A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of Charles Bock's acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Children. Bock's debut novel brings together a cast of surreal characters whose paths intertwine in a search for a missing boy in Las Vegas, the author's hometown. I was curious about the book because I'd read in the Times that the book included a character who was a porn star. At the time, the book was available via PDF on the book's website, so I downloaded it. But I only read the parts of the book that were about porn. And then I wrote a review of the book that only reviewed the parts of the book that were about porn. But after I posted the review, I read the whole book. And then I asked Bock if he would be interested in being interviewed about the book. But only the parts that were about porn. And Bock was kind enough to agree. In this fourth installment of this blog's Fast & Dirty interview series, Bock discusses the significance of pornography in 21st century American pop-culture, the literary research he did to bring to life a world in which strippers dream of being movie stars and pornographers look like Jabba the Hutt, and what makes Vegas America's original city of sin. Of course, Beautiful Children isn't just about porn--it's about runaways and rockers, married love and comic book characters, and the end of days when hope springs eternal. Earlier this month, Warner Independent Pictures optioned Beautiful Children. Eric Roth, who wrote "Forrest Gump," is in talks to adapt.
Reverse Cowgirl: This year, several novelists--including yourself and Chuck Palahniuk, whose forthcoming Snuff focuses on the making of a gangbang movie--are taking on porn in fiction. Why do you think this is the case?
Charles Bock: Fiction writers are addressing pornography because porn has taken up such a prominent place in the culture. Porn can be seen as a reflection of the culture, a shadow of it. Whatever the metaphor, the fact is adult entertainment is a part of America these days, on the list of things that we consume with a voracious appetite. Porn makes the internet run. Is there a straight guy over eighteen who has a computer who doesn’t check out stills of a naked woman every now and then? Guys watch porn online. More than a few women watch it, too. We all know it. Meanwhile, a whole lot comes with this.
Most porn is watched alone so there’s something about loneliness in there. With porn, the act of sex is being done specifically not for intimacy, nor for the enjoyment of the participants, and this is in direct opposition to the traditional idea of sex being the most intimate act possible between two people. So that’s interesting. Then you’ve got the cumulative effect on a person, what happens when you are regularly watching people who don’t give a rat’s ass about one another fucking. Or all the power structures that revolve around male sexuality and female sexuality, which can shift from moment to moment between any two people. Throw in the personalities of who gets involved with the sex industry. Throw in the exploitative nature of most business transactions. Someone who is eighteen now was all of eight when the Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape came out. So there’s a generation that’s grown up with widespread amounts of porn affecting how they think about sex.
And it’s great grist for fiction. A novel is maybe singularly great for measuring the culture and how people move around in the world, presenting the complexity of questions in good, entertaining, non-preachy storytime kinds of ways. Fiction is also pretty much exclusively geared towards jumping into someone else’s experience, with the goal of creating a level of empathy and understanding between people who might not otherwise understand one another or might not venture into one another’s mental neighborhoods.
Beautiful Children deals with runaway and homeless teenagers, with grieving parents, with a comic book artist in the middle of a career crisis. Hopefully, I can create characters a reader wants to follow, a story a reader cares about, and a big, wide, compelling world for a reader to get absorbed in and move through. Porn is just one part of my novel. My larger hope was to create a love letter for the people left on the side of the road, the people that most of us cross the street to avoid.
RC: How did you create the character of Cheri Blossom, a stripper who ventures into the world of adult movies?
CB: Cheri Blossom is a supporting character in Beautiful Children. Cheri is a stripper who’s had some body enhancements. She’s had breast enhancement surgery. She’s had extra surgery done so, as part of her act, she can light her nipples on fire. She has a weird 3D effect and tattoo in her pubic area--her pubic hair is manicured into the shape of a bull's-eye, and there’s a tattoo on her skin underneath that. As if this is not enough, Cheri sees her life as a movie at times, complete with screenplay. Oh, did I mention that her boyfriend is trying to suitcase pimp her into making a hardcore film? It sounds like a cartoon, but she’s a really fun character, and in truth, she’s fairly complicated. More than a few readers have come away from the book saying she’s their favorite person in the novel. She given pretty much the most generous moment of anybody in the end. A real fave of mine, Miss Cheri Blossom.
At some point, I was certain that if my novel was going to be set in Las Vegas, my hometown, I had to address the adult side of Vegas. In Cheri Blossom, I wanted a stripper who saw herself as a star, who absorbed attention until she took a certain amount of it for granted. But who was also someone who was trying to be a decent person. Who felt love and faith towards someone who was going to fuck her over and would follow him so far down that path. I wanted the reader’s introduction to her to be stereotypical, presenting her on stage in a fetishized, uber-stripper moment. Only, as you advance through the novel, that stereotype would be taken apart, step by step, and Cheri would show all kinds of complexity. For her role in the book to work, Cheri had to be a really strong person. This was necessary so that eventually, when push came to shove, she’d make good decisions for herself and act to save herself. Just as important as acting to save herself, she also needs act generously toward her sleazebag boyfriend in a key moment where maybe there isn’t much reason for her to be generous.
The more I worked on Cheri, the more drafts I did of the novel, the more my understanding of what she had to be evolved, I was able to move toward her, and my writing eventually shaped the really complex and interesting and, well, awesome character that was always out there, waiting to be born and done justice to.
Yeah, there’s a good debate to be had over whether a male novelist can in fact get inside the head of a female character, especially a stripper, or a woman involved with the adult film world. But I never questioned if I could do it, I never asked for permission. If you are a novelist, creating characters is part of the job. Flaubert and Madame Bovary, for example. And to me that's a great thing about fiction; it allows a reader to enter another person's head. It allows a writer to assume the clothes and thoughts and fabric of his creations. There’s an empathetic leap that’s pretty powerful and wonderful there, although the responsibilities of it certainly are large. And it is possible that a man can only go so far. And, admittedly, with an adult film actress this might even be more true. Having said this, if you take Cheri and put her side to side with any recent “stripper literature”--there have been several memoirs in the past few years and there are a number of online reflections about life in the business--I like to think that, at the very least, she holds her own.
RC: How did you come up with Cheri’s crotch tattoo and flammable boobs?
CB: The idea for the crotch tattoo came to me through a few ways. I’d seen some strippers with complicated tattoos running around their pubic area and through the inside of their legs, and I had a conversation with one who had done the first of what was going to be three sessions to fill in her tattoo. That probably made an impression on me. And then there was plot stuff that had to correspond with the idea of a three-dimensional tattoo. Somewhere along the line, I connected Cheri’s pubic area with that plot point.
As for the nipples... Here in New York City, for years there was a stripper who worked bachelor parties and the like. She was sixty or so and her nipples were naturally inverted, and she actually did put candle wax in them and light them on fire. I stole the idea and made it weird, adding the surgery angle. I’ve to this day never heard of a woman actually having surgery to have her nipples hollowed out. In truth, strippers can and do rub a flammable solution on their breasts, and some can do a thing with sparklers. I’ve never heard of the surgery happening, though. And I hope it never happens.
RC: Porn, strip clubs, aspiring sex stars--all appear in your book. What kind of research did you do to bring these characters to life? What kind of research did you do as far as porn? And what about the Vegas strip club scene?
CB: I did lots of leg work for this book, and that wasn’t limited to the adult side of the novel. But for the adult stuff, I definitely delved into that world. My parents still live in Vegas so whenever I’d go back to Vegas to visit them, I’d spend parts of nights at strip clubs, just talking with the women, buying dances and trying to get the most info I could out of the time when they are chatting you up. Most of the time I was writing this novel I was broke and kind of living on the margins, but I always saved enough for the Vegas trips so that I wouldn’t stiff anybody for her time. I never told the dancers I saw that I was writing a book or took notes or anything like that, although I did learn to keep a notepad in my car. One or two dancers and I went out after shifts and I’d talk with them over breakfast or what have you. But when I’d finally leave the strip club or the meal or wherever, I’d sit in my car for who knew how long and scribble notes and phrases to myself, enough to allow me to reconstruct it all later.
I didn’t use one stripper as a model, as I didn’t want anyone to read my book and say, you stole my life. Strippers, runaways, pornographers, parents of runaways, anyone. I just did not want to be limited by the truth of any one person’s story. Rather, my hope was to draw on as much material as I could to create my own real universe and my own characters. Now, of course there were the few strippers who befriended me, and one woman is a lifer in one club I visited, and she kind of came to recognize my face over the years. So, certainly, key phrases and details and maybe a mannerism or five did get absorbed into Cheri. But eventually I learned the terrain enough, I think, to create an amalgam of details and observations, combining it with my own sense of character, my own understanding of things.
Along these lines, I spent a decent amount of time talking with guys who worked in porn shops, getting a sense of their lives. And yes, I visited porn sets, talking with actors, actresses, and the producers. Off and on for a month, I’d say. A guy at one company, whose name I can’t use, let me be a fly on the wall. I’d hang out and talk to people and just kind of ask them questions. To get access, I did have to tell people it was for a book I wanted to write, a book of fiction, and I was looking for color and authenticity, and wanted to get to know this world. Most of the talent and production people were cool about it--porn hadn’t really blown up at that point.
My experience on sets and in that world--well, a lot of it was like hanging out at any job site. It was banal. It could be boring. I wasn’t on set for a tryout or first time video, like the one I depict in the book. I did not want to be on the set for that. But I was on the set for other filming and scenes. And there are vibes and tension going on there that are pretty intense. So much of porn is about power. Depending on who is running the show, a set can really reflect that. There were moments when I saw the bottom line cynicism of the business, and it became really obvious that so much of porn is so bad because nobody fucking cares. They’re fucking fucking films. Fuck it. Let’s get paid and let’s fuck and fuck it. By the time I was done on the sets, I did not want to see another naked body for a while.
I visited sets and started researching the book back during the age when porn was primarily on videotape. After I was done with my visits, a guy from a company where I did the research would send me stuff he thought I should see. I’d also buy tapes. Then I’d go home and watch it and take notes. I was in and out of relationships a lot during this time and amassed a pretty good collection. I watched a lot of tryout, first-time, and faked first-timer tapes. More than any one human being should ever see. But as with so much of my research, I also reached a point where I felt I had a good enough of an understanding of my subject. I’d seen habits and had lists of details, and, you know, those telling moments that give you a real insight. I’m someone who wants the research to empower my imagination, to allow me to tell the lie that was more real than the truth.
Somewhere along the line, I pretty much stopped watching those tapes. I had to. The effect of watching porn that closely is really not good. The effect of being in that world is that it can suck you in even more and send you way, way, way down the rabbit hole.
RC: Why are sex workers and the porn scenes important to a novel set in Vegas?
CB: Sex workers and porn scenes are important to a novel set in Vegas--or at least to my Vegas novel--for a few reasons. One of the ways I used Vegas was as a specific slice of the American dream at this moment. Modern Vegas isn’t just a creation of pop, it’s a crystallization or apex for pop culture in America. The genius of the city is that it has everything you want, waiting for you at every single second. You just have to reach out for it. This includes sex, obviously. If you’re going to take on that dark side of the dream, the omnivorous side of the American psyche, you have to go into the porn world. And in Vegas, it’s a part of the landscape. The Adult Video Awards are in Vegas. You can’t drive down a major street without getting bombarded by billboards for strip clubs and gentleman’s clubs. Jenna Jameson, the icon of modern porn, went to Bonanza High School, which is closer to the home I grew up in than the school I was zoned for and attended. When I understood that I really was going to try and write a novel about my hometown, I simply knew that it had to deal with the adult entertainment side of Vegas.
At a key moment in the novel, I have a porn tryout scene, where there are big, sleazy guys pressuring someone into doing something they are unsure about. I included this for a reason. I have no blanket agenda against porn. In fact, in my novel, I think I probably give a better argument than has ever been presented in a novel before as to why porn is a necessary part of our modern landscape. But the world of porn is a rough, rough business. And I honestly believe that almost everyone involved in it is damaged, usually in some profound way. You can argue we’re all damaged in some way. But let’s be real here.
When you start to talk about the actresses, the women who make their livings in the business, it gets bizarre. You can’t have people you’ve barely met before--people who you know casually in most cases and maybe hang out with but who basically, no, you don’t know--you can’t have these people fuck you, fuck you really, really hard two and three and sometimes five times a week without having some parts of yourself close off or shut down. I just don’t believe it’s possible.
Meanwhile, the straight porn industry--that is, porn bought by straight men--is utterly dependent on women. In porn, women are the show. However, the whole business model, thirty, hell, forty years of it now, has most of the riches going to the middle-aged men who run things, directors and producers and executives. It basically gets down to sleazy men exploiting women. Things might slowly be changing--the big contract girls get paid well, there’s talk about empowerment and porn for women. But those are the exceptions. They always will be. That’s just the nature of the adult film business. And there’s just this huge trail of broken lives left by the side of the road.
None of the writing of this novel was easy. But researching and writing about the sex industry and crafting those scenes were particularly grueling. At the end of the day, my mind would be fucked eight ways to Sunday. It’s hard to explain, other than to say you get desensitized to just how dark it all is, and meanwhile the subject propels you deeper into the darkness, further away from the regular world. In some ways, it’s interesting, because a huge supermarket can be a nefarious and bleak and depressing place, too. It’s not like suburban America is any great wonder. Hell, porn is now a firm part of that America. But the bleakness I’m talking about here is something totally and exponentially different. Something far more impenetrable.
I wrote one draft of a big porn scene while a resident at the Yaddo arts colony, and during those two weeks, the other writers and artists stayed the hell away from me. I was this walking dark evil thing. I’m someone with a pretty large dark side anyway, and I definitely think that darkness is seductive and has its own appeal and its own rewards. But work on this really sent me down down down into pitch blackness.
Still, I had to do it. There’s a straight line that runs right through popular culture and entertainment to Las Vegas, to my characters, to teen runaways, to the adult film industry. They are all connected. Absolutely. Once I understood this was the case, and once I committed myself to writing this novel, I also made a promise that I would not blink. I had to go to the wall and follow the novel wherever it would take me. That’s part of the job. I think I did a pretty good job, and believe that one of the big accomplishments of this book is that it never blinks, and, at the same time, it never loses its humanity and hope for something better.
