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Porn Studies

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This looks like a blowjob for Superman: servicingfanboys with superhero porn parodies

Dru Jeffries

To cite this article: Dru Jeffries (2016): This looks like a blowjob for Superman: servicingfanboys with superhero porn parodies, Porn Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2016.1196118

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This looks like a blowjob for Superman: servicing fanboys withsuperhero porn parodiesDru Jeffries

Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACTThe porn industry is following Hollywood’s lead by takingsuperheroes more seriously than either had in decades past.Contemporary superhero porn parodies, particularly thosedirected by Axel Braun, eschew the goofy puns and tacked-onthemes that had previously defined the pornographic parodygenre. These films present a unique point of intersection betweenHollywood, the porn industry, and fandom. While female-orientedfandoms often devote considerable intellectual and creativeenergies to transforming patriarchal genres into shapes thatbetter appeal to their interests and desires, male fandom seemsmuch more inclined to keep the story the way it is. Braun’sparodies appropriate transformative textual practices usuallyassociated with female fan productivity in order to seduce malefans, while also exploiting the industrial limitations of themainstream superhero genre, and capitalizing on the legalfreedoms afforded by their parody status. Often antagonistic totheir mainstream counterparts, these hardcore films appeal tofans by confirming the value of an ‘original’ text by critiquing theshortcomings of official adaptations. If porn and the superherogenre usually speak to and express male power fantasies already,Braun’s porn parodies merely take current trends in superherofilm aesthetics and fanboys’ fetish for fidelity to the next level.

ARTICLE HISTORYReceived 30 June 2015Accepted 7 October 2015

KEYWORDSAdaptation; Axel Braun;fandom; porn parody;superhero films

Introduction: fandoms and parody

Every superhero with a reasonable rogue’s gallery of villains has an antagonist that is hisdoppelganger, an evil double that resembles him physically but whose morality is theinverse of his own: Superman and Bizarro, The Flash and Professor Zoom, Spider-Manand Carnage, Shazam and Black Adam, Green Lantern and Sinestro, and on and on.Even the Hollywood superhero film as a genre has a doppelganger in the form of thesuperhero porn parody. With lavish budgets and high production values (for porn), narra-tives that attempt to do more than merely justify a series of sexual encounters, and releasedates scheduled to take advantage of Hollywood’s marketing machine (Smith 2012, 110),contemporary superhero porn parodies are eschewing the goofy puns and tacked-onthemes that had previously defined the porn parody genre. In short, the porn industry

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Dru Jeffries dru.jeffries@gmail.com

PORN STUDIES, 2016http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2016.1196118

is following Hollywood’s lead by taking superheroes more seriously than either had indecades past, and both are being rewarded with financial success and devoted followings.

Leading the charge is director Axel Braun, who began the current wave of superheroparodies with the self-financed Batman XXX: A Porn Parody (Braun 2010) which was distrib-uted by Vivid Entertainment.1 Based on its success – the film won numerous industryawards and was no less than the top-selling and most-rented title of the year2 – thecompany set up an imprint devoted specifically to releasing Braun’s parodies, dubbedVivid Superhero. In an industry not necessarily known for producing auteurs with recog-nizable or unique styles, Braun is marketed as ‘the undisputed King of Parody’.3 Hisfilms are perhaps most widely recognizable for their costuming work, which sometimesapproaches Hollywood levels of quality and detail, and routinely resemble the originalcomic book designs more closely than the mainstream adaptations. Moreover, Braun’sfilms feature many comic book superheroes that have not yet appeared in mainstreamadaptations (e.g. Spider-Woman) and obscure characters that are not likely to anytimesoon (e.g. Wonder Woman villain Angle Man).

As Braun himself puts it, ‘I’m basically making fan films with boobs… I’mmaking themprimarily for people who don’t like porn, for people who are fans of the source material –like me’ (Stuart 2013). The imagined ideal viewer of these films is thus not the typical pornconsumer – the so-called ‘raincoat brigade’ (Williams 1999, 100) or its contemporary inter-net-equipped equivalent – but rather the archetypal superhero fanboy, hoarding longboxes full of bagged-and-boarded back issues and perennially dissatisfied with theways in which Hollywood adaptations deviate from their comic book source material.Since the end of the genre’s peak popularity during World War II, superhero comicshave only been read by an increasingly small niche audience of fans – top monthlytitles sell only in the hundreds of thousands4 – especially compared with the mainstreamfilm versions featuring the same characters, which routinely boast budgets in the hun-dreds of millions and regularly break box-office records.5 Unlike pornography, the econ-omics of blockbuster filmmaking necessitate that these films appeal to a global four-quadrant audience. ‘Studios have different priorities; they need to be able to reach abroader audience, so they often use a more widely relatable approach’ says Braun, explain-ing why studios tend to tone down the bright colours and skin-hugging spandex seen incomics.6 Compared with Hollywood, the lower budgets and non-mainstream nature ofpornography allow Braun to indulge his – and fans’ – fetish for textual fidelity: ‘I ammore than content to appeal mainly to fanboys’ (Braun as quoted in Serrano 2014).

Braun’s use of the word ‘fanboy’ should be taken literally: while female fandoms havelong been associated with the kinds of productivity that critically address what they per-ceive to be the shortcomings of the franchises they are so invested in, creatively reshapingthem to fit their own interests and desires (Jenkins 2006b, Kindle loc. 811), Braun’s imaginedviewership is coded specifically as a male comic book reader who is less interested in trans-forming the text than in seeing it reproduced verbatim in live action: as is often the casewiththe reception of comic book film adaptations, the importance of visual fidelity is oftenemphasized to a far greater degree than other kinds of fidelity.7 Braun’s pornographicfilms might thus be understood as an appropriation and masculinization of practices infandom that have been traditionally coded as feminine. The words of former LucasfilmVice President of marketing Jim Ward, famously quoted by Henry Jenkins (2006a, 149) inConvergence Culture, come to mind: ‘Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is’.

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While his statement is not explicitly gendered, Ward’s concise delegitimizing of femalefandoms’ tendency toward transformative practices implicitly privileges the male versionof fandom that, by contrast, respects the intellectual property of corporate stakeholders.

As Forrest Phillips points out in an essay about Lucasfilm’s response to fan-made re-edits of Star Wars, however, the desire for textual fidelity and respect for copyrightholders are by no means inextricably connected. Fan films, which ‘affirm the existing nar-rative and are typically gendered as masculine’ (Phillips 2012), can only circulate legally(usually online) in a gift economy, where they produce subcultural capital for their produ-cers rather than monetary profit. As Phillips notes, this is necessary when creatingunauthorized stories about characters that have powerful and litigious corporateowners with a strong economic interest in controlling all of the content associated withtheir brands. However, Braun’s films – including a Star Wars parody that generated nota word of complaint from Lucasfilm (Stuart 2013) – demonstrate that ‘celebrating thestory the way it is’ and skirting intellectual property laws by selling the work for profit ispossible under the protective umbrella of parody.8

The association between Braun and the figure of the productive fan, as he representshimself, is thus highly problematic: while his approach to filmmaking overlaps significantlywith commonly practiced activities within fandom – from fan fiction to cosplay – the factthat he performs these activities within the industrial framework of pornography (ratherthan, say, an online community governed by a gift economy) aligns him more closelywith industry than fandom. Indeed, profiting from one’s creativity within a fan communityis usually considered to be distasteful; Jenkins claims that this ‘reflects less a generalizablepolitical or economic resistance to capitalism’ – the object around which fandom iscentred is almost always a product of corporate cultural production and only availablethrough the marketplace – ‘than the desire to create forms of cultural production and dis-tribution that reflect the mutuality of the fan community’ (2013, 160).

In practice, then, Braun is a producer, selling a product to a particular kind of fan thatdoes not want to creatively transform the text but rather wants to ‘celebrate the story theway it is’, and whose standard for fidelity is so high that mainstream film adaptationsusually fail to reach it. This marks ‘a shift from the traditional fannish obsession with reify-ing the boundaries of the original text to a new fannish activity of concretizing those sameboundaries’, as Paul Booth (2012, 77) observes with regard to online fan videos within theSaw franchise. Braun’s films parody not only the original texts but also the feminine modesof fan writing (like slash) that transform seemingly masculine genres and texts in such away that they come to better embody their own sexual desires and interests. But:

if slash allows the reader to re-examine traditional notions of patriarchy within traditionalsociety through subverting the sexuality of the main characters, porn parody does the oppo-site: ‘it forces the audience to confront the patriarchal modes of contemporary media throughovert hyper-articulation’. (Jones 2013, 370)

This might be considered less as a confrontation, as Booth puts it, and more as a reaffirma-tion of the values latent in the original text. In this context, Braun’s work uses fannish (read:feminine) modes of cultural production to represent more traditionally masculine desires.The shift from not-for-profit to for-profit production further emphasizes a movement fromthe domestic/feminine sphere of grassroots fan communities to the capitalistic/masculineone of the marketplace.9

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Of course, Braun’s films are not run-of-the-mill superhero fan films, because they arealso pornographic. Constance Penley proposed that after learning to consider pornogra-phy as film (thanks to Linda Williams), the next challenge for scholars is to thinkthrough porn’s relationship with (and status as) popular culture: ‘We would then beable to ask what traits pornographic film shares with the production and consumptionof a whole range of popular forms’ (Penley 2004, 315).10 Penley’s call is by no meansrecent, and scholars have certainly answered it already, resulting in some excellentwork in the burgeoning field of porn studies, and even some on the porn parody genrespecifically.11 However, I argue that Braun’s superhero parodies present a unique pointof intersection between Hollywood, fandom, and the porn industry, appropriating trans-formative textual practices usually associated with fan productivity in order to attract hard-core fans to their hardcore product.

Like much pornography, Braun’s films could certainly be considered to be exploitativeof female bodies and male desires. What makes them most interesting, however, is nothow they reboot the porn parody genre, or even how they ‘hyper-articulate’ the genderpolitics of the mainstream superhero film, ‘mocking contemporary gender stereotypesthrough overt articulation’ (Booth 2014, 405). Rather, Braun’s films are most interestingfor their exploitation of the mainstream superhero genre’s limitations and the ways inwhich they capitalize on the creative freedoms afforded by their legal status as parody.While the mainstream superhero film must abide by the creative limitations imposed bycopyright law, its porn counterpart uses the parody classification to profit from others’intellectual property without permission. Braun’s superhero porn parodies are also oftendirectly antagonistic to their mainstream counterparts, but in ways that are meant toappeal to fans by confirming the value of an ‘original’ text – often the comics that Holly-wood fails to reproduce with sufficient fidelity – by addressing and critiquing the short-comings of the official adaptations.

The superhero costume: fidelity as fetish

While the content of these films, as in all pornography, remains centred on sex and itsgraphic depiction, many of the pleasures that they offer fans ultimately have little to dowith sex, and often undermine the expectations and norms of pornography as a genre.Dudley Andrew claims that the purpose of genres is to ‘construct the proper spectatorfor their own consumption’ by creating and then satisfying particular kinds of desires(in Jenkins 2013, 124). As a generic hybrid, the ‘proper spectator’ for Braun’s superheroporn parodies is a fairly complex and contradictory figure, torn between the conventionsof two genres whose ‘desires’ (and the means by which they would be satisfied) do notoverlap perfectly. As such, the films display an active negotiation between the desiresand pleasures of superhero texts and pornography.

Previous analyses of porn parodies suggest two possible outcomes for how viewersmight respond to such pornographic works. In her astute analysis of fan response to anX-Files porn parody titled The Sex Files: A Dark XXX Parody (Hain 2009), Bethan Jones(2013, 380) notes that the film appears to fail as both pornography and as parody, andonly becomes valuable as a text when read as a work of fan fiction; alternatively,I. Q. Hunter suspects that viewers of the A Clockwork Orange porn parody A ClockworkOrgy (Cramer 1995) would probably ‘resent the homage to Kubrick using up time available

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for uninterrupted sexual display’ (Hunter 2007, 108). Such hybrid texts risk alienatinggenre/franchise fans with hardcore sex extraneous to the narrative and alienating pornviewers with genre elements extraneous to their sexual gratification: the desires do notoverlap, but rather get in each other’s way. It is perhaps no surprise then that Braun de-emphasizes the pornographic elements of his films while playing up their appeal forfanboys: as quoted earlier, he imagines that they will be best enjoyed by ‘people whodon’t like porn’ but who are rather ‘fans of the source material’ (as quoted in Stuart2013: emphasis added). Indeed, Braun only directs the narrative scenes in his films; heis so disinterested in the sex scenes that he leaves the set while they are being filmed(Stuart 2013), a striking contrast to his attention to detail with regard to other aspectsof his productions.12

In certain cases, however, the desires of genre viewers and porn viewers can intersect:as Edward Buscombe notes in his discussion of a western porn parody, ‘The iconographyof the Western readily lends itself to being fetishized. Leather chaps and belts call atten-tion to the male genital area, and guns, of course, speak for themselves’ (2004, 27). Thesuperhero costume – a combination of colour, iconography, and the skin-huggingfabrics that create the impression of the (super)human body’s ‘perfect nudity’ (Bukatman2003, 215) – is similarly readymade as a fetish object. Even for the superhero himself orherself, the costume seems to be central to the genre’s appeal. As Scott Bukatmanhypothesizes:

What battles against ‘crime’ and ‘corruption’ really do, it seems, is license the donning of thesuperhero garb, legitimate the movement out of the home, through the window, and into thesecret magic of the urban night. The fantasy, then, is one of dressing up – superheroes don’twear costumes in order to fight crime, they fight crime in order to wear the costumes. (2003,216)

The superhero porn parody goes a step further: they fight crime in order to wear the cos-tumes in order to have sex.

A revisionist superhero text like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (Moore,Gibbons, and Higgins 2008; originally serialized 1986–1987) turns this generic subtextinto text in a manner that anticipates Braun’s porn parodies. In the classic graphicnovel, the superhero costume is what allows Nite Owl II to overcome his impotenceand have sex with Silk Spectre II; in porn parodies, the superhero costume similarlybecomes a primary site of generic pleasure – of both sexual and non-sexual varieties– for the viewer. Unlike Buscombe’s example of the pornographic western, however,this results in a subversion of pornographic convention in the superhero parody,specifically undermining what Linda Williams refers to as porn’s ‘principle ofmaximum visibility’ (1999, 48; original emphasis): that is, the privileging of ‘close-upsof body parts over other shots’, and the tendency ‘to overlight easily obscured genitals’and ‘to select sexual positions that show the most of bodies and organs’ (1999, 49). Thegraphic display of the naked body requires, first and foremost, a naked body, whichwould strip superheroes of both their unique identities and their fetishistic charge.Thankfully, the superhero costume, at least as represented in comic books, is essen-tially a colourized nude figure, whose every muscle is perfectly visible underneath alayer of so-tight-it-might-as-well-be-paint fabric.

PORN STUDIES 5

This nude ideal has not translated to Hollywood’s superhero adaptations, although thepresence of anatomical features like musculature and even nipples on the thick latex cos-tumes in Joel Schumacher’s (1995, 1997) Batman Forever and Batman & Robin have cer-tainly attempted to recreate this effect.13 In any case, the nudity of the comic booksuperhero does not extend to visible genitalia, making the male costumed superheroappear vaguely castrated when in crime-fighting garb.14 Obviously, that will not cut itfor porn: for superheroes of both sexes, the costumes remain on during sex scenes inBraun’s films, but with small holes cut into the fabric, exposing their genitals andnothing else. (The holes magically disappear immediately after orgasm, demonstratingthat the greatest superpower is editing.)

Unlike much pornography, extreme close-ups of sex organs are generally avoided inthese films, because to exclude the entirety of the costume is to exclude much of thegenre’s unique appeal: without his Superman costume, performer Ryan Driller ceases tobe recognizable as a superhero and sacrifices the cosplay element that makes thesefilms distinct from ‘normal’ pornography.15 The superhero costume’s pseudo-nudity sub-stitutes and replaces literal nudity; it is the superhero costume, not the naked body, thatachieves maximum visibility. In this way, the superhero costume clearly functions as afetish object in these films: it is the ‘perversion’ that distinguishes it from other varietiesof moving image pornography, and the thing that the films most clearly and prominentlyput on display.16

Moreover, in other media superheroes have the opportunity to demonstrate theirsuperpowers in spectacular ways; in porn parodies, such moments of violent spectacleare either elided or executed quickly and with a minimum of fuss in order to get to thesex.17 Notably, the brief moments of CGI-enabled displays of superpowers are always rele-gated to the narrative scenes; the superheroes and villains refrain from using their powersduring sex. Other than the costumes, then, the sex scenes ‘keep close to the documentaryevidence’ of the act of copulation (Williams 1999, 50) rather than adhering to the genericlogic of how superheroes might use their powers recreationally. This limitation puts evenmore significance on the costumes, because without the costumes they are not superher-oes, they are just porn stars.

Before turning to the films more closely, a brief word on the selection of case studies forthis article: as of this writing, Braun has directed almost 200 films including dozens ofbranded parodies, 16 of which are the kinds of superhero parodies under discussionhere.18 In order to produce a focused and coherent analysis of the genre, it will be necess-ary to limit the number of texts being considered. For the purposes of this article I willpresent analyses of three case studies: Superman vs. Spider-Man XXX: An Axel BraunParody (Braun 2012d), Man of Steel XXX: An Axel Braun Parody (Braun 2013b), and TheDark Knight XXX: A Porn Parody (Braun 2012b). These three films best exemplify themain strategies at work in Braun’s superhero parodies, and demonstrate the full gamutof intertextual relations that they create and rely upon for their effects.

Adaptation vs. parody: the battle of the century (Superman vs. Spider-ManXXX)

The strong emphasis Braun’s parodies place on fidelity to their original source texts begsthe question: are these parodies or are they adaptations? Legally, the categories are clearly

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distinguished, as the case of Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation (Powers 2012) demon-strates. In 2012, porn production company Smash Pictures was sued by Universal overtheir XXX version of E. L. James’ novel, a film they specifically marketed as an adaptationrather than a parody (Jamet 2012, 60). Like the superhero parodies under exploration inthis essay, Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation did not change the names of its charactersto punny sound-alikes or transform the narrative into a comedy at the expense of the orig-inal: indeed, in keeping with its self-presentation as an adaptation, it retained the plot andcharacters of the book on which it was based. But because Smash did not obtain the legalrights to adapt the novel cinematically, their film infringed on Universal Studios who hadpurchased the film rights for the book.19 If Smash had released their film under the titleFifty Shades of Grey XXX: A Porn Parody, however, they would likely have been legally pro-tected without otherwise needing to change a single frame of the actual film. Entertain-ment lawyer David Ginsburg clarifies that ‘The rules of parody apply as equally to pornas they do to any other form of parody, like “Saturday Night Live” or Mad Magazine’ (asquoted in Rogers 2013), allowing them to essentially be unauthorized adaptations and/or for-profit fan films in terms of their degree of fidelity to the work being parodied.20

If parody is defined as ‘the genre of making-fun-of’ (Chatman 2001, 28), then certainlycomedic television shows and magazines like SNL and Mad qualify without reservation,which is why they can use copyrighted characters for the purposes of satirizing themand the texts in which they appear. These are quite distinct from the kinds of parodiesat issue in this article, however, which are rarely comedic in tone. While bawdy comedyis a central feature of most porn parodies (Lehman 1996, 46; Watson 2013, 392; Booth2014, 3, 98) and, indeed, pornography in general (Williams 1999, 62; Shelton 2002, 126–127; Penley 2004, 313), Braun’s superhero parodies are closer to adaptations insofar asthey only attempt humour in equal measure to the text being parodied: for instance,Batman XXX: A Porn Parody replicates the light-hearted and pun-filled spirit of the 1960stelevision series, while The Dark Knight XXX (Braun 2012b) is a rather bleak and mirthlessaffair – arguably even more so than the Christopher Nolan films that inspired it!

Ultimately, the only salient differences between Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptationand Braun’s parodies lie in their self-categorization – adaptation vs. parody – and thestatus of sex in the original narrative: since Fifty Shades already has explicit sex in the orig-inal novel, hardcore representations thereof in the pornographic version do not representa parodic addition. In Braun’s parodies, however, the sex scenes represent an automaticdifference from the original, and may be interpreted as a parodic commentary on the‘repressions and erotic sensibilities’ latent in the original works: ‘a kind of wild over-correc-tion, substituting the single motivation of sex’ (Hunter 2006, 325) for the archetypal super-heroic raison d’êtres of ‘truth, justice, and the American way’ and ‘with great power comesgreat responsibility’.

Nevertheless, the line between parody and adaptation remains unclear, as a film likeSuperman vs. Spider-Man XXX demonstrates. In contrast to most of Braun’s other superheroparodies, Superman vs. Spider-Man XXX is not inspired by the plot and imagery of a Holly-wood adaptation, but is rather an adaptation of a particular comic book that has not – andwill probably never – be officially adapted to film. At the time of its release in 1976, thefilm’s source text Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man: The Battle of the Century(Conway et al. 1976) was an unprecedented collaboration between the two largest pub-lishers of superhero comics in the world (DC and Marvel), featuring a team-up between

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their flagship characters. This crossover, and all those that would follow in its wake, aremeant to provide answers to the Big Questions of superhero fandom – many of whichbegin with the words ‘Who would win in a fight between… ?’ – and hope to satisfyfans of both companies while simultaneously winning new readers for both. Since Super-man and Spider-Man live in different narrative universes specific to their respective pub-lishers, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man’s central appeal is the co-presence of twocharacters who have never appeared in the same story before and may never do soagain. Whereas intra-company crossovers are now de rigeur in the superhero film genre– think The Avengers (Whedon 2012) or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder2016) – inter-company crossovers have not been forthcoming, which is why the X-Men(whose film rights rest with Fox) do not join the Avengers (who are owned by Marvel),even though they cross paths all the time in Marvel Comics.21 It is also why the cinematicSpider-Man (Sony/Marvel) may join the Avengers, but he will never cross paths with Super-man (Warner Bros/DC).22

Since porn parodies do not need to receive permission to use licensed characters,however, they enjoy total freedom to use whichever ones they please: even the legallyunadaptable Marvel/DC crossover Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man is fair game forlive-action adaptation, so long as it is done under the auspices of parody. Superheroporn films can thus offer fans the experience of certain characters and combinations ofcharacters that they will never see in the mainstream due to the legal restrictionsaround character use which major film studios must abide by. In this regard, what theporn parody may be ‘making fun of’ is not a particular text but the corporate stricturesplaced on the Hollywood film industry itself.

Superman vs. Spider-Man XXX is more than just a porn film that features both of its twotitle characters: it is unambiguously framed as an adaptation of the 1976 comic. Braun hassaid that ‘people wanted to see a movie [based on that comic]; now they have a chance tosee that movie’ (Stuart 2013), suggesting that his intention in making the film is closer toadaptation than parody. As in many mainstream comic book adaptations, the film’s para-textual materials emphasize the aesthetic similarities between the original and the adap-tation; for instance, the DVD box art and the cover of the comic book feature nearlyidentical visual compositions. The film’s narrative does differ substantially from the 1976version, however, mostly in order to accommodate a series of sex scenes (the comicdoes not feature any female superheroes; the porn version adds Black Cat, Spider-Woman, and Supergirl to its cast of characters) and to decrease the amount of storyand action-based spectacle. The basic premise – Superman and Spider-Man team up todefeat Lex Luthor and Dr. Octopus, who are working together – survives the adaptationto porn, as do some specific scenes from the comic, including an early scene in whichthe two villains escape prison together through a device Luthor smuggled in under hisskin.

One notable deviation from the plot of the comic occurs in the film’s final scene,wherein the ultimate confrontation between Luthor, Octopus, Superman, and Spider-Man nearly ends in the villains’ favour, before Spider-Woman appears out of nowhereto save the male heroes with a single energy blast. (Guess what she asks of Spider-Manin return?!) The practical reason for this departure from the source text is to insertanother female sex partner in a narrative that is mostly centred around men, but itattests to the sad fact that superhero porn parodies are – by necessity – far more likely

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to include female characters than their mainstream counterparts. Braun’s films featurefemale characters in far greater numbers than Hollywood superhero films, but alsonecessitate that they always be subjugated to the sexual desires of men (includingthose of the viewer himself). As Paul Booth notes,

Women take a more central role in pornography in general, and in porn parody specifically.Women are also most often the central characters in porn parody, to the extent that manycharacters who are male in the original text, like the Tusken raiders [in Star Wars], are madefemale in the parody (This is Jaws XXX goes so far as to make female the protagonist,Richard Dreyfuss’s character, Matt Hooper). This type of feminization is common in slashfiction, which upends traditional gender roles by illustrating, as Jenkins (1992) puts it, an ero-ticization of male characters put into female positions in the narrative. (2014, 405)

In contrast to slash and the parodies cited by Booth, Braun’s superhero parodies neverfeminize characters that are male in the original: in keeping with the desires of themale fandom outlined earlier, fidelity to the source material trumps any desire to queeror otherwise subvert the original text. Gender-swapping would enable more heterosexual(or girl-on-girl) sex scenes; instead, Braun’s parodies simply include more female charactersfrom the established comic book universe – in comics-accurate costumes – and add themto the narrative alongside the male characters.

Similarly to the appeal of Superman and Spider-Man teaming up, Braun’s films tendto include live-action versions of comic book characters that have not yet appeared inHollywood features – especially female characters – and often present more visuallyfaithful versions of those that have.23 To wit, Spider-Man vs. Superman, Man of Steel,and The Dark Knight’s parodies alone feature Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Livewire,Silver Banshee, Zatanna, Black Cat, Spider-Woman, Batgirl, Poison Ivy, Catwoman,and Kathy Kane (Batwoman in the comics), in addition to other non-costumedfemale characters. Of these 11 superheroines/villains, only four have ever appearedin a mainstream superhero film. Although many feminist fans would not be pleasedor satisfied with the representation of these characters in a pornographic context,their representation therein can nevertheless be interpreted as a damning critiqueof the Hollywood superhero genre, which has been widely criticized for its reluctanceto centre films on female superhero protagonists.24

Braun’s films trouble the distinctions between the categories of parody and adaptation,as well as fan fiction, appropriating elements of a beloved fan object and transforming it inways similar to how fans expand the worlds of their favourite franchises. Linda Hutcheonmakes a distinction between fan fiction and adaptations: ‘There is a difference betweennever wanting a story to end… and wanting to retell the same story over and over indifferent ways’ (2006, 9). In these terms, Superman vs. Spider-Man XXX seems moreclosely aligned with adaptation than fan fiction,25 although it also aligns with Hutcheon’sown definition of parody as ‘repetition with critical distance’ (1991, 6). In Hutcheon’s terms,it retells and repeats, with critical distance and difference, a story previously told: it is a fan-made parodic adaptation. The other films discussed in this article are more clearly cut fromthe parodic cloth, directly critiquing particular Hollywood films for various reasons and, likefan fiction, appealing to fans by correcting the ‘errors’ of the original text or dramatizingthat which the original text only suggests.

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Character rape (Man of Steel XXX and The Dark Knight XXX)

The fan response to Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot (and opening salvo of DC/WarnerBros’ cinematic superhero universe), Man of Steel (Snyder 2013), is an excellent demon-stration of the kinds of ‘fanboy desires’ to which Braun’s parodies cater. While theonline fan response to the film ranges from unqualified adoration to categorical dismissal,the consensus opinion centres on a single complaint: that Superman does not make anyeffort to prevent (or avoid causing) a massive loss of human life in the film’s action climax,the collateral damage of which has been estimated by disaster experts at 129,000 con-firmed dead, 250,000 missing/presumed dead, one million injured, and $750 billion inphysical damages (Zakarin 2013). Resistance to this new iteration of the Supermanmyth was widespread, prompting editorials like that of Devin Faraci for Birth. Movies.Death.:

I understand that it’s 2013 and there are elements of the Superman mythos that need to beupdated and brought into the modern world… But there are some things about Supermanthat are so vital, so central to what sets him apart from other superheroes, that to changethem is to alter utterly the character, rendering him Superman no more. And one of thosethings – maybe the ultimate central thing that makes Superman who he is – is his status asa protector. (Faraci 2013)

Faraci continues, identifying a particular irony that results in the uncomfortable marriageof Superman-as-protector with the demands of the contemporary action (‘disaster porn’)blockbuster:

The only time Superman seems to show interest in the well-being of civilians is during thebeginning of the Smallville fight, when he tells people to get indoors. He then proceeds tohelp destroy all the buildings in which those people were hiding.

While many complaints about mainstream comic book adaptations have to do with visualfidelity – Superman and his world ought to look a certain way, based on how they look inthe comics – the negative response to Man of Steel has to do with fidelity to ‘the spirit’ ofthe original text.

For many fans, the film fell short of an understanding of Superman created by a com-bination of general generic expectations (superheroes save people) and a specific under-standing of the character produced intertextually (Superman has previously beenrepresented as demonstrating a concern for human life above all). Regardless ofwhether it was authorized by the legal owners of the character, Man of Steel’s depictionof Superman could be called ‘character rape’, a term used in some fan circles to identifymoments in a serialized fiction that do not jibe with fans’ understanding of a particularcharacter. As Jenkins puts it, this concept:

frees fans to reject large chunks of the aired material, including entire episodes, and even toradically restructure the concerns of the show in the nameof defending thepurity of the originalseries concept. What determines the range of permissible fan narratives is finally not fidelity tothe original texts but consensus within the fan community itself. (2006b, Kindle loc. 1077)

Naturally, the thousands of appearances of Superman in various media have made for acomplex and contradictory character history, but, as responses like Faraci’s attest, thistrait may safely be considered as a cornerstone of the character’s ‘meta-text’: that is, the

10 D. JEFFRIES

‘ideal’ version of a text against which the validity of new versions and instalments arejudged (Jenkins 2013, 98).

Man of Steel XXX’s narrative directly critiques Snyder’s characterization of the titularcharacter by addressing those elements of the mainstream film that most rankled fans.To begin with, the film does not depict Superman’s origin story, as the film does,instead beginning in medias res, relying instead on the character’s comic book historyas an implied backstory.26 At the outset of the parody, Superman is tired of bearing theweight of the world’s problems on his shoulders; after accidentally killing the supervillainLivewire, the superhero approaches Dr. Fate and asks him to magically divest him of hissuperpowers, both as penance for his lethal loss of control and to relieve him of hisburden. Compare this with the mainstream version: after decimating much of Smallvilleand downtown Metropolis in battle, Superman deliberately snaps General Zod’s neck,killing him instantly; he cries out in remorse, but in the next scene is smiling and jokingwith the US military about their inability to police his actions.

The parody thus begins with Superman’s struggle with the moral conundrum that Manof Steel ignores, and uses it as the impetus for the rest of its story. While the mainstreamSuperman does not bat an eye at destroying Metropolis and many of its citizens, and isonly temporarily dismayed at having to execute a supervillain, the pornographic Super-man is so shaken when he accidentally kills a villain that he seriously questions his worthi-ness as a hero. Anticipating the plot of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder 2016),President Lex Luthor denounces Superman’s lethal actions and puts a $1 billion bounty onhis now-powerless head, then announces the creation of a Superman clone that will actunder the US government’s authority. Naturally, the clone plot backfires, creating thesupervillain Bizarro and prompting Superman to head to the Fortress of Solitude. Dr.Fate has anticipated his need for an antidote that will restore his powers. Bizarro tracksSuperman to the Fortress, where the repowered superhero reluctantly dispatches himto the Phantom Zone, an interdimensional prison. In the parody’s closing moments,Wonder Woman arrives at the Fortress, where she reaffirms Earth’s need of him. Theykiss, and the film fades to black.

Bethan Jones’ aforementioned article on The Sex Files offers a particularly relevantcontext through which to assess Man of Steel XXX’s relationships with the film being par-odied, and Superman fandom more generally. What is notable about The Sex Files, Jonesargues, is how it departs from pornographic conventions in order to better appeal toviewers that are deeply engaged with the fandom of the original text, perhaps to thepoint of alienating more traditionally ‘pornographic’ modes of viewing (2013, 371). Inthis regard, The Sex Files seems similar to Braun’s films; however, what is unique aboutJones’ case study is the careful way that the porn version’s narrative unfolds within theboundaries of the X-Files meta-text, giving concrete articulation to a popular fan theory(and the subject of much speculative fan fiction) that a sexual encounter occurredbetween the series’ lead characters in the margins of a particular episode.

The Sex Files’ director Sam Hain is quoted in Jones’ article, expressing his concern withmaking his film ‘work very much like the television show’ and having it ‘fit into continuitywith the actual series’ (2013, 381), going so far as to locate its narrative at a particular junc-ture in the series (near the end of season seven, even though it was released years after theseries went off the air). Jones thus concludes that the porn parody is best ‘read as a para-text, and read through the series and its fanfiction’, making it ‘part of the show’s meta-text’

PORN STUDIES 11

for a particular segment of the series’ fandom known as ‘shippers’, whose enjoyment ofthe show largely hinges on the romantic undertones of Mulder and Scully’s relationship(2013, 380). For these viewers, the porn parody functions similarly to their own fanfiction, and becomes a legitimate addition to the X-Files narrative.

Braun’s parody of Man of Steel, by contrast, oscillates between fidelity to its source text(with regard to the superheroes’ costumes and overall visual design) and an overt critiquethereof, the latter of which is better understood not as infidelity to the film but rather as agreater fidelity to the Superman meta-text than Snyder’s film itself demonstrates. WhereasThe Sex Files appeals to fans by positioning itself within the show’s canon,Man of Steel XXXcontradicts the mainstream version throughout, instead rewarding fan knowledge ofcomic book narratives through references to characters like Lobo, Mongol, Doomsday,and Metallo, and specific narrative arcs like ‘Lex 2000′ (wherein Luthor is elected President)and ‘The Death and Return of Superman’. While The Sex Files’ narrative is overtly concernedwith sex, thereby commenting on the conspicuous lack thereof in the television series,Man of Steel XXX’s themes are concerned more or less entirely with Superman’s internalstruggle with his place in the world and the ethics of superheroism. As a result, the sexscenes are all inessential to the narrative as such – note that no sexual encounters arementioned in this plot synopsis – and to the unique pleasures the film offers to fans.

This again contrasts with Jones’ case study: while the climactic Mulder–Scully sexualpairing that closes The Sex Files services fandom by finally fulfilling the unresolvedsexual tension (referred to in X-Files fandom, at least, by the acronym UST) between thetwo characters in the official version (Jones 2013, 379), the sex scenes in Man of SteelXXX seem to go out of their way to be of little interest to fans. Without exception, the char-acter pairings in the sex scenes avoid those with canonical UST (or even sexual tension) inthe comics or the mainstream film. Rather than capitalize on the inherent fan appeal ofseeing Superman have sex with Lois Lane or Wonder Woman, for example, Man of SteelXXX offers the unlikely pairings of Livewire and a male radio station manager, SilverBanshee and Angle Man, a black-suited Superman and Zatanna, Lois Lane and LanaLang, and finally Bizarro and Lana.

The closest the film comes to capitalizing on UST occurs at the film’s end, when Super-man and Wonder Woman kiss in the Fortress of Solitude. Astonishingly for a work of por-nography, the film fades to black during this initial kiss, deferring fans’ collectivegratification at seeing their UST graphically resolved in favour of building anticipationfor the inevitable sequel.27 In this way, the parody privileges a convention of the superherogenre – narrative serialization and its endless deferral of resolution – rather than satisfyingfans’ sexual desires with a climactic money shot.28 Instead, Man of Steel XXX offers a nar-rative that replaces the hyperbolic action of the mainstream version with quiet contempla-tion, devotes considerable effort to correcting the character rape of the official film, andrewards fan knowledge by drawing upon the characters’ comic book histories andrelationships.

While the fannish value of Man of Steel XXX’s sex scenes is close to nil, The Dark KnightXXX offers two sex scenes (out of five) that would be of particular interest to fans. A sexscene between Bruce Wayne (out of his Batman costume) and Catwoman (in hercatsuit, which hews much closer to the current comics look than the costume worn byAnne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises [Nolan 2012]) is similar to the Mulder–Scullyscene in The Sex Files insofar as it visualizes, in hardcore detail, that which has long

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been teased or suggested in mainstream comics and film narratives.29 Most interesting,however, is the scene that opens the film, in which Joker rapes Batgirl. This is a direct adap-tation and extrapolation of a scene from Alan Moore and Brian Boland’s graphic novelBatman: The Killing Joke (Moore et al. 1988):

In an infamous scene, the Joker and his henchmen assault Police Commissioner James Gordonand his daughter, Barbara (secretly the superhero Batgirl), in their home. The commissioner iskidnapped, and the Joker shoots Barbara with a revolver, paralyzing her. Joker takes Commis-sioner Gordon to the carnival grounds serving as his headquarters, strips and binds him, andthen forces him to look at the photographs of his daughter’s suffering, which some believeincludes an implied rape. (Ayres 2010, 345)

Like The Sex Files, then, The Dark Knight XXX draws upon the fan-created meta-text anddramatizes what many imagine to have transpired between the panels of The KillingJoke. While acts of rape in Braun’s other films discussed herein are coded as consensual– in Superman vs. Spider-Man XXX, for instance, a caged Lois Lane is forced to fellate LexLuthor, but beforehand she ‘consents’ by telling him ‘If I suck your cock, you better fuckme really good’ – the Batgirl-Joker scene that opens The Dark Knight XXX is unambiguouslypresented as rape. Batgirl refuses eye contact, struggles, pushes him away, and audiblyprotests throughout (‘Don’t touch me’; ‘Fuck you’; ‘You disgust me’; ‘Get your filthyhands off of me’). Most of the scene is focused on anal sex, which is rare in these parodies,and only desired by villainous (‘deviant’) characters like Livewire and Joker. CommissionerGordon is forced to watch the whole scene, naked, from a cage. After the money shot,Joker tells Batgirl to ‘run to papa’, at which point he shoots her in the back, paralysingher. As she lies crippled on the floor, Joker laughingly conflates the preceding sex act’sorgasmic culmination with its equally grotesque aftermath (‘I guess she got two in theback’).

The appeal of this scene for fans of Batman and The Killing Joke in particular is alongthe same lines traced in the earlier examples: like Superman vs. Spider-Man XXX, it is anadaptation of a work that is unlikely to be adapted in the mainstream; and like The SexFiles, it dramatizes a scene that fans have long speculated about. But this rape and sub-sequent moment of horrific violence – more shocking than anything, perhaps, in amainstream superhero film to date – also puts the lack of humour in these parodiesinto stark relief.

Conclusion: the fanboy id runs wild

Peter Lehman and Constance Penley have both rightly noted the central role of humour inpornography, which parodies have historically displayed in their titles, usually involvingsome crass wordplay (e.g. the aforementioned A Clockwork Orgy and The Sex Files).Despite the superficial connection to a mainstream film made through the title, Lehmannotes that porn parodies tend to ‘have little or no iconographic connection with their orig-inal and they remain, in effect, one-joke remakes’ (1996, 50); and Penley suggests thatthese ‘knockoffs cannot be intended simply to ride the coattails of popular Hollywoodfilms because most consumers know that the porn version seldom has much to do withthe themes, characters, and events found in the original film’ (2004, 328). Neither obser-vation is true of Braun’s superhero parodies. These are films that take themselves and

PORN STUDIES 13

the genre seriously, refusing parody’s association with comedy30 and instead inheritingthe grim seriousness that the mainstream superhero film has largely embraced inrecent years, only a few decades after the genre’s ‘realistic’ turn in comics (as embodiedby milestone works like The Killing Joke). As Will Brooker correctly points out, however,realism is ‘a term used synonymously in this context with “darkness”, or sometimes “gritti-ness”, connoting a militarization of the genre, a surge toward hypermasculinity, a readi-ness to get “down and dirty”’ (2013, 28). The very premise of the porn parody genre,however, is that mainstream texts can only get so ‘down and dirty’; they will alwaysleave the more extreme narrative beats, like Batgirl’s rape, to the uncertainty ofimplication.

At the outset of this article, I portrayed the superhero porn parody genre as the main-stream genre’s evil doppelganger, but perhaps it is more accurately described as its id runwild. The restrictions placed upon Hollywood superhero adaptations – in terms of whatstories can be told, which characters can be used, and how many of those characterscan be women – are radically undermined by Braun’s porn parody, in ways that reflectthe conservatism of the mainstream superhero genre and its fans. The popularity of super-hero porn parodies arguably speaks to a desire immanent in the genre’s fandom, orperhaps even an ideology underlying the genre itself. At a 2013 press conference,comic creators Todd McFarlane, Len Wein, and Gerry Conway asserted that the superherogenre is primarily male-centric, ‘testosterone-driven’, and not the proper venue for storiesfor or about women (Rosenberg 2013). In academia, Scott Bukatman has described super-hero comics as stories about ‘mutant musclemen and the big-titted women who lovethem’ (2003, 48). These conceptions of the genre are both eerily similar to how Linda Wil-liams describes a common perception of pornography ‘as the quintessential male genre –as the most extreme example of what Women abhor about male power’ (1999, 4). Whilefemale-oriented fandoms devote considerable intellectual and creative energies towardswarping such patriarchal genres into shapes that better appeal to their interests anddesires, male fandom unsurprisingly seems much more inclined to keep the story theway it is. If porn and the superhero genre both usually speak to and express a malepower fantasy already, ultimately Braun’s porn parodies only take current trends in super-hero film aesthetics (serious, adult, hypermasculine) and fanboys’ fetish for fidelity to thenext level.

Notes

1. Other notable porn parody directors include Will Ryder’s (2007) Not the Bradys XXX and LeeRoy Myers’ (2009) Friends XXX: A Porn Parody.

2. See http://business.avn.com/articles/video/AVN-Announces-the-Winners-of-the-2011-AVN-Awards-421782.html. Accessed June 24, 2015.

3. See, for instance, http://www.wickedb2b.com/news/for-immediate-release-wicked-comix-releases-official-trailer-for-batman-v-superman-xxx-an-axel-braun-parody. Accessed June 24,2015.

4. For sales figures, see http://www.comichron.com/vitalstatistics/topcomics.html. AccessedJune 24, 2015.

5. For a breakdown of superhero films’ box office grosses, see http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=superhero.htm. Accessed June 24, 2015.

6. Naturally, there are other reasons why live-action films might deviate from the costumedesigns featured in comics. See Jeffries (2013).

14 D. JEFFRIES

7. Despite the lack of actual fan productivity in such instances, the ‘fanboy’ obsession with visualfidelity evidenced by Braun’s parodies suggests a similar set of values as those underlyingwhat Matt Hills (2014) calls ‘mimetic fandom’, a masculine coded subculture wherein fansdevote considerable energy to creating screen-accurate replicas of significant objects andprops. In both cases, it is the superficial visual design of a text that is privileged over otherkinds of meaning. See also Hassler-Forest (2012), which discusses how the film version of300′s significant departures from the politics of the graphic novel are overshadowed by thevisual similarities between the two: the film is appraised as a ‘faithful’ adaptation on thesegrounds.

8. The relationship between the genre of parody and Braun’s films is complex and certainly war-rants more discussion than I have space for in this article. Batman XXX (Braun 2010) wouldmake for a particularly interesting case study, since it is a parody of a parody that replicatesthe style of the original 1960s television series while thoroughly neutralizing the original’s sub-versive homosexual subtext.

9. See Rebecca Lucy Busker’s (2013) ‘Fandom and Male Privilege: Seven Years Later’ for otherexamples of how men seek to appropriate female-oriented fan spaces.

10. Following Williams, I will forgo the question of whether these pornographic films are misogy-nist or if they should exist: the fact is they do exist, they appeal to a certain audience, and thisappeal should be understood.

11. See specifically work by Paul Booth (2014), Claire Hines (2012), I. Q. Hunter (2006, 2007), BethanJones (2013), Peter Lehman (1996), Emily Shelton (2002), Julian Stringer (2002), and ThomasWatson (2013).

12. Despite Braun’s prioritization of narrative, the contrast between the two genres’ conventionscome into particularly stark relief in the ‘non-sex’ versions of the films that are often includedas DVD bonus features. Without the sex scenes, the films are dramatically shortened andusually fail to satisfy as standalone narratives.

13. Ozymandias’ costume in the film version of Watchmen (Snyder 2009) also features musclesand nipples in what seems to be a satiric allusion to Schumacher’s films.

14. In interviews, superhero film costume designers often discuss their struggles over ‘bulge’ size,not wanting their superheroes to be distractingly well endowed nor totally castrated. See, forexample, Smith (2005).

15. See Lamerichs (2011) for a discussion of cosplay as a site of fan productivity.16. One reviewer of The Dark Knight XXX bemoans a missed opportunity that articulates how the

superhero costume functions as a substitute for the naked body: ‘Things finish off withBrendon cumming in Penny’s mouth, sort of an opportunity lost, cum shot on the bat girlsymbol, could have been hot’ (Thorne 2012).

17. See, for instance, the deus ex machina resolution of Superman vs. Spider-Man XXX discussed inthe next section of this article.

18. As of this writing, these include Batman XXX: A Porn Parody (Braun 2010), Superman XXX: A PornParody (Braun 2011b), Spider-Man XXX: A Porn Parody (Braun 2011a), Avengers XXX: A PornParody (Braun 2012a), The Dark Knight XXX: A Porn Parody (Braun 2012b), Superman vs.Spider-Man XXX: An Axel Braun Parody (Braun 2012d), She-Hulk XXX: An Axel Braun Parody(Braun 2012c), Iron Man XXX: An Axel Braun Parody (Braun 2013a), Man of Steel XXX: An AxelBraun Parody (Braun 2013b), Wolverine XXX: An Axel Braun Parody (Braun 2013d), Thor XXX:An Axel Braun Parody (Braun 2013c), Captain America XXX: An Axel Braun Parody (Braun2014a), Spider-Man XXX 2: An Axel Braun Parody (Braun 2014b), X-Men XXX: An Axel BraunParody (Braun 2014c), Avengers XXX 2: An Axel Braun Parody (Braun 2015a), and Batman vSuperman XXX: An Axel Braun Parody (Braun 2015b).

19. Universal’s film was released in February 2015.20. Fifty Shades is a particularly interesting example with regards to these issues, since E. L. James’

novel began its life as Twilight fan fiction before being reworked to centre on new characters.21. The only exception to this rule is Spider-Man, whose forthcoming films represent an unprece-

dented collaboration between Marvel and Sony. While Sony continues to own the film rights

PORN STUDIES 15

to the character, Spider-Man can appear in Marvel Studios films as well. See Graser and Lang(2015).

22. Whereas Marvel sold off the film rights to many of their superheroes in order to temporarilystave off bankruptcy in the 1990s (Howe 2012), resulting in a limited number of charactersaround which to base their initial cycle of films beginning in 2008, the film rights for everyDC character are owned by DC’s parent company, Warner Bros.

23. The comic book accuracy of the costumes is a central component of the way Vivid marketsthese films. Note, for instance, the advertising copy accompanying the trailer for The DarkKnight XXX on the official Vivid website: ‘a better Batman costume than its mainstreamcounterpart? A Catwoman who can actually kick ass? Zatanna? John Constantine? Nightwing?Poison Ivy? Batgirl? A Bane who can give his Hollywood counterpart a run for his money, and aJoker who’s creepier than the late screen legend???’ See http://www.vividparodies.com.Accessed June 24, 2015.

24. See, for instance, Berger (2015) and Shaw-Williams (2014).25. Bethan Jones (2013, 382) makes a compelling case for understanding fan fiction as a form of

adaptation.26. The reliance on and repetition of superhero origin stories for film adaptations have become

another common complaint within fandom. See, for instance, Beckerman (2012).27. That sequel,Wonder Woman XXX: An Axel Braun Parody, was filmed concurrently but has yet to

be released (Stuart 2013). Vivid is probably stalling its release in order to capitalize on theinevitable marketing for the mainstream version, which currently has a scheduled releasedate of 23 June 2017.

28. See Williams (1999, 93–119) on the salience of the money shot in mainstream pornography, aswell as Williams (2008, 25–67) on the narrative ellipsis as it pertains to kissing and sex in main-stream filmmaking from 1896 to 1963.

29. See, for instance, the final pages of Catwoman #1 (Winick et al. 2011).30. As Thomas Watson analyzes, horror porn parodies also combine genre elements with hard-

core sex, which similarly complicates parody’s association with humour by instead embracinga ‘callous tone and representations of violence’ (2013, 388).

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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18 D. JEFFRIES

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