It seems like every famous filmmaker from Lumière to Stanley Kubrick verbalized wanting to make a porn, or at least a film with realistic sex as part of the story. It’s a fine line as studios and famous actors worry about keeping their jobs yet fulfilling themselves artistically. Bruce LaBruce has pulled off art with actual sex in his films for years now, previously at Sundance with notorious films Super 8 ½, Hustler White, and Raspberry Reich. This year he brings us zombie porn (with art and social issues intact) with Otto; or, Up with Dead People. LaBruce gives us his thoughts here on art vs. porn.

You know, I interviewed the great Joseph Stefano a while back on the set of Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake - Mr. Stefano wrote the original Psycho screenplay and produced The Outer Limits on TV - and he told me he and his colleagues always talked about wanting to make porn in the seventies. I think it’s just a natural thing, because graphic sex is a natural part of most peoples lives! It almost seems odd that it’s elided from mainstream film. (I just saw I Am Legend, and I was thinking if I made that film, the main character would definitely be watching porn and having sex with a blow-up doll, if not the dog! But then again that movie was totally ideologically reactionary because the Will Smith character was supposed to be so pure and righteous that even when he's the last man on earth he clings to monogamy and fidelity! Not to mention Christianity! Don’t get me started.) For me, like Godard said, the sexual is political, and I’ve always used explicit sex to make certain political statements about gay representation, about defining and transgressing taboos, about issues of homosexual identity and difference, etc. But having said that, I'm still not in favor of the mainstreaming of pornography. Like Jane Fonda says in Klute, “inhibitions are always nice because they're so nice to overcome.”

I think it’s a sign of the times that it does make a difference. There were famous instances in the seventies where stars performed extremely graphic sex scenes (albeit without penetration being shown, which is the line that separates softcore from hardcore) and it didn’t negatively effect their careers. Today I think it would. I mean, actors are still afraid to define publicly their sexuality as bisexual, never mind gay, out of the fear of limiting their careers. Despite the outward appearance of sexual permissiveness in our culture, there is a new overriding Puritanism that even extends to a resurgence of homophobia and anti-feminist sentiments. Today your only option is to have a sex tape that you supposedly didn’t intend to be released on the internet. That absolves you from direct responsibility.

Listen, zombie porn is the wave of the future. I’ve only seen a couple of examples on the internet, but I think you’ll see an explosion of it in the coming years. Think of all the potential orifices to be explored! As to your question, if you’ve ever had anonymous sex in a park or even in a bathhouse, basically it is like having sex with a zombie, and not necessarily in a bad way. Zombies tend to be kind of emotionless and anonymous - they all act pretty much the same, and they're interchangeable - so having sex with them frees you from the personal and emotional restraints of normal sexual behavior and allows you to overcome all your inhibitions and really go crazy. That concept interests me, but the socio-political dimension of the zombie phenomenon interests me even more. As the master, George Romero, always reminds us in his films, zombies result from the alienation, materialism, and rampant consumerism that is the logical outcome of advanced capitalism. Zombies are the ultimate consumers. Like one of the characters says in Dawn of the Dead, the zombies are drawn to the shopping mall because it was the most important place in their lives! And of course the joke is that they act pretty much the same as zombies as they did when they were alive! In my movie, Otto; or, Up with Dead People, I try to make a paradigm shift. I've made a movie in which the zombie becomes more human than the living. It's the living who represent violence, intolerance, and consumerism, and it’s the zombie who has become the victim - a sensitive figure with a conscience. Otto is the result of the deadening effects of a selfish, violent culture.