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At the turn of the 21st century, Nikki Sixx, the bassist of the Los-Angeles-based, heavy metal band, Motley Crue (stylized as, Mötley Crüe), released his autobiography, The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band. At the turn of the 2020s, the digital streaming platform, Netflix, adapted Sixx’s autobiographical novel into a film.
“Did you ever stop to think that the slobs who fuck you guys, probably fuck every other band who comes through town?...Yeah!...we’re like pussy brothers with the whole scene.”: How Netflix’s The Dirt Pornotropes “Groupies”
At the turn of the 21st century, Nikki Sixx, the bassist of the Los-Angeles-based, heavy metal band, Motley Crue (stylized as, Mötley Crüe), released his autobiography, The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band. At the turn of the 2020s, the digital streaming platform, Netflix, adapted Sixx’s autobiographical novel into a film, starring Douglas Booth as Sixx, Colson Baker (as the band’s drummer, Tommy Lee), Daniel Webber (as the band’s lead singer, Vince Neil), and Iwan Rheon (as the band’s guitarist, Mick Mars). Alexander Weheliye’s filmic model of the pornotrope, (90) provides a valuable model for conducting a sex-positive, feminist reading of Netflix’s The Dirt’s portrayal of “groupies” – teenage girls and young women, that offer their provision of famous men’s sexual gratification, in exchange for the relationality that is formed between the “groupie,” and the male celebrity, on the basis of that sexual interaction. Hortense Spillers’ concepts of the, “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” (67) and her deconstruction of the language of relationality between a female (black) slave, and a white master, (74-77) provide a vocabulary for understanding how the gender-ideology of The Dirt rationalizes how Sixx, Neil, and Lee, play their role in the transaction between “groupie” and band member.
Spillers states that through the colonial processes which transformed Africans enslaved in West Africa and for-sale in regional slave markets, into black slaves “planted” on plantations in the Americas, (68) un-gendered, and then re-gendered, the social gender of the biologically female slave (73-80). The author writes that because all slaves were perceived as property, not unlike a domestic object that a white family stores and uses in their homestead, there is no reference to female slaves’ gender in the historical accounts which record African slave markets, the Middle Passage, and/or the deliverance of slaves to their American owners (72-73). Spillers then examines Frederick Douglass’ recorded account of his time as a slave to the Covey family, (74-76) and also Linda Brent’s transcribed account of her time as a slave to the Flint family (75-78). Spillers’ writes on the gendering of biologically female flesh in Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: because female slaves were subjected to both internal (ex. penile-vaginal rape) (73-75) and external forms of punishment (ex. knife-slashing, and skin-whipping and -burning) (67-68), when the former was associated by masters with feminizing, and the latter, with masculinizing, their bodies were gendered to be both female and male (77-80). Using Lydia Maria Child’s written account of Linda Brent’s experience as a slave, Spillers’ argues that the ability for a slave’s rights-less body to be vulnerable to masculinizing and feminizing modes of violent operant-conditioning, also left the slave’s female body vulnerable to sexual predation from both male and female masters (75-77).
One of Spillers’ key points, is that a female slave’s body could be, and was, raped without impunity by her white master, and that any child that she birthed, would one, not be allowed to form a familial relationship with her, (73-75) and two, that any of the master’s children that she did birth, would not be entitled to any of the same rights, that a female master’s child would inherit upon their birth (75-77). Weheliye’s pornotrope is a cinematic style, (Weheliye, 89) that is built on top of Hortense Spillers’ “grammar” (65) of how race is spoken about in the United States. Spillers writes that the dominant American approach to discussing the subject of race, is to re-traumatize black bodies (Weheliye, 90-93). Viscerally violent language is employed to re-humiliate the fictional slave’s body, before the reader’s gaze (93-95). Weheliye examines the prose used to illustrate two different scenes in Frederick Douglass,’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: a scene of Aunt Hester being punished for one of her masters’ perception that she was autonomously engaging in a flirtation, and the iconic scene after which Douglass feels he has been made into a, “man (Weheliye, 95).”
According to Weheliye, pornotropic language in the discursive field of linguistics (in Hortense Spillers “grammar”), renders the black body as an object defined by its fleshiness (106-112); Douglass,’ “…after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor, (93)” and, “…I seized Covey hard by the throat;…He held on to me, and I to him, (95)” demonstrate this linguistic phenomenon. The interlocking of slave body, and the idea of fleshiness, functions to bind the mind-body of the black slave, to the physical form in which that mind-body system has been placed into – this grammatical rule, reinforces the notion that the slave is separate from a political selfhood (a habeus corpus), and is only entitled to possessing its own flesh (a habeus viscus) (109-112). Pornotropic grammar also interlaces the description of violent acts, and the literary style of the literary genre, erotica (91-95). Sentences like, “Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked, (92)” and, “Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope;…he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me…I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor, (94)” illustrate such a libidinal-violent entanglement.
The pornotrope (in film) is constituent of four concatenated aspects: the (slave’s) body is presented as a place of irresistible yet destructive – for both the master’s status, and the slave’s physical condition – libidinousness; (90) it presents the body as a, “thing…for [its] captor, (90)”; the body, as a thing marked by both its own desires and the master’s desires, becomes a physical embodiment of “Otherness”; (90) the body’s “Otherness” communicates physical powerlessness, that points to the body’s status as zóé, and also its absolute dependence on the master (90). Two of The Dirt’s scenes embody Weheliye’s pornotrope: the first, (45:10-45:37) involving Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee’s fiancée, Roxie (whose engagement to Lee, is a product of her being a “groupie,” (45:32-47:02) and participating in sex acts with Lee), and the second, involving possibly, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee, and Sixx, and an unnamed “groupie” (30:48-32:41). In a majority of the first scene, Roxie is positioned on her elbows and knees, in the prostrate positioning of the body, (45:20-45:36) and in all but three shots (31:15, 31:17, and 31:25-31:43) of the second scene, the “groupie” is underneath the table that Motley Crue are sitting at – out of sight of the spectator’s gaze (30:48-31:15, 31:44-32:41). Roxie has bypassed the fact that she is engaged to Lee, (45:50-47:00) in order to have sexual intercourse with Sixx, (45:10-45:37) and the second “groupie,” credited in the film as, “Excited Partygoer,” is offering her capabilities of satisfying the three different members of the band, with her ability to perform oral sex (30:48-32:41). As in Hegel’s abstract concept of the slave and the master, the dynamics of power at play, in the women’s willingness to give consent, are skewed; (Lacan, 79-80) while a Marxist would regard the “groupie’s” bodies as an object invested with acute commercial value, an anti-sex work feminist (an in particular, one that champions the Nordic Model) would place the onus on the members of Motley Crue not to take advantage of that unequal balance of power.
Weheliye states that the master’s desire to participate in a pornotropic sex act, is his desire to take the place of the slave in society (109-112). The author writes that, because (black) slaves had no access to self-chosen sex acts, being the master’s sex object offered their psyches a sense of satisfaction, which in turn, gave the slave a sense of gratitude for the master having selected them for the act of sex (108-112). As the master desires the slave’s freedom from society (or rather, the slave’s not being a governable subject), Weheliye writes that the slave desires to take the master’s place in society (109-112). Michael Weheliye follows that last point with the concept that, in being the bringer of the master’s sexual gratification – the very essence of his capacity to create life – the slave understands the pornotropic sex act to be, in one sense, the attribution of what makes their male master, a Man (109-110). Roxie and the Excited Partygoer feel, for whatever reason, that if they are to participate in sex acts, than they have the greatest desire to engage in whatever sex acts, with famous men, and in particular, popular rock musicians. The pornotrope’s conflation of the master’s and the slave’s libidinous desires are apparent in both of the scenes I am focusing on as key representations of The Dirt’s portrayal of “groupies”.
In terms of the desires of Nikki Sixx’s and Roxie’s flesh, the former snorts and licks cocaine off of the latter’s arched buttocks, (45:17-45:30) and the former tears into the skin of the latter’s neck (45:09-45:14). Roxie consents to being ravished by Sixx, (45:14- 45:32) in exchange for the clout of not just bedding the Motley Crue bassist, but accomplishing such, after having done the same with the band’s drummer, and receiving an engagement ring in the aftermath of her and Lee’s intercourse. The Excited Partygoer is eager to perform fellatio on any member of Motley Crue; on any man who sits down at the table beneath which she is concealed, she confesses to the spectator (31:15-32:41); and appreciates the opportunity to be the woman who performs such a task on them without asking them for anything more than their phalluses. The Dirt uses the pornotrope to communicate an ideological point that the band members, (ex. 38:01-38:51, and 1:30-1:52) and that some of their eventual wives, and baby mamas, (ex. 27:54-29:54) express regarding “groupies”: the former does not respect, but appreciates the latter, and also view the latter, as an essential aspect of the successful production of the rock music cultural industry.
“How many chicks have you fucked so far?...Three…No, not today, on the tour…I lost count after that gang bang in Salt Lake City…Did you ever stop to think that the slobs who fuck you guys, probably fuck every other band who comes through town? (38:10-39:42)” is a conversation that takes place amongst Motley Crue’s members. In his conclusion to his chapter, “Depravation: Pornotropes,” Weheliye writes that as a form of bare life, the only access a slave had to sex acts, the cultivation of their desires (on American soil, and in the ecosystem of the plantation), and their gendering as female vis-à-vis being the sex object of a male master, was sexual violation (108-112). The Dirt’s Roxie and the Excited Partygoer, derive psychological as well as libidinal gratification, by performing sex acts with the men that hold power in the society that they have chosen to – or, rather, that they feel that they have been taken to, to borrow Spillers’ and Weheliye’s concept of the slave – inhabit. This idea is communicated through pornotropic filmic language. Hortense Spillers writes, that while there is no empirical difference between light skin and dark skin outside of a gradation in pigment, blackness in the ideological-language of dominant America, contemporarily is marked with the scars of physical violence that has been wrought upon African slaves, and African-American slaves’, bodies, from one generation of American history to the next (65-68). Spillers queries whether there has been, by now, a rupture in the chain of black skin’s national-grammatical, negative meaning; (68-69) in a post #MeToo Western world, perhaps a seismic disturbance in the normality of deeming “groupies” to be an inferior classification of female, is on the horizon.
Works Cited
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition In English. Translated by Bruce Fink, Heloise Fink and Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 64-81.
The Dirt. Directed by Jeff Tremaine, performances by Jordan Lane Price, Erin Ownbey, Douglas Booth, Daniel Webber and Colson Baker, 10th Street Entertainment and LBI Entertainment, 2019.
Weheliye, Alexander G. “Depravation: Pornotropes.” Habeus Viscus, edited by Alexander G. Weheliye, Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 89-173.