The Future of Porn: A Review on 3D Sex and Zen

Here at the Portland Review we are always on the lookout for guest contributors. You can view our submission guidelines at http://portlandreview.submishmash.com/submit. So, without further ado, here’s Peter Tieryas Liu.

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I think of the Biblical Ecclesiastes as I finish watching the not-quite-soft-core porn/torture movie, 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy. That’s a surprise.

The movie made headlines for the fact that it beat Avatar’s Hong Kong opening weekend record. This is a movie that starts as an adulterous celebration of all things carnal and then veers into territory that verges on a ‘love conquers all’ PSA pushed way beyond the extreme. Orgies are rampant, crude jokes about erectile dysfunction abound, penises get sliced off, and women function as sex machines lewder than robotified sex cyborgs. In fact, one of the villains is an androgynous beauty with a penis as long as a rope that he/she wields like a forklift.

Of course a movie that starts by glorifying fucking spends half an hour pounding in the fact that it’s the most ghastly thing in the world. It could either be the work of a genius, or just someone’s perversely twisted version of a thinly seamed morality tale.

Is this the future of porn? That’s what the producers claim.

 

Visual fetish can hardly describe the film, but it’s a good start. In the sex scenes, the atmosphere jumps from sensuality to slapstick comedy to repulsion and back. Admittedly, the love-making is a visual splurge. The women are nymphic fantasies, squirming and writhing in high resolution and cinematic 3D. They’re in perfect makeup, oiled skin, cinematic lighting to emphasize every meandering curve. Like the flawed computer graphics, you never believe anything is real, but it’s so exaggerated and over-the-top, belief becomes suspended until the next insane twist that pushes the boundaries of what’s palpable. At one point, the movie turns into something straight out of Saw. Atrocities and mutilation are conveyed with considerable flamboyance. Trick acrobatics merge with sexual gymnastics.

There are fifty denouements, fifty premature climaxes. The edits and jump cuts often make no sense and make no semblance at coherence, jammed together with the inconsistency of a broken puzzle. And yet, the film oozes zest, an angsty obsession with style.

It’s a parody in one sense, but the film wouldn’t work without a core of sincerity (unless that sincerity happens to be the most mawkishly disguised form of cynicism). The director (Christopher Sun) and the producer (Stephen Shiu) really believe in the material. You can sense gravitas in the entire cast as well, despite their seeming comfort as archetypes in this comical reality.

The characters never question compulsive sexual addiction or the pursuit of absolute pleasure until it’s too late. Then regret showers the protagonist. It’s this ‘moment of zen’ that really makes the film so interesting. He is punished with shocking masochism; the creative minds behind the film seem to take a little too much joy in his suffering. To the viewer, every past orgy becomes even more utterly depraved and disgusting. If only we could rewind to the comedic collage of . . . of what? His juvenile marriage driven solely by visual attraction?

Despite their weak bond, the pain that is inflicted the protagonist and his wife is so gruesome and their reborn devotion to each other so extreme that I couldn’t help but root for them and even tear up (a little) seeing that they survived all these decades later as an elderly couple.

When the film ended, I was confused. Was this a sermon disguised in porn? I felt traumatized and clutched my wife, who had endured it with me. I was grateful for a simpler love.

Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes and the lamentations of Solomon, bemoaning a life of pleasure and realizing the vanity of it all as he approaches the end. 3D Sex and Zen was a journey, definitely one many will not particularly enjoy, but a march through the cinematic depths of a porn flick attempting to guide its audience towards enlightenment. Present happiness is actually sorrow because it will end, monks philosophize near the beginning of the movie.

After giving into temptation and undergoing the epiphany of the meaninglessness of pleasure, sex is dismissed like a cheap taxi used to draw the voyeurs in.

It’s a work of brilliance that inspired a lot of incredulity and uncomfortable amazement that’s definitely not for the squeamish.

Is this really the future of porn? I don’t think so, even with 3D breasts in my face, mainly because there’s too much of a high-brow message involved. But I think this film will easily achieve cult classic status. Only genius, albeit perverse, could weave a mad tapestry like this.

Zen need not always be peaceful. Its roots can often sprout from disturbing imagery that compels. This movie succeeds as an original, philosophical piece of smut. It has no shame. Nor do I in admitting that I enjoyed it.

Well, maybe a little bit.

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Peter Tieryas Liu has stories published or forthcoming in the Bitter Oleander, Camera Obscura Journal, decomP, the Evergreen Review, and the Indiana Review. His collection of short stories, Watering Heaven, is coming out in the fall of 2012 from Signal 8 Press. You can follow his work at tieryas.wordpress.com