As the release date for Bret Easton Ellis’ film The Canyons approaches, Josh Lambert analyzes the self-styled Jewishness of crossover porn star James Deen:
Picture a Jewishy guy from a recent blockbuster movie, whether it’s Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, or Jesse Eisenberg. He’s likely a nebbish, some clumsy man-child who wants desperately to have sex but can’t quite figure out how. This image has its history, too, of course — you can trace it back to Matthew Broderick and Jonathan Silverman discovering masturbation in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, and before that to Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, and Charles Grodin in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who seized upon Freudian sexual neurosis, by way of the stand-up of Woody Allen and Shelley Berman, and smelted it into curly-haired, American New Wave gold.
What Deen manages to do is to destroy this cliché of the sexually passive Jewish man that still pervades our popular culture, replacing it not with its anti-Semitic mirror-image, that old chestnut about insatiable Hebrew lust, but with an image of unselfconscious, upbeat, healthy male sexuality.
Jacob Silverman takes a more critical approach:
Deen is active in this shaping of his image, using his Jewishness as a metonym for likeable and unthreatening. … I have no problem with porn or with presenting James Deen as its most palatable public face. And perhaps, as Ellis and some of Deen’s other ardent boosters claim, he’ll use his acting skills, which make him the Brando of his current industry, to impressive effect in The Canyons. But for now, there’s a troubling way in which Deen’s Jewishness—his "nice Jewish boy"-ness—is used as a gloss to make him acceptable for public consumption. There’s a strange justificatory tone in the desire to explain it all, as well as an element of surprise: who knew that nebbishy Jews could fuck better than steroidal goyim? (Ron Jeremy, himself a failed actor, is sometimes ironically praised for being the stereotypical hirsute, soft-bellied Jew—another kind of sympathetic everyman, save his enormous member.)
Previous coverage of Deen's burgeoning career here and here.
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