The Rise and Fall of a Porn Superstar, Storyville, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Director Tomer Heymann

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000frcl/storyville-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-porn-superstar

I missed the first few minutes of this. I expected to see (not that I watch porn) blonde hair and silicon breasts and a solid arse so big it would have shamed a Kardashian and housed half of dancing Africa with bongo drums. Instead I got this guy, who called himself Jonathan Agassi and he was in Berlin. He dressed down to go out in a pair of tight-fitting swimming trunks. He went to a Berlin nightclub to collect an award for the being the best new gay porn star. He won the category, best porn actor, United States.

Fucker, you better believe it. He didn’t live in the United States.  The best, or so he thought. This is the rise part, before the world goes back to being less than a Cabaret tune. ‘Come to the Cabaret my friend, Come to the Cabaret’. Another song set in Cabaret (Berlin of the 1930s Weimar Republic) sets the tone: ‘Money, makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around. Money makes the world go around…’ It still does. When Agassi is the queen of the porn industry and doing what he’s told, money pours in. The next big thing is always standing behind you.

I found Agassi’s relationship with his mum weird. She’s in Israel. He’s in Berlin. They Skype. He looks for reassurance he’s still beautiful. She gives it.  Then he goes back to visit her in Tel Aviv. There were some uncomfortable moments such as Agassi dressing in fishnets and high-heel shoes and his brother telling him this wasn’t Berlin, but Tel Aviv. In other words, don’t go out like that ya sissy. But he’d went to school there. Threatened suicide, when he was at school and ready to jump from a high window, his classmates shouted, ‘Jump’. I guess Israelites are too busy gobbling up the land of their poor Palestinian neighbours to be overly politically correct.   

We meet Agassi’s dad back in Berlin. Things have turned more difficult. Agassi’s bum is still for sale but the price is dropping out of the market. Worse, his dad is the worst kind of arsehole. Agassi remains fixated on his dad calling him ‘a homo’ when he was twelve. We all know the cure for that from right-wing (let’s call them) Americans who imagine a good shag with a good girl will cure them of that kind of malarkey. That was certainly my da’s view, when his best mate, Jimmy Mac, told him his son was gay.

‘No, Jimmy, yeh, cannae have that,’ were my da’s immortal words.

Agassi’s da went further. When he was twelve he set him up with this then female partner. You know, the good-shag cure, which in other societies would be looked on as paedophilia and procurement, but not here. Not in Berlin.

Later, Agassi and Da meet again. His son is out of his face on drugs most of the time. He’s filmed sleeping on top of a parked car. And admits he hadn’t slept for two days. Worse, his wanger is playing up, gone off solidarity and on strike, he can no longer ejaculate on cue. The money shot is no longer the money shot. Things are slipping.

Da talks about his mum as if he loved her. Maybe he did. But he tells the big lie. Mummy was depressed because she wanted a girl and instead had a boy, Agassi. That set her into depression, perhaps post-natal, perhaps something else. Nudge. Nudge. Wink. Wink. Your mum hated you and it’s your fault for being born.

Mummy soon put Agassi right. She was stuck in New York, penniless and young, with two kids and daddy was out spending what little money that had and whoring. That’s when I got on mummy’s side. Now I kinda liked her. She was spunky.

Agassi dresses mummy up in designer clobber and claims she looks beautiful. The answer here on this side is no, she doesn’t. She looks like an ordinary wee woman. Since we’re on the male gaze, I don’t think Agassi looks anything special either.

He ends up working in a supermarket. The kind of guy you pass every day. Gives lectures to kids about the dangers of drugs. When I watched Louise Theroux’s programme about escorts £200-an-hour seemed to be the going rate. Agassi around $4000 an hour. Must be hard, working on the checkout, minimum wage, made to eat shit. Lack of money does that to you. Porn, like anything else, is an overcrowded market. It eats the young. Hates the old. I’m sure there’s some kind of metaphor waiting to pop up.