Will you do nudity?_____ Semi?_____ Full?_____
This was one of the questions on the information card I filled out during the casting call for extras for the upcoming Adam Sandler movie, I Hate You, Daddy.
Have I just not been paying close enough attention to notice all those nude extras in the background of Adam Sandler films? That one man or woman obscurely getting out of a bath in his remake of The Longest Yard? Or that full body wax going on behind the drama unfolding in Mr. Deeds?
Under what circumstances could the nude figure be consigned the place of an extra? Bizarrely, only during massacres, holocausts, in asylums (see Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies), those black spots in history when dissidents are rounded up in the football stadium.
Could Sandler be cutting into new terrain for I Hate You, Daddy?
The question on the casting call card made me realize: there are no extras in porn films. There are no neutral bystanders in an orgy. Such negligible characters as the pizza deliverer cannot slink off scott free as they do in our everyday world. In the adult film, these figures are compelled to participate. The extras in an adult film cross this line easily because there's not much dialogue happening anyway. The extra in Ass Bandits, if he or she exists, just grunts more discreetly.
Porn films provide us with our operative model for celebrity. Here the mucus membranes are ready for their close up: anatomy stars and the residual body of the actor becomes, in an odd twist, just extra. The adult film provides us with the perfect embodiment of the Hollywood star sytem: a cinematic world without anyone on the sidelines, without the reality quotient provided by the non professional actor. In short, a spectacle so consuming that it destroys our peripheral vision.
