J St James is to porn outreach what JK Rowling is to young readers' fiction: her "Emma Marx" movies open up the currently moribund porno video world to a whole new crop of young audience constituents. The 3rd edition of the Penny Pax-starring series is a lackluster affair -very low on creativity.
Problem is basic: Jacky's self-contained universe of the glories of being a submissive young woman conforms to an internal logic but makes no sense to a skeptical viewer. That's because it's built on a series of silly contradictions. Jacky's solution: as narrator she constantly makes assertions that if accepted blindly permit the viewer to slavishly (pun intended) conform to the auteur's way of thinking. Independent thinking will cause the entire house of cards to crumble.
For Part 3, Jacky returns to a sure-fire gimmick: let Penny's "straight" (read: corny) sister Riley Reid have a hot sex scene with her husband Van Wylde to get the XXX show rolling. Premise is that she & hubby are role-playing, he pretending to be a nincompoop using lame lines to try and pick her up at a party. This ruse is silly since we loyal viewers know who Riley & Van are playing so they ain't fooling anybody even momentarily.
This sex scene is staged in a striking white-on-white bedroom, which visually rang a bell with me, and several reels later I was rewarded with the answer to this sense of recognition.
But first we return to Penny's happy life with the mysterious Mr. Frederick, played in Part 3 with a buzz cut (much shorter) hairdo by cool customer Richie Calhoun. A montage shows the evolution of their master/slave relationship, and the appearance of a butt plug and its usage indicates Penny's allegiance to anal-sex is complete.
When she asks him if they could move on to a threesome, Richie balks, recalling bad results when same gambit was tried with Penny's predecessor, Sara Luvv. Calhoun relates a lengthy flashback of what went wrong and Luvv is back, non-sex again, as Audrina, getting her wish to have lovely Rebecca (new talent Samantha Hayes) involved in a BDSM sex sort of way.
This scene is stimulating, as Richie manhandles Hayes as his slave, dog collar at her neck, and Luvv is forced to just lie there and watch as voyeuse. There are several continuity problems that detract from the vignette's effectiveness: Richie's hairdo remains what he looks like now when Part 3 was shot, rather than his longer hair of several years back as would be depicted in the Luvv-era of this flashback; and more glaring for me is the fact that Sara's large dark nipple dominates the frame in the first part of this segment, bare beneath her clothing, but is hidden even though she's watching motionless later on in the action.
SPOILERS ALERT:
At this point St. James elects to kill off the Mr. Frederick character, a drastic story twist that I found very poorly done, in fact so arbitrarily presented I naturally jumped to the conclusion that it was a hoax (it isn't).
So Penny falls into a deep depression, and moves in with sister and brother-in-law. This turned out to cheer me up immensely, because lo and behold they're living in the classic "Immoral Proposal" mansion, its distinctive spiral staircase attractively featured here. (Its white-on-white interior was broadcast earlier).
We get to see Penny in a flashback threesome with Richie and striking Aidra Fox, an actress who coincidentally co-starred last year with Riley in a hit Riley vehicle "Being Riley", a horrible junker that recently won 10, count 'em 10 idiotic Adult industry awards that I would chalk up more to payola than mere stupidity.
Riley intercedes and gets sis Penny back on track by finding her a mentor Ryan Driller, and the final few reels of the film are devoted to his training her, ending with the promise of her becoming a submissive to him as master, replacing that hole in her life left by Mr. Frederick's demise.
For me, this nonsense was less sophisticated, for all its trendy BDSM trappings, than an episode of the classic "I Dream of Jeannie" TV series. In my youth I had a crush on Barbara Eden (stemming from her unsung sexiness in George Pal's classic "7 Faces of Dr. Lao") and her "yes, master" routine in the '60s does have striking similarities to the Emma Marx character, minus the fantasy. Extrapolating, had the producers replaced Larry Hagman as her master with another actor, as was done with Elizabeth Montgomery's better half in the competing fantasy series "Bewitched", the analogy with Calhoun morphing into Driller here would be complete.
Since film structure happens to be my bag, my greatest objection to Jacky's strategy of ramming her would-be Submissives of the world unite! philosophy down our throats (I apologize for the inevitable double- entendres) is her hokey narration. She frequently, as in early volumes, interjects her own voice as that of omniscience on the soundtrack representing Emma's point-of-view rather than having actress Penny Pax speak. This can lull the viewer, especially one wet-behind-the-ears, into believing all this submissive b.s.
Yes Jacky has achieved a fair measure of self-realization, choosing pornography as her outlet rather than becoming the next Nora Ephron or Harper Lee in the mainstream world. But this Emma Marx character is decidedly retrograde, unable to function at all as an independent agent, but desperately needing the co-dependency or outright dependency of a Master. Ms. St. James can assert a million times her drivel that "you can only gain freedom by submitting" till she's blue in the face, but I'm not buying it. Hopefully she will put a sock in this series, now that Emma's degrees of freedom as a fictional character have been effectively reduced to zero.
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