Reflections

Rated X: A Journey Through Porn

Video, 92 min., 1999 (RP)

Everybody's seen it (and a lot of us, according to Ed Meese and company, have done it), but how many of us know what goes on Behind the Green Door? The days of Ivory Soap-model-cum-porno-starlet Marilyn Chambers are long gone, but this multibillion-dollar-a-year industry has done nothing but thrive in the face of unceasing and highly concentrated attacks from the Meese Commission to AIDS to its own inept power brokers. Yngvesson, who readily admits to a typical teenage fascination with pornography, wades hip-deep into the moaning mire of modern "erotic movies" and comes back with a document that's disturbing as much for what you'd expect -- willful ignorance and disinformation in the face of a plague, foul misogyny, and untrammeled greed -- as for what you might not. Such surprises as a female porn director who subverts the system by using her paycheck to fund her own documentary work with PBS, and longtime genre favorite -- and new mom! -- Jeanna Fine make Rated X a welcome surprise. When Yngvesson actually signs on as a porno cameraman for a short while toward the end of the proceedings (after a touching, hilarious call to his anthropologist mother), the film enters the realm of the truly surreal. It's a microcosm of Americana that makes Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights look like Mayberry on acid, but this is the real thing.