part.

Thyberg sets out not to excoriate porn and its performers but, as Freud would say, to de-cathect its objects—to remove the aura of desire that it projects onto its fetishes. Vaginas, butt plugs, binds, strap-ons, middle-aged men with massive penises—in the world of Pleasure, all of these things come to lose whatever sexual luster porn filmmakers are able to imbue them with. We see them through Bella’s eyes, which light up with desire for the camera whenever its shutter opens, rather than for the men or women she’s paired with.

Kappel’s daring performance attunes us to an earnest but strangely alienated mentality that doesn’t view sex as a potential source of pleasure, but a means to—for Bella at least—the greater jouissance of being admired for doing it. “Don’t you want to see anything in L.A. besides a porn set?!” asks Joy (Revike Reustle), her roommate and fellow aspiring porn star, during a hike to the Hollywood sign. To which an out-of-breath Bella bluntly responds, “No.”

In several instances, Bella proclaims that she came to the U.S. to fuck, but that’s clearly all part of the performance. Her goal is notoriety, and why she chose this as the path toward getting it remains provocatively unclarified, including in a call back home to her mother, who may or may not know what her daughter is doing in L.A. Porn is a part of the world we live in, even if most of the time we’d rather overlook it, and some people just want to be in that world.

Despite their ambition, Bella and Joy are shown to be vulnerable in a business that preaches safety, consent, and harmless fantasy, but remains dominated by men accustomed to being serviced by women. Joy has an encounter with a handsome, popular male actor (Lance Hart) whose threatening and abusive behavior resonates with the recent history of porn star James Deen. And the film’s most harrowing scene shatters the illusion that drawing a line between actual abuse and the rough-play fantasies typical of a lot of porn is a simple matter.

The film, though, contrasts Bella’s rape at the hands of a trio of manipulative gonzo-porn bros with her experience working under Aiden Starr, a female director of bondage videos, during which she’s constantly checked in on and looked after, including by her male co-star (Aaron Thompson). It’s not exactly a subtly delivered contrast, but, then, the industry that Pleasure focuses on doesn’t exactly deal in subtleties either. Thyberg simply has to show us what we’d rather not think about in order to suggest that maybe the problem isn’t sex on video, or even rough sex on video, but the way patriarchy ensures that men can achieve pleasure at the expense of women’s, and whether that pleasure comes from orgasm or from being a star.