A decent number of films exploring the drama of the porn industry have followed in the wake of Boogie Nights, but few of them have matched Paul Thomas Anderson’s knack for highlighting the absurdity and monotony of the industry. Most of the post-Boogie Nights films have either honed in on the natural titilation of the subject or have been overly dark and nagging. But in his new film King Cobra, Justin Kelly manages to achieve a PTA level of absurdity despite working from a true story, and in the process also manages to showcase his own unique visual and narrative sense.
Unlike Boogie Nights, King Cobra is primarily set in the gay porn world, following the ascent of “Brent Corrigan” (Zac Efron clone Garrett Clayton) and the controversies surrounding his falling out with suburban porn tycoon “King Cobra,” who is more simply known to his neighbors as Stephen (Christian Slater). Kelly’s background directing videos for campy queer pop act Hunx and his Punx comes through in the tone of the film, particularly whenever Cobra rivals Joe (James Franco) and Harlow (Keegan Allen) are on screen. But Kelly also effectively nails the jealousy and self-loathing that leads to the eventual fall of Stephen, making a more sympathetic character out of real life King Cobra Bryan Kocis.
The rift that emerges between Stephen and Brent is depicted as organically arose from Brent’s gay porn stardom and the frustrations he had from being essentially a kept man for Stephen. Kelly avoids depicting Brent as a troubled lost boy and instead shows that he was bored with the dullness of his existence and was eager to do something exciting. He may not have imagined that path coming from a gay porn career, but after Stephen recruits Brent and turns him into his most bankable star, he becomes more ambitious and eager to escape.
One of the most effective ways Kelly achieves this is by showing the illusion Stephen has created for his neighbors. As far as they can tell, he’s a portrait photographer, though one neighbor does confront Brent about all the young men coming and going in the house. Stephen is portrayed as an intensely closeted and self-hating gay man and it’s difficult for Brent to connect with this insistence on creating a suburban facade. Kelly does both men interacting with the women in their lives in similar ways, hiding the truth of their careers, with Brent convincing his mom (Alicia Silverstone) that he’s got a summer internship while Stephen dodges any question his sister (Molly Ringwald) asks about his love life. The difference is that Stephen gives his mom a kernel of truth by insisting that what he’s working on is an education in filmmaking, it just so happens that the education is a little more hands on than normal.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t take long for Brent to view his relationship with Stephen as an albatross around his neck– he’s simply jumped from one quiet suburban existence to another, albeit a false one. Stephen’s attempts to make Brent love him and lead some kind of paradoxical erotic and suburban life push Brent further and further away until Brent goes to extreme lengths to escape.
The relationship between Joe and Harlow, by contrast, is almost like a mirror image of Franco’s Spring Breakers persona. Joe functions as Harlow’s pimp and encourages him to lead an extravagant life and these sections are filmed like lost bits of a Gregg Araki work, complete with neon color palettes, soft focus hook-ups and dreamy reminescences. Although the two halves of the film are at odds with one another, Kelly does a masterful job balancing them and using them to show two very different gay lifestyles unified by the commodification of sex.
The film’s weakest section is the collision of these two worlds, and the crimes that made the real life story so notable. Even though the film builds to this moment from scene one, it still somehow feels rushed and haphazard, in part because the two teams of actors have approached their roles in such wildly different ways. Nonetheless, it’s one of the rare porn crime films that never condescends or becomes overly preachy. Even with what happens to Brent’s former mentor, Brent is never portrayed as a broken person, and by the end he’s the only person who achieves what he has set out to, even if the path to that dream is bizarre and unexpected.
King Cobra is available now on VOD platforms including iTunes.
Morgan Davis sells bootleg queso on the streets of Austin in order to fund Loser City. When he isn’t doing that, he gets complimented and/or threatened by Austin’s musical community for stuff he writes at Ovrld, which he is the Managing Editor of.
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