Movies (Part 2: movies on video and TV)

Buying a car and moving to Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong’s house greatly enriched my movie-buff life. I could go to any rental video shop in town whenever I wanted to. I could watch Siskel & Ebert every week on cable TV. I could check what was on HBO channel and video-taped whatever I wanted. I could even understand the system of a video purchase-club, through which I would buy more than a dozen of videos.

Renting videos was indeed my major entertainment in Klamath Falls. I obtained membership of four video stores in town. I regularly cruised around from one to another. There was no Blockbuster-type huge video-rental franchise in town. All of four, including one K-mart that rented videos, had a limited space to exhibit their repertoires. One was very quick in adding new-releases, one contributed a large portion of inventory to almost B-movies, the other one was run by extreme movie buffs who could cite all actors and actresses in the videos there, and the other just mediocre but give a volume and seasonal discounts.

I regularly checked what’s there almost once a week. When I became a regular customer of each store, it did not take a lot of time to drop by all of them. Investing an hour would take care of everything I needed to do. Just like the mini-theater in a small city in Hokkaido where I had been raised, the only movie theater could not show everything that residents there wanted to see. The video shops could take care of the unfilled needs.

I was happy to watch controversial “Last temptation of Christ” that Pelican Cinema refused to show. I could rent a few splatter movies that I could not see in my home town when I was a kid. They are sort of legendary films among movie-goers in Japan and are sometimes written and spoken about by the maniac critics. I rent “Johnny got his gun” to let Mr. Armstrong’s son, Paul, see it with me. It was a great movie that moved me when I was a high school kid, which I had never been able to find at any video store back in Japan before going to the United States. (I bought the video through the purchase-club later.)

In this sense, HBO channel served a lot also. Watching a classic monster movie “Q” was a memorable event. I just stayed all night watching a couple of time-killing movies waiting for “Q” to start at 2 o’clock after midnight. When it was over at four, my mind was dull and “Q” flew around in it.

I also enjoyed watching a dumb but famous B monster movie “Monster in Closet” on HBO with a friend and she thought that I was out of my mind. For it was a movie about a human-eating man-sized monster that inhibits only in ordinary closets. It was so mighty that it can live through severe crossfire of the U.S. military, or high voltage electric shocks. So the president with no countermeasure consulted a scientist, who left his advice as his will that all the people in the world should destroy all the closets so that monster would have no place to migrate.

Anyway, that’s how I utilized rental video shops as well as HBO channel to entertain myself. But there was one thing missing in the menu. That’s porno. Almost all the Japanese video rental shops have a space called “adult-video corner” that are filled with porno videos. In Japan, porno materials, either videos, magazines, books, comics, or theatrical films, are at much higher availability than that in the United States. Porno comics are sold at all the convenience shops that I know. Books stores almost always sell porno books that are so extreme as to show S&M kinky techniques.

Porno stuffs in the United States are treated like some taboo. It is like “You buy it. You are sinner! You are excommunicated” So sinful materials are concealed from or separated from ordinary life. The Japanese approach is somewhat different. Porno stuffs are not, of course, recommended. But they exist in our daily life as a part of variety of our culture and living. They are the materials treated more like personal favors or tastes. It is like alcohol drink for people with drinking habits or cigarettes for those with smoking habits. There are indeed many people who hate the materials in Japan but they are at least more tolerant to those who enjoy the stuffs.

So I decided to explore porno videos in Klamath Falls, a rural town in the United States. For it is totally different from a typical American movie scene with prostitutes on the streets, which we often see on TV back in Japan.

“Do you rent porno videos?” I asked the store attendants at the four stores. Three said no. And the last one replied yes and asked back my age. After he checked my driver’s license with a suspicious look, he disappeared into the backyard storage. He brought back a thin dusty file with old worn-out paper edges visible on the top of it. That was the X file! He placed the file on the counter and opened it slowly as if he had been waiting for me to feel abruptly hesitant. I was not. There were several pages of list in it. The list of porno video titles.

Here I encountered the same old trouble. The titles were not intuitive at all. I believe that they were by no means intuitive to Americans, either. They were just the names of the girls, or sometimes names with some occasions like “Agnes at home 1975.”

Let me just explain how porno videos are displayed in the video rental shops in Japan. The so-called “Adult-video corner” is separated from other area with a mere banner or a tapestry type short curtain with a warning for those under 18. In the area, the videos are displayed as ordinary videos are. Most of the stores categorize the inventory into several genres such as “high school girls,” “female college students,” “foreign,” and “animation.”

Back in the video store in Klamath Falls, there was no clue provided with the customers to know what’s inside. No genre, no actress’s name, no director’s name, no year of production, no nothing! I reluctantly asked the man, “Have you seen any of these?” He admitted, “Well, yeah. Just some of them.”
“Okay, which one of these do you recommend me to see?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. What kind of thing do you want to see?” he was embarrassed.
“Well. I want something very typical. Typical American porno video!” I announced.
“To me, they are kind of similar. I’m not quite sure what you mean by typical.”
“All right. Then just give me what you saw most recently.”

I do not remember the title of the video I rented then. But it must not have meant much. I just followed the video store guy’s choice whatever the title was. I went to one of my friends’ place in the OIT dormitory and played it. It was shocking! It was more than astonishing! It was not a hard-core. It was not a homosexual one. It was just about bunch of people coming in and going out of the camera frame and making love. Yes, of course, there was no mosaic adjustments done on the film as I had expected.

What astonished me was clothes the people wear in the video. It was a very old film probably shot in early 60’s. People wear turtle-neck sweaters in eye-thrusting vivid colors and bell-bottom pants. A few girls even wear tall sandals. They come visit a room with pale brown walls with nothing on them. No window nor a painting. In the room were just a door and only furniture, a large sofa. It looked like a waiting room of a therapy or a clinic.

The quality of the visual image was very low and sandy as if it had been shot with a then-state-of-the-art handy old 8mm camera. People’s voices were hollowing and faint. I wondered what kind of microphone they had used to do the audio.

Well, that was the only porno video I saw in the Klamath Falls. It was worth seeing. But it would not be worth seeing twice. I still don’t know it was astonishingly out-of-date because it was in the United States or because it was Klamath Falls. If I had tried many more samples of porno videos in the X file list, I might have come across something fascinating. However, I had something else to see to enjoy even at the same video store displayed on the shelves not just shown by a line of meaningless titles.