About a month ago, I graduated from college. About a year before that, our class presidents sent us an email asking for nominations to select our graduation speaker. Because I went to a school primarily focused on STEM (though, to be fair, my school does nominally make an effort to focus on the humanities as well), many of the nominees were, unsurprisingly, in the tech industry which was a standard choice that I was less than excited about. I will admit, though, that there were some nice surprises in the nominees my peers had provided, e.g. Melinda Gates. But, in a story as old as time, having a non-tech industry speaker was not our class’ destiny and we would go the much more traditional path.
In years past, I attended graduation. Before I watched my friends walk up on stage, have their names’ read, and be handed their diplomas, I sat through their respective commencement speaker’s supposedly wise words. Unsurprisingly, during my four years, every commencement speaker that my school had invited was from some STEM field or industry; this isn’t a bad thing per se, it’s just a little bland. And after each commencement speech ended, I remember feeling disappointed. Disappointed because the speaker mostly talked about themselves and tried to weave inspiration in it. Each year, I expected something new and, yet, each speech felt basically the same. They went something like this: do this, do that, if I did it (ignore the survivorship bias), so can you! Blah, blah, blah. And, in fairness, if I was asked to give a speech, I imagine I would structure it similarly: use stories of my life and try to pull lessons out of them. Writing a speech is not easy, I admit, but these are clearly smart people who surely have something unique to say. But maybe that was part of the problem, these smart and logical people were just following the tried-and-true public-speaking algorithm: use a hook, use three stories to make three points, and send everybody home.
In an effort for the future to avoid past mistakes, during the nomination process, I—and at least one other person, I later learned—nominated the well-known, science-fiction author Neal Stephenson. Growing more pronounced with each book, Mr. Stephenson, it seems, is becoming more pessimistic about Big Tech and the internet more broadly. Recently in an interview, he called social media a “doomsday machine” and in his latest novel, we see the world become less interested in the real, physical world (what he calls Meatspace) while everyone alive becomes more interested watching the simulated, virtual world (what he calls Bitworld).
With nearly half of the students in my class going into software, I would have loved to hear his perspective. A few of my friends have expressed this sentiment, too. Now my college had invited a few very notable authors to commencement before—if this outdated list is to believed—including a two very recognizable and highly-regarded science-fiction authors: Douglas Adams—who wrote the classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—almost gave the speech in 2001 (though dying managed to get in the way, apparently) and Ray Bradbury gave the commencement speech twice, once in 1981 and again in 1987. Though I couldn’t find Ray Bradbury’s first speech, I found a transcript his second speech given in 1987 (it’s a delightful speech; I encourage you to read it).
My hope was that Neal Stephenson would (1) be selected by my peers and (2) say something different from the tried-and-true formula that was worth hearing. In an age where Big Tech is becoming more criticized by the broader parts of society, I believe Mr. Stephenson could have made all of us think about our roles in this Tech Economy differently. But alas, Mr. Stephenson was not selected and, instead, I sat through twenty minutes of Sebastian Thrun talking about himself and his relationship to self-driving and flying cars. Mr. Thrun’s speech was typical for my school’s commencement address and it turned out as the previous three years had. Admittedly, his speech could have been worse, though it’s difficult to imagine that it could have been significantly better.
Regardless, I decided to sulk after commencement ended. Although he’s not an especially exciting speaker, I convinced myself of how much better Neal Stephenson would have been. While looking for absolutely zero evidence to the contrary, I managed to confirm my fragile belief by:
- watching hours of clips on the internet of Mr. Stephson speaking (for example, look here);
- going to see Mr. Stephenson speak on his book tour; and
- finding examples of any author’s commencement speech.
Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.’s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.’s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box’s return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective — 60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy — was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: “In real movies, it’s all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.”
Hecuba’s detective’s explanation is intriguing, at least to yr. corresps., because it helps explain part of the deep appeal of hard-core films, films that are supposed to be “naked” and “explicit” but in truth are some of the most aloof, unrevealing footage for sale anywhere. Much of the cold, dead, mechanical* quality of adult films is attributable, really, to the performers’ faces. These are faces that usually appear bored or blank or workmanlike but are in fact simply hidden, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who’s giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy — he denies us true expression. (You can see this very particular bored, hard, dead look in strippers, prostitutes, and porn performers of all locales and genders.)
But it’s also true that occasionally, in a hard-core scene, the hidden self appears. It’s sort of the opposite of acting. You can see the porn performer’s whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blankness (in most males) yields to some genuinely felt erotic joy in what’s going on; the sighs and moans change from automatic to expressive. It happens only once in a while, but the detective is right: The effect on the viewer is electric. And the adult performers who can do this a lot — allow themselves to feel and enjoy what’s taking place, cameras or no — become huge, legendary stars. The 1980s’ Ginger Lynn and Keisha could do this, and now sometimes Jill Kelly and Rocco Siffredi can. Jenna Jameson and T.T. Boy cannot. They remain just bodies.
*N.B. Of those friends and intimates of your correspondents who happen to dislike porn, a large majority of them report disliking it not so much for the moral or religious or political reasons but because they find it boring, and a lot of them to use robotic/mechanical/industrial metaphors to try and characterize the boredom, e.g.: “[Hard-core sex is usually] just organs going in and out of other organs, in and out, like watching an oil rig go up and down all day.”
Reread David Foster Wallace’s third paragraph of his footnote. This description of porn is not only intriguing but it is oddly beautiful somehow. Further, he’s right about the self being locked away someplace behind the eyes, not only for porn stars but for ordinary people as well. With surprisingly little effort on a porn-watcher’s part, the rare morphing of a porn star’s facial expressions can make an oil rig deeply human to us, invoking something surprisingly personal in us. The connectedness people feel while passively watching this transformation occur makes porn the multi-billion dollar industry that it has been for decades, and it seems like it’s what gets people hooked.
And it goes further than porn; this transformation is what makes books so intriguing too: we watch characters interact with their mainly fictional worlds. And while we follow their lives, though rare, their actions can—just for a brief moment—become so familiar, so personal to us, that it causes our own transformation to occur, a déjà vu of sorts. The reader’s more active transformation, from following the plot on a page to physically feeling something, makes an author’s skills so powerful. With much effort and care, an author, coupled with a reader who is willing to make the effort to understand, can craft how someone sees themselves and their world around them. This is why someone like David Foster Wallace could explain to the masses why being empathetic is so damn hard for most of us; this is why Douglas Adams could show us how absurd the world truly is. Authors don’t have to use themselves or their accomplishments as a crutch to fill twenty minutes at a commencement speech. Most won’t omit the ugliness of the world they’re trying to open up to us. Though it may be concealed underneath a few layers of humor, an author will try and guide you to see how they view the world. And that’s a good thing, because it’s something we should all probably do more often.