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I am an actor!” Don Cheadle’s character Buck Swope yells at the bank manager who is denying him a loan to open his own audio store. The bank manager has just told him that the bank doesn’t do business with people in pornography. Buck might consider himself an actor, but to the general public, he’s a porn star.
Acting is the art of simulation, whereas, aside from a few lines of dialogue and perhaps some grunting and moaning, acting in porn means performing unsimulated sex acts. It’s one of the most glaring examples of how people in the porn industry saw themselves versus how the outside world saw them, and that world is brought to life perfectly by Paul Thomas Anderson in the 1997 classic Boogie Nights.
Boogie Nights revolves around Eddie (Mark Wahlberg), a 17-year-old dishwasher who comes from a troubled home and finds himself on the radar of porn filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) because of his looks and enormous talent between his legs. He finds a kindred spirit in Rollergirl (Heather Graham), who drops out of school and also ends up under Jack’s wing. Together with Jack’s main porn star Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and Jack’s regular filmmaking crew, they become a surrogate, dysfunctional family with plenty of sex and drugs involved.
Boogie Nights is a rise-and-fall story that adopts a template often seen in biopics, where we follow someone’s meteoric rise to stardom only for them to come crashing down before eventually finding some form of redemption. Boogie Nights sends an entire ensemble of characters down that path, but despite the sun-drenched pool parties, a sense of tragedy underlines every moment. Had these people found happier lives at home or at school, they probably wouldn’t have ended up in this world in the first place.
Both Eddie, who adopts the moniker Dirk Diggler, and Rollergirl are essentially runaways. Amber Waves is a young mother who hasn’t seen her child in years because of her line of work. In a world where everybody works under stage names, a call from her child goes unanswered because nobody knows her real name—only Amber Waves. Moments like these form the emotional core of Boogie Nights, simmering just beneath the glamorous surface of having sex on film, becoming a celebrity because of it, and turning life into one big alcohol- and drug-fuelled party.
But when all of that fades away, alcohol and drugs are often the only things left.
The inciting incident for all of this in Boogie Nights is the rise of video and the difficulty of staying relevant in an ever-changing landscape. Eddie sees his status as a star threatened by the new kid on the block, conveniently forgetting that he himself was once the new kid. The switch to video strips productions of their prestige. Once shot on film and destined for theatres, they are now shot on low-resolution video for home entertainment. Budgets shrink, and people who once dreamed of making actual movies are forced to reinvent themselves just to remain relevant.
Jack Horner goes from making films on elaborate sets to having his muse, Rollergirl, have sex in front of a camcorder with a random guy picked up off the street in the back of his limo. It’s one of the film’s most excruciating scenes, made even more uncomfortable when it turns out the guy recognises her from school. Eddie also goes off the rails, losing himself in drugs and alcohol before eventually becoming a male prostitute in another painfully uncomfortable sequence.
The entire film is packed with memorable moments: Buck Swope becoming an unwilling participant in a robbery that ends in absurd fashion; Little Bill (William H. Macy) constantly walking in on his wife having sex with other men; Scotty J. (Philip Seymour Hoffman) harbouring a secret crush on Eddie and expressing it in the worst way imaginable; and Rollergirl introducing a fraternity brat to the business end of her roller skates.
Boogie Nights also deserves credit for casting several women from the porn industry, giving the production an extra layer of credibility. Nina Hartley, Amber Hunter and Veronica Hart all make short but memorable appearances. Hartley, in particular, is brilliant as Little Bill’s adulterous wife despite having only a few minutes of screen time and very little dialogue. That driveway scene is pure gold.
This might just be nostalgia talking, but Boogie Nights is one of those films that represents the last great decade of true auteur filmmaking. The ’90s indie cinema boom paved the way for directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Kevin Smith, M. Night Shyamalan, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to make completely original films. Movies like these are becoming increasingly rare in today’s IP-driven landscape, where everything needs a built-in audience. Ironically, even many of these directors have become brands unto themselves. But back then, a film about the rise and fall of a porn star could get greenlit, receive a wide theatrical release, and rake in awards. I kind of miss that in today’s streaming landscape.
Boogie Nights is one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen because it simply works on every level. My only minor nitpick is that the entire subplot involving robbing a drug dealer in the final act feels somewhat out of nowhere, despite an electrifying performance by Alfred Molina. That’s a very small complaint, though. This is one of the greatest movies ever made.
