Impressively, the fauxcest 1980-released adult drama Taboo still resonates with crowds in the 40th year since its release. A decade after independent pornography’s 1970s-era boom, creativity and limitless aspiration blended together to develop the moment wherein Taboo emerged. Sex, fetish, and morbid fascination with risque themes portrayed with a dynamic plot has not slowed in exciting fans worldwide. Over four decades, the film spawned many volumes, countless spinoffs, and inspired a still-thriving MILF sub-genre. Intriguingly, there are pieces of Taboo‘s legacy worth studying to understand how plot development and long-form storytelling can remain a vital and creatively motivating force in the adult industry.
Foremost, it’s essential to consider Taboo as a perfect marriage of the three distinct phases of adult film’s Golden Age of 1970-1985. 1970-1977 was the era of smutty, surprisingly commercially successful art films: ranging from 1972’s Deep Throat, to 1973’s The Devil In Miss Jones, to 1976’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven. 1977-1980 was an era of campy, big-budget spank-bank material with a risque touch of creative license, Taboo included. From 1980-1985, the industry, overwhelmed by VCR technology, devolved into low-budget lewdness aimed specifically at highly-sexualized, middle-to-upper-class audiences.
Taboo is keyed to acclaim by the level of slavish male devotion afforded to Kay Parker. Parker’s star turn resulted from being cast by director Kirdy Stevens as the lead actress, portraying fetishized mother Barbara Scott in Taboo, with a guest appearance in Taboo 2. Visually, the then-36 year-old, 38-DD breast-sized performer’s appeal is tied to her fantastic physique and “mature, warm, and charming” nature onscreen. However, equally important is, as noted in a 1984 interview, she was a “gung-ho improvisational actress” taught to “portray a character that has some essence of a story.” Plus, she was someone who enjoyed “straight-out, plain-old good sex.” Moreover, describing her favorite sexual acts as those conveyed foremost with “sensuality, sensitivity, and communication” seals the deal.
Place Parker’s twin arthouse and spank-bank appeal into an incestuous, simultaneous coming-of-age-meets-midlife-crisis storyline between Parker and her soft-featured, square-jawed costar Mike Ranger. These combustible elements marrying the first two eras of porn’s Golden Age create a multitude of explosive results that still resonate in porn’s modern age.
If Taboo were just a regular film about incest featuring a cast including Parker, Ranger, the film’s (and its sequels) hilariously insatiable matron Juliet “Aunt Peg” Anderson, Dorothy LeMay, and more, it’d have been successful—but Taboo‘s heritage is borne of a notable and unique coupling of time, space, and place.
In a 2007 review, RogReviews.com notes,
“Kay Parker is a stunning woman who handles a rather difficult role. The script is pretty basic, but it certainly has more emotional depth than anything we see these days.”
The film’s subject matter is drawn from a 1977 Penthouse article entitled “Incest: The Last Taboo” that highlights a report in the original Kinsey interviews that “untraumatic incest” is “surging in popularity,” and would “be a major social issue in the 80s.”
Comparatively, in a 2012 Vice article entitled “What Makes a Good Porn Script?” performer/director Kayden Kross says,
“The story is not normally of consequence, nor is the dialogue. They want what makes them aroused—so if the dialogue contributes to that, great, but 70 percent fast-forward through it.”
Insofar as that other 30 percent? In a 2009 conversation in Interview Magazine, Sasha Grey noted,
“Going into an adult scene. I usually start my preparation the night before. I’ll write some loose dialogue that I want to use in the sex scene, to mess with the other performer to get a natural reaction.”
Similar to Kay Parker, Jessica Drake draws an obsessive level of fan appreciation in the modern era. With over a million combined social-media followers, the Wicked Pictures contract actress/director is an ideal person to speak to regarding the sex industry’s evolution in regards to what she refers to as “producing quality entertainment in the form of feature movies.”
“The Golden Era had more to do with feature movies with plot-pertinent sex and acting that was more developed. Directors wrote scripts, created concepts, imagined wardrobe. Reducing our industry to a monolith by consistently reproducing scenes that get that traffic sheerly from shock value, not necessarily because they elicit arousal in the viewer, don’t do us any favors.”
Dig even deeper into Drake’s answer—in terms of Taboo’s scripting and conceptualization—and the 1980’s standard offers an intriguing scientific glimpse into what made the Golden Age iconic.
Taboo‘s dialogue and acting, in and of themselves, aren’t significant. It’s instead the fact that the words and actions are connected to just-probed, empirical, psychosexual data now being beamed into people’s homes. There’s something oddly comforting in seeing something so delightfully degenerate at an adult theater. However, by 1980, those were on the decline. Seeing a film in your living room about a hot MILF getting hot and heavy with their son in the bedroom? That’s a heady blend. Suppose the mix of sex-to-script was at 70%-30% by 2012. In that case, it’s entirely possible that Taboo achieves an ideal 50-50 balance of incredibly risque talk—even for the fringes of the mainstream—that triggers arousal that is then capitalized upon onscreen in a most impressive manner.
Taboo—though its exact income is unknown—was an unparalleled box-office success. Following its success, similarly extremely risque films defined into a brief era in which luxuriously dirty delights had an astounding impact. Well worth mentioning here is Taboo-inspired and 1985-released four-part miniseries saga, Taboo American Style.
An important addendum is necessary here. Incredibly, 1982’s Taboo 2—as noteworthy as the original Taboo proved to be—improved the previously established standard. Need proof? Thirty years after the release of Taboo 2, Adam Carolla interviewed Leon Felburg, the film’s composer, regarding the song “She’s On Fire.” The track remains as memorable as Honey Wilder and Kevin James‘ iconic sex scene between their incestuous characters Joyce and Junior McBride.
It is also essential to note that many regard films like 2005’s Pirates and 2007’s Pirates II as examples of how classic era-style, plot-driven porn could still be relevant. The award-winning first film’s plot surrounds a ragtag group of seductive sailors who lust after a band of evil pirates. Pirates is plot-driven and adds special effects (sexy female pirates materializing from the mist, anyone?). Impressively, the semblance of a genuinely engaging plot was more greatly eschewed in lieu of special effects for the sequel, as Digital Playground spent $10.1 million (in 2019 dollars) on the film. That astonishing sum is some 40,000% greater than the average film budget, even for that era.
Post-2007, the sex industry changed drastically, shifting into the current, digital-first porn age. Plots and dialogue have mainly been deemphasized, as the luxury of filming adult cinema with million-dollar budgets accessed on VCRs and DVD players no longer exists. However, watching adult films on high-end cell phones with 5G wireless access effectively ensures that the onus isn’t necessarily on budgets and technology anymore. Adds Jessica Drake,
“I do see a return to creativity today. Performers aren’t being forced into molds; they’re being allowed to create. Every technological advance we have at our fingertips certainly makes this easier.”
This era can be different, yet similar, to the Golden Age. In mirroring something forgotten about Taboo compared to Pirates, or other films since the mid-1980s, a highly impacting statement emerges. Rediscovering, or surging deeper into plots and scripts that are more than just benign circumstances and words on a page, is critical. Using them as devices to dive into untapped psychosexual elements—that positively trigger deep, emotional reactions—engages best with how long-form erotic art remains lucrative and artistically viable in the clip-and-scene-driven, short-attention-span era.
Taboo star Kay Parker was correct when she said that, highlighting “good, sensual, and consensual sex, featuring improvisational acting, and highlighting the essence of a story” is essential. It’s the cornerstone of porn’s future. Taboo used scientific evidence as a plot device to develop a consensually indecent film. Its greatest success is that it pleasurably pushes shocking buttons via hot people, hot sex, and hot loads. Every modern fuck-fest should not, nor can be Taboo. However still—40 years later—it remains a relevant gold standard of low-down, high-art, onscreen sexual excellence.
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