by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
First up on Lifetime’s prime-time schedule last night was a
“world premiere” film with the provocative — to say the least — title From
Straight A’s to XXX, telling the pretty sad
tale of Miriam Weeks (the attractive and appropriately perky Haley Pullos —
whose name is the sort of thing that in the days of classic Hollywood got
changed; who, the studio chiefs thought back then, would want to see “The
Wizard of Oz, starring Frances Gumm”?), who
gets accepted to her “dream” college, Duke University (and it was a bit startling to hear the name of a real university in a Lifetime movie instead of a
fictitious one like “Whittendale,” though given that this is the story of a young woman who pays for college by selling
her body sexually it would have fit right into the “Whittendale universe”),
only just as she gets the news that she’s in, her dad, Dr. Kevin Weeks (Peter
Graham-Gaudreau), receives word that he’s being sent to Afghanistan. This means
that the family’s income is about to take such a major nose-dive that the
Weekses, Kevin and his wife Harcharan (Imali Perera) — I don’t recall hearing
her first name on the soundtrack but that’s what imdb.com says it is — can no
longer afford to cover her tuition. So what’s a poor young college girl to do?
She discusses this with her college roommate Jolie (Sasha Clements) — who is
really from Oklahoma but has spent enough time in New Orleans to acquire a
(bad) Southern accent and a lassiez-faire attitude towards public displays of casual sex (of course Miriam asks
her about Mardi Gras and Jolie fends off the question with a hauteur that indicates she’s bored with the whole ritual and
if you’ve seen one Mardi Gras you’ve pretty much seen them all) — and they joke
about various options. Miriam doesn’t want to take out student loans — “My dad
didn’t finish paying off his student loans until I was in middle school!” she
whines — and she doesn’t want a job as a waitress, not only because it’s
demeaning but because the low pay for a waitress in North Carolina (where the
minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, the same as the federal one) is barely going to
make a dent in the $65,000 per year Duke charges for its education. “Maybe we
could rob a bank,” Jolie jokes — and Miriam jokes back, “Or I could be a porn
star.”
Then Miriam decides to pursue porn seriously, though for a woman who’s
supposed to be savvy enough about feminism that she’s double-majoring in
pre-law and women’s studies, she makes a pretty dire mistake in signing on for
her first scene with a company called “Facial Assault.” Not bothering to read
the comments page on the Web search about them — which describes them as
totally unprofessional and hell to work for — she shows up for her first scene,
and is confronted with a male partner who looks like he just came from the USA
Network’s “Raw” wrestling program and likes to refer to feminists as
“feminazis” à la Rush Limbaugh.
The guy slaps Miriam across the face — hard — as his idea of foreplay and she
goes ahead and does the scene, gets the $1,200 she was promised for it and then
goes back to Duke to lick her wounds. Eventually she hooks up with an
L.A.-based porn agent and director who promises her better pay and nicer
working conditions, and her first scene under this new arrangement is a
girl-on-girl (Miriam, using the nom de porn “Belle Knox,” says in a pretty typically pretentious
remark for someone of her intellect and background that she’d considered
herself Bisexual but had never actually done the down-’n’-dirty with a fellow
XX-er before) encounter set up with some pretty typically bad porn dialogue in
which the two lament that they’re the first to arrive at a party and so “we’ll
just have to entertain each other.” She and her on-screen partner Mandy
(Jovanna Huguet) are shown doing so many of these scenes one begins to wonder
whether Belle is ever going to shoot a scene with a guy — but eventually she
does, and she finds her first male co-star genuinely attractive even though,
not surprisingly, the film makes doing porn seem considerably more fun than it
is for real. (I’ve never interviewed anyone from the straight porn world, but
the Gay male porn models I’ve talked to say it’s an hours-long grind; as with
any other sort of filmmaking, the actors are kept waiting for long periods
while the director, camerapeople and other technicians set up the scene, and
male porn performers have the problem of having to get hard-ons instantly on
cue.)
Belle shoots to the top of the porn world even though maintaining her
double life — neatly dramatized by director Vanessa Parise (a cut above the
general run of Lifetime directors; the films of hers I’ve seen are Perfect
High, #popFan and The
Unauthorized “Beverly Hills, 90210” Story)
in a series of intercuts between Miriam’s and Belle’s Facebook pages — gets
harder and harder, as she’s shown frantically plowing her way through a thick
and impenetrable women’s studies text during breaks on her porn shoots. As
Belle’s reputation grows, so does her repertoire of scenes, including ones with
Black partners and a sequence she draws back from in which she’s supposed to be
playing a college student showing up to “discuss my thesis” with a 50-something
professor. Belle draws back from this one — I had thought writer Anne-Marie
Hess was going to go for the irony that a college girl who takes her studies
seriously is playing one who’s willing to trade sex for good grades, but it
turns out her problem is that she had made it clear that she didn’t want to
perform with any partner older than 35. Her mentor, who’s also directing, says
that unless she does the scene she’ll gain a reputation for being “difficult”
and that will get in the way of her doing future work, so she plows on
regardless. Meanwhile, an Asian-American student named Jeff (he’s not identified
on imdb.com but, though he’s not all that great-looking, there’s a scene in which he’s wearing a shirt tight
enough to show a nice pair of pecs) discovers Belle’s videos online and
recognizes her as Miriam, and soon it’s all over Duke that one of their nice
young freshgirls is doing porn. Miriam hoped that her two worlds would never
cross, but now they have; she confides in Jolie, and soon she’s being harassed,
threatened with gang-rape, literally
assaulted with garbage and her dorm-room door is spray-painted “Slut.” At one
point I thought this would have been an interesting project for her to write up
as a paper for her women’s-studies class — they had earlier been shown
discussing terms like “slut,” “whore” and “bitch” and how they’re used to
objectify women, and Miriam is now getting a first-hand education in how this
works for real — but instead Jolie talks her into doing an interview with
Angela, a reporter for the Duke school paper, and eventually she goes
full-public with an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan (playing himself) and her
story becomes nationwide tabloid fodder. Of course Miriam’s family — her highly
conservative Catholic parents and her brother, who cuts her dead when he finds
out — learn about her unusual way of working herself through college, and
they’re predictably condemnatory.
Though the credits say this film was
“inspired by a true story,” it also travels down the same roads seemingly
hundreds of previous Lifetime movies have gone before, though I give writer
Hess credit for not having Miriam
get hooked on drugs to sustain herself through her porn work — a plot twist
usually de rigueur for these
sorts of titillating stories about nice young girls who get involved in sex
work and then lose control. (Maybe Hess and director Parisse figured they’d
already done the innocent-girl-seduced-into-the-drug-scene number in Perfect
High and didn’t need to do it again.) The
film climaxes (so to speak) at the Risqué porn convention in Las Vegas, where
Belle Knox receives the Best New Performer award but also finds that Mandy and
the other porn women whom she thought were her friends instead have decided
she’s getting too high-and-mighty for them and especially hate how in her
mainstream media appearances she presumed to speak for all women who do porn. As familiar as most of this story
is, that’s a new wrinkle Parisse and Hess got into this one: we never feel for
Miriam so much as we do when it seems like she’s lost all sources of her community and been rejected by her
family, her college friends and
her porn friends. The story lurches to a close as Miriam closes out her
freshman year and then, two years later, speaks at a rally of pro-sex feminists
and says that feminism ought to be about a woman’s right to make choices about
her own life — including selling her body on screen for money, if that’s what
she wants and feels she has to do. It’s an O.K. ending but an oddly
inconclusive one for a film that, as familiar as the paths it trods are, does
have some unique aspects and also makes me wish Vanessa Parise would be able to
break out of the Lifetime ghetto, get some decent scripts and take a run at
feature films.
