Ah, the 70s. The Golden Age of Pornography. The pubic hair was excessive. The mustaches were grotesque. The porn was…terribly shot. I’m actually kinda interested to learn when, precisely, the biz figured out how to shoot pornography and make it…appealing?
In the midst of all this we find arguably the most famous porn film of all time, 1972’s Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace, who (fun fact) also made a bestiality film called Dogarama where she got railed by a German Shepherd.
It was a simpler time.
Financed (probably) by the mob, Deep Throat made an estimated $100 million (some say $600m), and was so popular even the First Lady admitted to having seen it. No, not the Throat Goat, although that’s an obvious mistake. Jackie.
Deep Throat opens on some text from Sigmund Freud rambling about the sexual stages of development, cut to a shot of a boat moving slowly down a river, and then we slowly pan over to reveal Linda Lovelace wandering aimlessly along. She gets in her car and we get a title card, which I appreciate:
Shitty music plays over the opening credits as we get many, many shots of Linda driving around Florida. They clearly needed some padding to reach their 62-minute runtime. It’s not until 4:55 until Linda pulls into her driveway and heads inside with some parcels.
Her roommate, Helen (aka Dolly Sharp) is sitting on the kitchen table while some random guy eats her out.
Linda is completely nonplussed by this and wanders sulkily out after putting some groceries away. We are then treated to a lengthy and very unappealing cunnilingus scene while Helen smokes a cigarette. The actor has his entire tongue completely out of his mouth and instead of, say, licking the clitoris, moves his head around so his tongue can sort of bounce off her lower labia majora. It’s fucking weird.
Afterwards, Linda and Helen have a heart-to-heart out by the pool. Linda’s worried that she won’t be able to find a man and get married, because she doesn’t enjoy sex. She clarifies that it’s nice and sort of tingly, but “there should be bells ringing, dams bursting, bombs going off, something!” Gotta say: Linda Lovelace is not a strong actress. I’ve seen a lot of porn stars try to act, she’s easily bottom 5. Linda confirms that she’s never had an orgasm, so Helen says she’ll help Linda out.
Cut to a couple guys pulling up in Linda’s crowded driveway. They come inside and there’s a half-dozen or so guys already in the living room. Helen gives them each a ticket and says to wait for their number to be called. Okay, that’s a little clever.
We cut inside and Linda’s getting railed by the first guy. We start with a lengthy close-up on Linda. This is intercut several times with a close-up on the dude, which is not a good thing.
Next, a shot of Linda’s back as she looks back as if she’s wondering what’s going on back there:
Next, an EXTREME closeup of an incredibly hairy dick going into Linda’s vag. Fun fact, Linda Lovelace going clean-shaven in this flick significantly contributed to the decline of pubic hair in both porn and in real life! If you’ve ever wondered why shaved pussies are so popular, it’s this moment right here:
And finally, we get what I lovingly refer to as The Worst Angle In Porn:
I’m guessing at some point some hotshot young porn director said to themselves; “You know, if we just moved the camera back a couple of feet, we could see ALL of the actors at once, rather than just individual parts. Maybe seeing an actress’ pussy AND breasts at the same time would be, I dunno, visually stimulating to the audience?”
Also, this scene clearly shows Linda enjoying herself. I would have liked to see them play into the storyline a bit more, like maybe she has a notebook with a checklist and spends the scene looking morose, he finishes, she gets a Sharpie and draws a line through the word “Anal” and moves on the next item.
Helen isn’t going to let Linda have all the fun so she’s banging a couple dudes in the other room and it’s equally poorly filmed and pretty uninteresting except for two moments:
Also, during Helen’s three-way, one guy is in her ass while the other guy performs cunnilingus, which is NOT an act you see outside of cuck porn nowadays, probably due to gay fear. During the shot, Guy 1’s cock pops out of her ass and bonks Guy 2 on the chin, which I found very funny.
The next day Linda and Helen catch up and Linda’s still unsatisfied, because while she got off, it wasn’t as explosive as she wanted. Helen suggests she visit Dr. Young, a psychiatrist. We cut into a psychiatrist’s office, played by Harry Reems, who is chewing the fucking scenery. He’s blowing bubbles, accentuating random words, and getting very creative with his space work. He also has a very sarcastic nurse.
Linda explains the problem so Dr. Young decides to give her a physical examination. He eyeballs her snatch with a telescope (?) and finally explains that she doesn’t have a clitoris. Linda starts fake crying, very, very badly.
Dr. Young asks some questions and Linda, over fake tears, says the part of sex she enjoys the most is giving head. He takes a look in her mouth and…
Yep. Her clitoris is located at the back of her throat.
Dr Young: “Now now, Miss Lovelace, having a clitoris deep down in the bottom of your throat is better than having no clitoris at all!”
Linda: “That’s easy for you to say, suppose your balls were in your ear.”
Dr. Young: “Why then I should hear myself coming!”
That’s pretty good.
Dr. Young says they have the problem solved, now they just need to find the solution. I think he needs to figure out the difference between the words “identified” and “solved”. But he suggests that she try to deep throat a cock. Linda says that she’s tried, but she always chokes. The doctor says it’ll take practice and learning to relax her throat and time her breathing and you know…she can practice. On him.
Ethical violations galore!
Dr. Young drops trou and Linda starts polishing his knob and the song Deep Throat – yes, they had a song about deep throating made for this movie:
“Deep throat, deeper than deep, your throat, deep throat, don’t row your boat, don’t get your goat, that’s all she wrote, deep throat.”
It’s not a great song.
Turns out that with surprisingly little effort, Linda can deep-throat his penis, and Deep Throat seems to be arguing that a woman can reach climax by having the tip of a penis repeatedly touch her clitoris, so we get intercut shots of statues ringing bells, fireworks exploding in the sky, and NASA rockets taking off, because even in pornography in 1972, the one taboo was showing a woman enjoying herself sexually.
Linda is over the moon with joy and wants to marry the good doctor, who immediately declines, because having a wife who can only achieve climax by deep-throating your penis is…a bad thing? Instead, he suggests she come work for him as a physiotherapist.
Cut to Linda in a slutty nurse outfit with a pillbox hat. She goes to someone’s house, into one of the most terrifying rooms that is not an actual murder room that I’ve ever seen:
GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE! No house should have that many figurines watching you fuck.
They fuck, and the guy puts a hollow glass dildo inside her, then puts the end of some plastic tubing inside the dildo. He then takes a can of Coke (!) pours some inside the dildo, and they take turns drinking the Coke through the tubing from the hollow glass dildo inside her vagina. It’s…weird. Did Coke consent to this product placement?
There’s a brief interlude while Dr. Young narrates a message into a clock radio (?) while he rails his nurse about how he sent Linda over to a patient’s house. There’s a brief scene where the patient thanks Linda for the blowjob that she apparently gave him that we thankfully didn’t see, because this patient is a hideous fucking CHUD.
Dr. Young is now sick in bed because apparently between Linda and his bored nurse he’s getting oversexed or something. We cut back and forth between his bored nurse sucking dick and Linda helping him out, eventually revealing a cute white bandage around his injured penis. They’re intercutting between different times and sexual positions at a pace that would make Christopher Nolan blush, and, hilariously, there’s a shot of the doctor fucking Linda, while Linda furiously rubs…her clitoris. Which is right where it should be, anatomically. Consistency? What’s that?
Also, it’s hard to overstate just how fucking terrible the music is. It’s not even bass-heavy stereotypical porn music, it’s an odd assortment of vaguely patriotic drumbeats and slide whistles.
Finally, we have a man with a face mask and a gun break into her house. Linda is sitting on the toilet tank with a shaving cream cup, foaming up the kitty.
I’m guessing the production crew thought Linda’s clean-shaven beaver would confuse the audience, so they inserted a scene where she shaves her pubes, and to really make it work, they put it at the end of the movie. But we cut over to Dr. Young eating out his bored nurse who is reading (poorly) from a notebook about their patient who can only get aroused when he’s dominating his partner, and likes to role-play as a burglar raping people. And they think Linda is a good match for him. Ah.
There is a painfully terrible scene between the burglar – “Wilbur”, aka William Love – and Linda unsuccessfully role-playing the beginning of a rape-scene, but Linda is too enthusiastic so he can’t get it up. They’re apparently dating. Wilbur asks Linda to marry him, but she refuses because the man she marries will need to have a nine-inch cock. She suggests maybe he consult with Dr. Young to see about some silicon injections or something.
Wilbur is amenable to this, so we watch him call Dr. Young on an old rotary phone which takes a while. He tells Dr. Young that Linda needs a nine-incher, and he’s only “four inches away from happiness”, which is a pretty good line. He then excitedly tells Linda that Dr. Young can “cut it down to any size he wants” and whips out his dick.
Ah. I get it. Hilarious misunderstanding, he has a 13 inch dick, thought Linda wants it smaller. Brilliant.
Linda, however, is delighted with this, and slams his pretty normal-sized dick into her mouth, the deep throat title song starts playing and things end…well, not the way they normally do, because pop shots usually aren’t intercut with stock footage of bells ringing, fireworks exploding, NASA rockets taking off, and kangaroo statues playing brass instruments, but that’s what makes Deep Throat special, I guess.
Anyway. Linda collapses onto Wilbur’s arm, mouth dripping with spit and jizz, exhausted and happy, Wilbur makes eye contact with the camera like Jim from The Office, and that does it for this one. Everyone lived happily ever after, I guess, except for all the people charged and arrested for various crimes, and Linda herself, who, after basking in the fame and writing several pro-pornography autobiographies, abruptly reversed course and became an anti-porn crusader and claimed that everything she did she did under duress, and eventually died after a car accident in 2002. Sorry to end on a downer.
Kissing: Unfortunately, yes.