ABSTRACT
A somber Justine Jones stares out her apartment window and draws down the blinds. A haunting piano score sets the tone as she walks slowly and deliberately across her room. Miss Jones stares at her sullen face and her naked breasts in a large mirror. She clasps her hands together, breaths deeply, and then moves like a phantom into the bathroom. As she lays herself in the waiting bathtub, the screen savors every inch of her body. It lingers on her breasts, her naked abdomen, and, most of all, her defeated face. Calmly and without hesitation, she clutches a razor and slices at her wrist. The split skin and flowing blood are sharp and graphic. As a dark red stream pours down her wrists and pools over her abdomen, a dramatic orchestral score and operatic vocals announce the tragedy. The camera pans back to reveal a pale, naked body lying limply in blood-clouded water. The calm and single-minded Justine Jones dies a violent death before our eyes. (The Devil in Miss Jones [Damiano 1973])34
The most graphic, explicit, and realistic violence of the pornographic feature’s early years is not a dramatized rape; rather, it is the realistically portrayed suicide of a desperate woman. Justine Jones is a tragic heroine created by pornographic director Gerard Damiano, and her story-The Devil in Miss Jones (1973)—is his critically acclaimed hardcore masterpiece. Damiano, better known as the man who wrote and directed Deep Throat (1972), brought explicit sex to the big screen in a big way, attracting a massive audience35 and earning a fortune for his mob-connected producers. Miss Jones debuted in 1973, not long after Deep Throat, and both films became hallmarks of the so-called porno-chic era-a time when hardcore pornography rose from the seedy underworld of sex shops and peep shows to greet respectable middle classes, the liberated left, and esteemed film critics alike. If The Devil in Miss Jones was palatable to a wide audience, it is in part because Miss Jones’s violent fate was so unpalatable-presented by Mr. Damiano as a tragedy to ponder, as a riveting event in a dramatic tale, as an artistically rendered myth rather than a “sleazy” sexual fantasy.36
