Year of Our Exploitation 1979, Part 2: Hardcore

“Oh my God! That’s George C. Scott’s daughter! And me! And we’re both naked!”

Last time out, I recounted how 1979 resides in my head as 12 months of preadolescent obesity, round-the-clock suicidal ideation in the sixth grade, and having to endure Imus in the Morning before school each day because Howard Stern was still three years away from landing in New York, and mostly we only had AM radios in the childhood McBeardo home anyway.

Alas, investigation of 1979 from a gloriously insane-o movie point-of-view recasts it as an extraordinary year of one grimily awesome classic after another..

Our spelunk down the 1979 cult film hole continues - today, with just one stop. But, oh, is it deep.

HARDCORE
Kids today and their free porno all the time, any time, anywhere.

It’s a blessing and a curse, I’m sure, and I can’t imagine how I would have coped, circa ‘79, with not just being able to learn about and obsess over and contemplate the possibilities of pornography, but to lift the then-insurmountable veil of smudgy newspaper ads and glaring adults-only bijou marquees and nuclear-neon, gigantic 25-cent-piece-emblazoned peep-show signage to actually lay eyes (and who knows what other organs) upon whatever loomed on the other side of all those XXX-ratings.

I’ve documented on myriad occasions my all-consuming childhood drive to get inside New York City’s tug-yourself temples, which included my imagining I’d pay a sailor to smuggle me past the box office in his duffel bag, the inside of which would furthermore be stocked with skin-rags that I could peruse via flashlight.

Many a prepubescent moment had me longing to myself: “If only there were some kind of book or magazine or, best of all, a movie that would take us inside the porno places, and lay bare once and for all what was going down there - and, more importantly, what was coming off.”

And then came Hardcore.

Of course, being 11 years old, I could no more easily go to see Hardcore in a theater than I could go to see hardcore porn itself in a theater (or anywhere else).

But while I would have to trudge seven long years before I could easily consume smut with the state’s blessing, I knew that, somehow, I’d get to see writer-director Paul Schrader’s post-Calvinist carnal-underbelly freak-out - embodied by the poster’s immortal tagline, “Oh, my God! That’s my daughter!” - well before that.

Cable TV did not reach beyond Manhattan in the relentlessly self-proclaimed Greatest City in the World until 1986 (the year I turned 18, in a case of bitter irony) and my parents would not shell out for Wometco Home Theater.

So once Hardcore hit the pay channels, all this deprived Brooklyn boychik could do was maniacally read and reread its plot description in TV guide and wonder how I could get to a properly equipped home.

Complicating matters was that my friend Paul’s grandmother did have WHT and the one movie she checked out before we visited had her gasping: “Oh, my God! That’s what my grandson and his friend want to watch!”

The verdict came down hard(core): nothing doing.

Thus, I didn’t actually watch Hardcore until early 1983, when I rented it from Video Stop.

Suffice to say, Hardcore delivered. And still does. And always will.

George C. making goony faces as he preps the Christmas turkey. The second Darren from Bewitched. Peter Boyle practicing Mindscience. “Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it aw-aw-haw-hawffff!” George C. in pimp garb. Big Dick Blacque. Up and down all those massage parlor staircases. The skanky motel rooms. “T.U.L.I.P.” And Season Hubley, who shockingly embodied and validated my flat-chest fetish (there was no dearth or hyper-curvaceous female orb-objects in the ’70s to satiate my simultaneous mountain-mammary fixation).

In fact, in my personal development/deformity/inner-demolition, Hardcore is so seminal - in every disgusting sense of the term - that its only rival is Cruising (1980). And what comes to mind is Quentin Tarantino’s questionable but fun observation that “there are Elvis people and there are Beatles people.”

So maybe there are Hardcore people and there are Cruising people.

The correct response, of course, is that each is an equal meisterwürk and there’s no way to choose one over the other, but let’s imagine you HAD to. For whatever fecactuh reason.

For me, it comes down to Hardcore, almost entirely because that’s the one I’ve whacked off to. More often.
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Are you a Hardcore person or a Cruising person? Leave me a comment and explain your natural crimes-against-nature affiliation.

******

P.S. — Thank you, o mighty Kindertrauma, for the Al Pacino in Cruising costume!

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• « Year of Our Exploitation 1979: Part 1
• » Year of Our Exploitation 1979, Part 3: MAD MAX

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