Suicide Girls: The First Tour
Now available from suicidegirls.com.

The substance of this documentary doesn't justify its 110 minutes. A mere quarter of an hour would have been more than enough to say everything that needed to be said in Suicide Girls: The First Tour, which concerns a live tour of girls featured on the

Portland-based porn site. The show blazed across the nation, visiting 45 cities, and everywhere the naked ladies danced, the crowd went apeshit.

Employing high production codes, the documentary has footage of live performances and interviews with the performers. The basic thing the girls have to say is this: Taking off their clothes is liberating; it offers them a new and valid method of self-expression and self-discovery; nudity empowers them. That is the sum of what it means to be a Suicide Girl. Clearly, the DVD is meant for the most hardcore fans of the site.

For those of us who look at porn for the sole purpose of sexual arousal, this documentary has no value at all. The dancers do not get down to business, and the editing is too fast, the music (rock, punk, and hiphop) too loud, and the dancing too furious, for the imagination to grasp and enjoy a single nude body. The DVD is also of no use to those who want to better understand the social phenomenon of punk-porn. The interviewees don't say more than you expect, and there are no experts (academics, critics, social scientists) to weigh in on the matter.

The girls undress and the crowd (both men and women) watches them with way too much enthusiasm—and yet there's a strange absence of desire in the exchange. It seems as if everyone is excited for no other reason than it's cool for body-pierced punk chicks, super-slim hipsters, to show off their hot stuff. And maybe that's the ultimate goal of neo-burlesque shows: nudity without the risks, the shame, the desperation, the wolf-hunger of the lone male. At certain times you wish a fat and hairy man would jump onto the stage, start masturbating, and ejaculate all over the place—making things messy, sticky, and sad. But this is our age: Everything from the cultural gutter is appropriated and given new life—minus the danger, minus class realties, minus the misery. And so now we are left with celebrating what is in essence cheerless.

I will leave you with a quote from Roland Barthes's famous essay "Striptease": "Contrary to the common prejudice, the dance which accompanies the striptease from beginning to end is in no way an erotic element. It is probably quite the reverse: the faintly rhythmical undulation in this case exorcizes the fear of immobility. Not only does it give to the show the alibi of Art (the dances in strip-shows are always 'artistic'), but above all it constitutes the last barrier, the most efficient of all: the dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have been seen a thousand times, act on movements as cosmetic, it hides nudity, and smothers the spectacle under a glaze of... gestures."