Porn this way

Young Italian stallion Jon Martello has only a few interests in life: “My body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls… and my porn.”

This last one on the list, in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut Don Jon, is usually accompanied by the symphonic chord that announces a Mac laptop is booting up. This is followed by a montage of online porno staples — chicks staring at a webcam, licking their lips, female bodies arching backwards and forwards, body parts isolated and heaving — as the titular character stares at his flickering Mac screen.

Don Jon is about modern-day Don Juanism: the many avenues available to men in the digital age to avoid intimacy. Gordon-Levitt has written and directed a comedy here, but it’s also serious, and may hit home for some modern viewers.

We live in an age where sexuality is available anywhere, anytime. TV ads feature Kate Upton salaciously lapping down a Carl’s Jr. burger (one of the ads shown in the movie); it’s offered in twerking MTV Awards performances, and on reality survival shows (everyone selling a version of sexiness along with competence); and it’s freely available at the press of a mouse button.

But it’s not really sex, and it’s not really love, and it’s not really freedom. This is the message of Don Jon, whose main character spends half the movie rejecting the idea of two-way intimacy in favor of one-way selfishness. He looks for love in all the wrong places — at meat-market pickup bars with his male buddies, where the guys typically rate the available conquests. Or online, where the plethora of porn sites allows him to truly “get lost” in ways female companionship apparently does not. And in the arms of vivacious Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a Jersey girl with accompanying accent and feminine charms. He can’t wait to get in her pants, but Barbara’s the kind of girl who uses her wiles to get what she wants. Watch the scene in which she literally uses her ass — in an impromptu hallway lap dance — to convince blue-balled Jon to take night courses and “improve” himself. 

Jon eventually beds Barbara, and even takes her to meet his parents — including envious meathead dad Tony Danza, who can’t believe his son hit the jackpot with a sexpot. But wouldn’t you know it? Barbara’s not enough to ring Jon’s cherries: immediately after sleeping with her, he creeps away to his laptop and dials up his favorite sites.

Gordon-Levitt directs Don Jon with an interesting ADHD quality in the first half: the porn images are flashed everywhere, all the time, showing how modern life has become subtly sexualized and overtly self-obsessed. Jon goes to church (religiously, as they say in the Philippines) and says his requisite “Hail Mary”s for every time he’s had sex out of wedlock and visited porn sites — he even recites his penance while lifting weights, a form of self-flagellation.

What Don Jon’s insightful script also spotlights is that, while men use porn as a form of escapism and sexual idealism, women seek their own forms of escape — into fantasy-driven romcoms, novels and picket fence ideals. Both have unrealistic expectations of modern relationships. Barbara, it turns out, has her own agenda to “change” Jon, and when she discovers his porn portals, she drops him like a bad habit.

Enter Julianne Moore as Esther, a grieving older woman who takes the same night school course Jon does. She notices his cell phone is loaded up with porn clips (“porn to go,” he calls it), and gifts him with an old-fashioned “erotic” DVD from the ‘70s, something with a cover that recalls Last Tango in Paris.

Once the two become more than friends, the movie takes quite a different tack: no more ADHD editing and mechanical porn images flashing by; rather there’s a slow-developing sexuality and eroticism between Jon and Esther that shows the modern Casanova how sex can become a two-way experience. Thus it switches — subtly, almost without us noticing — from a modern porn comedy into a classic “erotic” drama. One scene in particular between Moore and Gordon-Levitt is almost a textbook example of how to express human eroticism without resorting to hands gripping sheets and sweat flying off of grimacing faces in slow-mo.

Much of the authenticity comes from Moore’s performance, as she slows down Jon’s hormones and gets him to view relationships through a different kind of lens. This could have been handled in the typical May-December romance template — from Summer of ’42 to James Spader getting schooled by “older woman” Susan Sarandon in White Palace — but Don Jon handles the relationship deftly, if a little too quickly, making us see how a life spent on sexual conquests can insulate you from actual feeling.

Gordon-Levitt also handles himself well despite an accent that seems extracted straight from Tony Danza’s DNA. (It’s priceless to see him and Danza sporting matching “wife-beater” shirts during their Sunday family meals together.) Johansson plays up her natural va-va-voom but has a thankless job here: making Barbara seem ultimately undesirable because she’s so friggin’ controlling. Now, that takes acting skill.

There’s a whole lot of modern commentary in Don Jon, but the prevailing picture is of a modern dilemma: we now have media at our fingertips that makes the material world seem ever more attractive and available at the click of a button. (Jon uses Facebook to track down Barbara after he fails to get her name at a bar.) But it all leads to an isolation and self-centeredness that is all the more haunting because the world tells us we should just want more, more, more. The reality bites when Jon realizes he can no longer experience self-satisfaction without the aid of porn imagery — he can’t use his own imagination to get off. And somehow that seems like the saddest revelation in Don Jon.