"Looks like a dick!'': _John Wayne Bobbitt, Uncut_ review by Cynthia Fuchs John Wayne Bobbitt, one of the more sensationally publicized dolts of our time, has reportedly been paid some $80,000 for making this most banal of porn films. Okay, so that's redundant: porn is into predictablity, it delivers what you think it will, that's the point. If the Bobbitt-ness of this one is worth considering at all, it's not because of his sexual performance (which is unimaginative at best), or because we get repeated shots of the famous penis, flaccid, erect, even, yes it was inevitable, ejaculating. No, what passes for sort-of-interesting in Ron "Big Dick'' Jeremy's film (all stars want to direct, I guess) is its hysterical revision of the John Wayne Bobbitt Story. Needless to say, perhaps, John is the hero here, an innocent jarhead menaced by the demonized Lorena (Veronica Brazil) and then pursued by a series of large-breasted, amazingly long-nailed women. In the "interviews'' which punctuate the narrative and come before and after the numerous sex scenes, the women actors say they're compelled to seduce our boy because they have this compulsion to "see it.'' "Seeing it'' is the standard point of porn of course, especially the boy-oriented kind: see the erection, see the semen, as proof of real arousal and real virility (that all this imagery is staged and edited is usually not stressed, and the illusion of real hardness becomes metaphysically charged, I suppose, as it solicits more real hardness in its viewers). Certainly this movie is no different, except that the promised object-on-display is this Frankendick, resurrected and visibly re-stitched. That Bobbitt is appearing at a gay strip club for Halloween, no less, is worth noting in this context. Who exactly wants (or will pay) to see this miraculous member, anyway? For that matter, what exactly does its repeated display "prove''? The triumph of surgery over castration? The triumph of lug-headedness over intelligence? Or could it be the triumph of canny profit-mindedness and tabloid-fame over some nostalgic yearning for good manners? _Uncut_ begins with John and Lorena's meeting and marriage (for about five minutes) and then... the cutting. Is it possible to think of a more likely turn-off for men than watching a re-enactment of this surreal event, and in slow motion, no less? Lorena poses over John Wayne Bobbitt, the shiny, remarkably long knife held--for some reason, you tell me-- behind her back, held up like a tail. Oooky. She complains loudly as he slumbers below that he doesn't please her, and that if she can't have him no one will! Cut to the next scene, Lorena in the car. She pitches the thing out the window, it--or a rubbery replica of it--lands at the feet of some guy, conveniently situated to exclaim in disbelief, "Looks like a dick!'' This is an odd self-referential joke. It does look like a dick, but it's not, it's a flaccid dildo (however oxymoronic this is). In this narrative about appearances, about believing what you can see, this emphasis on artifice and silliness is revealing. Porn is always about sustaining the fiction that sexual pleasure can be made visible, and so somehow "real,'' and so, somehow, arousing. It appeals to the conditioned belief that visibility equals reality. Sure. This cut-member image is so clearly *not* arousing, that it marks a kind of mini-rupture in the tradition (one that will be instantly recuperated by the story of John's subsequent prowess). In an interview in _Adult Video News_ (before he reports his penis size), Bobbitt recalls the terrible night: "I was in another world, confused.'' In the movie version, he's slightly less troubled, the idea being, I think, to reassure his viewers that even this nightmare isn't so bad, that, as _AVN_ puts it, the "American Dream'' is still a real possibility. "I was pretty worried at first,'' John states solemnly after some "doctors'' discuss his surgery (in the film). "I didn't know if I'd be able to... you know.'' His cutesy prudishness over language has nothing to do with the scenes to follow, including a hospital "miracle,'' where two nurses clamber all over him until he comes. _Uncut_ proceeds along these lines, increasingly uninteresting, with standard canned music, women delirious with pleasure at the vision of the illustrious dick, and John's very, very serious face as he goes through the porn-routines. Pathologies on parade. (Or maybe, dim bulbs on parade.) The fact of this movie, its reflections and recuperations of a slew of culturally overdetermined guy-anxieties, is surely less about any reality that we might know (sexual or otherwise) than about the relentless grindings of scandal-celebrity and a diehard faith that anything can be sold. "Let's face it,'' Bobbitt confesses at the end, "I'm just a simple ex-Marine who's gotten to have his share of the spotlight. Well at last, I may even settle down soon. But until that day, let's party.'' (Recent feminist protests at theaters showing the film challenge this "Don't blame me, I'm just a guy/party-animal/victim'' mentality, specifically drawing attention to his conviction for abusing his fiancee, in the context of social condoning of abuse through and as porn; while censorship seems to me a bad idea, in whatever form, protest seems important.) Okay. This film hardly marks the decline of Western civilization. But it's one of the more absurd, and perhaps one of the more revealing, manifestations of its endurance. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.