Alex Sudheim
`After 10 minutes time you’ll forget you’re watching a screen and you’ll feel like you’re in the same room,” promises Krish Moodley of his unique new venture, the 3-D Picture Palace on Durban’s beachfront.
Whether or not you actually want to be in the same room as several dozen grunting, sweating, copulating people is of course up to you entirely. Shame on the bad old days when Durban’s seaside promenade coyly sported ice- cream shops and souvenir parlours – now its wall-to-wall neon, casinos and sex. Oh well, it works for Amsterdam, although there at least you’re allowed to be stoned.
So it’s no coincidence that Amsterdam is precisely where Moodley stumbled upon the titillating new concept of a 3-D porn cinema and promptly thought to himself: “Wow. Now there’s something we could use back home.” After some fast and furious negotiations, Moodley garnered for himself the rights as sole agent in Africa for the spicy new import.
“When we were drawing up the contract it said `South Africa’,” he explains, “but I said: `no, leave out South’, so I got the rights for the whole of Africa.” Thus any prospective entrepreneurs from Mombasa to Middelburg keen to capitalise on the idea must purchase the franchise rights from Moodley in order to start up their own little hi-tech Sodom and Gomorrahs.
These days sex and morality have become extremely tired of their eternal battle with one another, seeming to prefer sharing a sort of suspicious tolerance. This modern attitude is reflected in Moodley’s business philosophy, where money and morals are kept neatly polarised.
“This business is what I call clean money,” he informs me. “It’s all above-board, registered, legit and legal. I don’t try to crook anybody. You get what you pay for. Its a public service you can choose to use or not.” Moodley adds to his already-remarkable feat of rationalisation by opining that “sex has become so open nowadays. Stuff like this is no longer secret or sacred. I’m a staunch Hindu and a Rotarian, but this is a business just like any other.”
By “stuff like this” he means the hardcore sex films he shows back to back. Once inside the venue, customers can choose between a single booth, a double cubicle for couples or the small cinema. “The concept is designed to bring you to the highest limit and then back down again,” Moodley explains to me. He has calculated this period to last 30 minutes for the average patron, which is why viewers pay R20 per half-hour increment.
It’s quite surreal to have one of the most profoundly mysterious apects of the human experience explained to one in such brutal shop-talk, but then I guess hardcore is hardcore. What Moodley is hinting at really is the fundamental logos: money itself is pornographic.
As for the product itself, what I got to see was lots of close-ups of grinding genitalia. Peering through my space-age goggles at the flickering screen, the 3-D effect kicks in when there’s a wider shot with strategically-placed potplants in the background to create depth of field. Of course one becomes inured pretty soon, and the whole thing starts looking like a gynaecology student’s homework project or the violent mating procedures of some alien species.
The idea of 3-D porn obviously relies a lot on the gimmick factor, with scores of thrill-seekers giving it a whirl out of curiosity. Yet many return for more, according to Moodley. He gets several married couples on a regular basis, and once three guys from Empangeni booked themselves into the Four Seasons for a few days just to scorch their retinas on the salacious visual fare.
Well, acres of highbrow cultural theory have been devoted to the deconstruction of society’s strange pornographic urges, but I’m not really sure what conclusion to arrive at here. All I can say is that I think Boogie Nights is an infinitely better film than Big Boob Bonanza.