The Opening of Misty Beethoven

The most celebrated film by Radley Metzger, a leading American porn director, is a humorous pornographic variation on Pygmalion that transports viewers into a world entirely devoted to sex. Sexologist Seymour Love bets that he can turn the third-rate prostitute Misty Beethoven into a mistress of pleasure who, furthermore, will be declared a sex star among the debauched upper crust. Misty’s thorough training, which is approached in the spirit of sports movies like Rocky  with clearly assigned goals and their gradual achievement, gets an appropriate context in the wider world, where sex-focused tabloid newspapers are published and sexual airlines take to the air. Paradoxically, however, the overabundance of sex, conceived as a purely everyday, performance-oriented and quantifiable activity, leads to the fact that, even though not a minute passes without penetration or stimulation of genitals, everything actually comes across as absolutely unstimulating. On the other hand, we can assume that this was the director’s intention, which is evidenced by the choice of formalistic treatment, when sex is often shown in almost anti-erotic clinical macro-details. However, we find support for this theory mainly in the film’s narrative, which gradually reaches the conclusion that striving for absolute perfection in sex causes it to be devoid of pleasure and emotion. Under Dr. Love’s guidance, Misty is absolutely transformed into an object finely tuned to deliver the best performance. In the climax, however, she rejects this, takes the initiative and ultimately returns pleasure to her instructor. Just as Pygmalion essentially ridiculed the British class system and turned its humorous premise into a treatise on a woman’s independence, Metzger’s film also upends its own concept of narrative porn and becomes a biting commentary on the age of sexual independence and the pornography boom as a social phenomenon, when individual films used all possible means to compete for the audience’s attention. Whereas The Opening of Misty Beethoven takes viewers to a number of the world’s great cities and, through opulent exteriors and studio locations, shows that even though gilding and technical parameters are nice, feelings will always be the most essential ingredient of sex. (15.12.2013)