Behind the Green Door has a deceptively simple central story, which nevertheless is layered with a great deal of really rather sophisticated exploration of sexual desire and the potentials of pornographic spectatorship.
The film begins in a truck-stop diner, as two drivers come in and are pressed by the chef to tell him the story of "the green door." The men are a little coy at first, but free coffee loosens their tongues. One of them begins to tell the story which we see... A single woman is kidnapped from her hotel and taken to a secret location where she becomes the centrepiece of a bizarre sexual show. Before the kidnapping, she is shown sitting isolated at an outdoors restaurant, keeping herself to herself and wrapped up against the cold as a boor at another table drones on to another fellow about what he got up to at the weekend. The film then posits that beneath her solitary exterior lurks a desire to be opened up to sensual pleasure and exhibitionism. She is kidnapped (by, significantly, characters played by the film's directors, the Mitchell Brothers) and taken to the show venue. She is met by a woman who tells her that she will not be hurt and that she will experience delights. She is stripped, massaged and dressed and then taken onto the stage.
The stage is set before a small audience of (mostly) masked onlookers, who have been told the "rules" of the club and seem to be all in on the secret society - they have to negotiate their way past burly doormen and agree to keep their counsel during the "performance." After a slightly grotesque Marcel Marceau-type clownerie, the kidnapped woman is led on the stage and sexually explored by a gaggle of ladies. After she has been woken to feeling by touching and cunnilingus, the green door at the back opens and a black man with a large and already engorged penis enters to the sound of funk. He then licks and f**ks the kidnapped woman, driving into her until they reach mutual orgasm.
This inspires the audience to begin masturbating, touching each other and finally indulging in an orgy. The kidnapped woman fellates three acrobats who descend on ropes and the cast and watchers come together for a Dionysian romp. This ends with a series of slow-motion money shots involving distorted special effects. After she has been covered in cum, the kidnapped woman is suddenly "rescued" by a member of the audience and taken back through the green door. Then we're back in the diner, with the chef desperate to know more. The drivers have nothing more to tell him, and one of them drives into the night. As he drives, he sees the lights of the city shining and a vision of himself making uninhibited love to the kidnapped woman.
The central story of the kidnapping and show is specifically structured as the fantasy of the drivers at the diner. All of the more controversial aspects of the show - the strangely acquiescent victim, the secret society of privileged voyeurs, the black man as representative of sexual prowess and primal sexual urges - are suggested by the film as fantasies of these working class white men, tales they tell to enliven their rather barren, powerless and sexually frustrated lives (they have no real women in their lives within the film).
There's also an intriguing strand of the film which posits that watching a pornographic performance will inspire an audience to indulge in its own licentious sexual activities. The audience of the show are soon touching and screwing each other (and its telling that their bodies are mostly not as attractive as the performers in the show), and the driver is lost in his own self-generated pornographic fantasies at the end.
The film is a remarkable and wonderfully self-conscious dream of male desire, a desire which wants women to agree to their own induction into a realm of uninhibited pleasure. It isn't suggested in the film that such a realm can exist in reality, but the audience participation suggests that the filmmakers hoped that their spectators might be inspired to sexual activities of their own. The most intense section of the film is the entrance and sexual performance of Johnny Keyes, the black ravisher - he is an astonishing presence, and the moment before he enters Marilyn Chambers (a woman with considerable star quality) suggests a collusion between the two characters which could also be a collusion between the two performers - it is genuinely erotic and laden with the temptation to see these two people as genuinely wishing to transgress social and ethnic sexual barriers.
The film fully deserves its reputation as a classic of the golden age of porn, a genuinely seminal work. The title refers to the popular song, a 1950s hit for Jim Lowe and itself possibly inspired by a story by O. Henry, also called The Green Door.
The film begins in a truck-stop diner, as two drivers come in and are pressed by the chef to tell him the story of "the green door." The men are a little coy at first, but free coffee loosens their tongues. One of them begins to tell the story which we see... A single woman is kidnapped from her hotel and taken to a secret location where she becomes the centrepiece of a bizarre sexual show. Before the kidnapping, she is shown sitting isolated at an outdoors restaurant, keeping herself to herself and wrapped up against the cold as a boor at another table drones on to another fellow about what he got up to at the weekend. The film then posits that beneath her solitary exterior lurks a desire to be opened up to sensual pleasure and exhibitionism. She is kidnapped (by, significantly, characters played by the film's directors, the Mitchell Brothers) and taken to the show venue. She is met by a woman who tells her that she will not be hurt and that she will experience delights. She is stripped, massaged and dressed and then taken onto the stage.
The stage is set before a small audience of (mostly) masked onlookers, who have been told the "rules" of the club and seem to be all in on the secret society - they have to negotiate their way past burly doormen and agree to keep their counsel during the "performance." After a slightly grotesque Marcel Marceau-type clownerie, the kidnapped woman is led on the stage and sexually explored by a gaggle of ladies. After she has been woken to feeling by touching and cunnilingus, the green door at the back opens and a black man with a large and already engorged penis enters to the sound of funk. He then licks and f**ks the kidnapped woman, driving into her until they reach mutual orgasm.
This inspires the audience to begin masturbating, touching each other and finally indulging in an orgy. The kidnapped woman fellates three acrobats who descend on ropes and the cast and watchers come together for a Dionysian romp. This ends with a series of slow-motion money shots involving distorted special effects. After she has been covered in cum, the kidnapped woman is suddenly "rescued" by a member of the audience and taken back through the green door. Then we're back in the diner, with the chef desperate to know more. The drivers have nothing more to tell him, and one of them drives into the night. As he drives, he sees the lights of the city shining and a vision of himself making uninhibited love to the kidnapped woman.
The central story of the kidnapping and show is specifically structured as the fantasy of the drivers at the diner. All of the more controversial aspects of the show - the strangely acquiescent victim, the secret society of privileged voyeurs, the black man as representative of sexual prowess and primal sexual urges - are suggested by the film as fantasies of these working class white men, tales they tell to enliven their rather barren, powerless and sexually frustrated lives (they have no real women in their lives within the film).
There's also an intriguing strand of the film which posits that watching a pornographic performance will inspire an audience to indulge in its own licentious sexual activities. The audience of the show are soon touching and screwing each other (and its telling that their bodies are mostly not as attractive as the performers in the show), and the driver is lost in his own self-generated pornographic fantasies at the end.
The film is a remarkable and wonderfully self-conscious dream of male desire, a desire which wants women to agree to their own induction into a realm of uninhibited pleasure. It isn't suggested in the film that such a realm can exist in reality, but the audience participation suggests that the filmmakers hoped that their spectators might be inspired to sexual activities of their own. The most intense section of the film is the entrance and sexual performance of Johnny Keyes, the black ravisher - he is an astonishing presence, and the moment before he enters Marilyn Chambers (a woman with considerable star quality) suggests a collusion between the two characters which could also be a collusion between the two performers - it is genuinely erotic and laden with the temptation to see these two people as genuinely wishing to transgress social and ethnic sexual barriers.
The film fully deserves its reputation as a classic of the golden age of porn, a genuinely seminal work. The title refers to the popular song, a 1950s hit for Jim Lowe and itself possibly inspired by a story by O. Henry, also called The Green Door.