The amateur roots of gonzo pornography

This article explores the hypothesis that gonzo is the industrial-scale translation of a style used to represent sex originating from non-professional practices which developed a specific language to deal with technical demands (use of a camcorder, absence of a screenplay, ‘naturalistic’ improvisations, private purposes). Drawing on what had hitherto belonged to the representation of intimate and personal erotic games, those methods of filming and storytelling have become encoded as the generic conventions of gonzo. In the passage from the confidential images of an actual couple’s intercourse to the serial commercialization of a brand, the realism of the scene is exalted but, at the same time, any celebration of ‘authentic’ intimacy is replaced by a hierarchy of gazes and bodies which opens up the filmed scene to interpretations of symbolic cruelty. Traces of this process are still detectable in some sub-genres of gonzo, where the convergence between non-professional and industrial content continues to have a primary role in the filmic and erotic development of the story. By describing the main structural features of this kind of materials, I aim to interpret some of the ways in which gonzo borrows, mimics, and deforms the amateur’s expressive tools.