Dance Fucker Dance
(or You're Gonna Go Far, Kid Part Deux)

Okay this is my last post on The House Bunny and hopefully that will get it out of my system. Having paid off my creditors, I can now spend money on frivolous impulse buys like magazines. So I picked up the latest issue of Geek magazine because Janeane Garofalo was on the cover and it would be interesting to learn what she thinks about her new gig on 24.

Coincidently there's a piece on Anna Faris:

To House Bunny's credit, one of the montages shows Faris' character actually learning - it's the first intelligence makeover scene. But Faris who gets story credit on the movie, orginally had something slightly less inspirational in mind when she met with writers Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Luts.

"We met and talked, and they asked what I was thinking about and I said I was playing around with this idea about a Playboy bunny who's thrown out of the Mansion, and maybe she's addicted to drugs or has an abusive father and she has to go back to her small Christian town and everybody hates her, and maybe she can't kick her meth habit... They were smiling and nodding and they came back a week later and said, 'OR... she could become a house mom at a sorority!' I wanted to make something comedic, I was just out-loud musing about why a Playboy bunny would really be kicked out of the Mansion.

Faris was eventually talked down to something slightly more family-friendly. "We really wanted to make sure that even though she had lived in this fantasy deviant lifestyle, for whatever strange reason she was an innocent. We decided not to go down the darker avenues of what a Playboy bunny's duties might be."

The picareque tale with bildungsroman traits reminded me of Zoolander, another story about a beautiful Ingénue and the theme of the cosmetic and superficial versus the authentic. The darker side Faris mentions brought to mind Martin Amis's journalistic journey into the porno industry.

If you're going to be a porno star, what do you need? It's pretty clear by now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex drive. You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally "mud nostalgia": a childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions and wastes). And - probably - you need damage in your past. You also need to be humourless. Chloe is not humourless. When she talked to me she was like someone peeping over a wall demarcating two different worlds, telling me stories about the other side.
...
Fifteen minutes later, referring to the achievements of Lola, [porn star] Chloe stabbed a hand through the air at me, and shouted with joy and triumph (Chloe is the director, remember, and she was thrilled to have this scene in the can): "That's the kind of blowjob I was telling you about yesterday!"

I reeled out into the yard with my notebook, laughing, and shaking my head. There are plenty of "jokes" on a porno set, and there is much raucous mirth to dispel tension. But only a Chloe, only an exception, can inject humour. She sounded like Mel Brooks, in The Producers, saying, "That's our Hitler!"