Sasha Grey’s Anatomy

Hey, my name is Alex, and I’m going to fuck you in the ass today. Delivered at the German premiere of 9 to 5: Days in Porn, without detectable irony or possibly entirely with it—hard to say. Whoever Alex is, he understood something about efficiency that most people spend their whole lives avoiding.

The documentary is Jens Hoffmann’s account of eighteen months inside the San Fernando Valley porn industry: the studios, the agents, the performers showing up to set the way anyone shows up to work, except the work is what it is. Basti came with me to the premiere at Central Kino near Hackescher Markt in Berlin, and he found the whole thing boring—said it felt like something he’d already seen a hundred times, a cable news report stretched to feature length. He wasn’t entirely wrong.

But I found myself pulled in anyway, less by the sociology than by Sasha Grey, who at the time was the most deliberately constructed figure in the industry—a performer and an art project simultaneously, quoting Bataille in interviews, talking about transgression with a seriousness that could be performance or could just be real. Probably both. She has this quality on camera of total control in situations that are definitionally about losing it, and I developed a small, helpless crush over the course of the film, which I’m not certain was the intended response but was definitely mine.

She had something on the market called Sasha Grey’s Anatomy, which I immediately decided was a spinoff of my favorite medical drama. It almost certainly isn’t. I looked it up anyway. Fuck it, baby.