Originally published on October 16, 1997

In the press kit for Boogie Nights, Mark Wahlberg informs us, "I put the script down and thought, 'Well, this guy is a genius.'" Newsweek speaks of "A filmmaker with an enormous talent for making movies"; Filmmaker calls the movie "a virtuoso accomplishment." Perhaps it's Oscar time for Marky Mark, whisper others. Behind it all, the prodigal director: Paul Anderson, 26-year-old genius. Jesus Christ, what a sad nation.

Boogie Nights tells the story of lonely dreamer Eddie Addams (Wahlberg), a boy with little more than a huge cock to guide him through life. No less an authority than his mother tells us he's stupid, in case we'd had doubts. But Eddie is a tragic hero: he'll be someone, you just wait.

Sure enough, his huge cock soon attracts the attention of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), a soulless, cauldron-born producer, who gives his magnificent member a purpose in life. The cocaine and money start flowing; Eddie renames himself Dirk Diggler, and starts using his huge cock to fuck porn stars (Julianne Moore, Heather Graham) in dirty movies. His cock is big and tireless: soon he is Dirk Diggler, Millionaire. He owns a mansion and a yacht.

Ah, but we know Anderson is a genius. He is therefore loathe to ignore the precedents of Sophocles and Aristotle: Pride goeth before a fall, and so fall Dirk must. In the movie's Oedipal second act, we follow Dirk to his tragic fall, in a pickup truck in a West Hollywood parking lot, washed up, coke-addled, trying to inflate his huge cock for $10 for what appears to be a damn queer. The monument will not be erected and so Dirk must be brutally fagbashed by bullies. Then: the requisite bloodbath, and a happy ending. Applause, critical praise—fucking dipshits.

What makes Boogie Nights worth leaving the country for is the terrifying smugness with which it slouches toward simple moralizations. In its heart Boogie Nights holds a cold, twisted chastity, redolent of repressed puritanism and abject judgment. When Interview magazine calls it "one of the most morally responsible films of the decade," we should pause to question what indeed that morality is.

It is worrisome that the only "sex scene" in an epic about sex is dumped on Nina Hartley, a true-life porn star; it is distinctly grotesque that her action merits her being the first in the film to have her head blown off in a two-for-one plot point and act of Holy Retribution. Her death is merely the first in the film's drunken weave down the moral high road. If not death, it's drug addiction, or poverty, or a beating. The message writ large in lightning: Slutty Behavior begets Misery, Pain, and Death.

Boogie Nights is a shining example of the mediated experience Hollywood is so good at delivering to an opiated nation. You may be titillated by the premise, aroused by the faux porn, caught up in the heady, cocaine-drenched flush of success... but then you will be whisked into dysfunction, massaged into guilt, beaten into submission, and finally cleansed by the Holy Water of the Happy Ending.

And there's a final insult: We never see cock. Not Dirk's, not anyone's. We should. The entire movie is about how far a huge cock can get you. By god, it should fill the wide-screen, it should blast off into the auditorium in Surround Sound—but it never happens. Americans, it seems, fear cock. Thus, a two-point-five-hour epic about a huge cock ends in a flaccid shot of a counterfeit. It's fake: a piece of wax, poorly grafted onto Marky Mark's little motivator. A dildo. A red herring.

Don't see this movie. Don't advance the march of darkness. Instead, go straight to Starlight Video, Capitol Hill's newest and friendliest (outside Toys in Babeland) adult video store, specializing in vintage smut. Sergio, the owner, didn't think much of Boogie Nights either, but he will gladly guide you to a film called Eruption. Filmed on Hawaii and starring the legendary John Holmes as an insurance agent gone bad, the film features gloriously bad acting, pointless and aimless action sequences, and a more honest, if less recognizable, boogie soundtrack. It is stupid, but it is not evil. And, in a curious way, it is real, at least in one significant aspect: John Holmes really did have a huge cock.