sexualities” (114, emphasis in the original). Unlike the anxiety-ridden sex-
ual discourse of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex and Portnoy’s
Complaint, where the goal of the therapeutic enterprise ultimately involves
learning—or failing to learn—how to “do” sex the right way, in Deep Throat
therapy and confession are simple and elegant endeavors that operate out-
side the realm of the punitive and thus never merit guilt or remorse.
Although her friend Helen feels that Linda is perhaps pursuing the largely
unattainable in her quest for a sexual experience of bursting bombs and
exploding fireworks, the entitlement to something more, or something else,
as a woman is sanctioned rather than interrogated. If the pleasure that you
want is not there, all you need to do is find it, the film suggests, which is
exactly what Linda does. The interchange between doctor and patient in
the examining room similarly emphasizes the diagnosis and systematic res-
olution of physiological problems over the discernment and exploration of
psychological complexes. Indeed, Dr. Young’s pronouncement that “you
don’t have one” is less a pronouncement of ultimate female lack in psy-
choanalytic terms than a momentary setback in the diagnostic process,
when moments later he finds an-other “one” where it is least expected.
More than perhaps any other film of the year, Deep Throat demonstrates
the restorative and curative dimensions of the confessional act. The decision
to seek medical help, and to tell the expert doctor about what she believes
to be a problem of sexual identity, ends up effecting a cure in which the
doctor’s considerably voluminous “instrument” plays a decisive role. The
therapeutic relationship involves a process of authentication of the individ-
ual and interactive roles of doctor and patient. The doctor does as doctors
do, and the patient gets exactly what she wants, even before she leaves the
examining table. At the same time, however, the very elegance of this rela-
tionship between confession, therapy, and cure soon begins to point out the
limits of pornography as a narrative form. Once this cure has been brought
about, there is little left for the narrative to do but to reiterate the scenar-
ios that bring about pleasure. Untraditional though they may be in terms of
the physiological configuration of orgasmic responses, the scenarios rely
upon a repetition whose pleasure remains located more within the bodies
of the onscreen participants (as actors and characters) than in its extra-
diegetic observers. As narrative, all that Deep Throat can eventually yield is
the very happy ending that Linda is promised by finding the perfect physi-
ological specimen to maintain her pleasure.
If Deep Throat’s ability to construct a sexual crisis in order to meet, and
then proceed to repeat to build up to, its resolution appears to be out of step
with the demands of classical Hollywood narrative, its fantasies of perfectly
1972 — MOVIES AND CONFESSION 93