Now, in a digital age where Eros has become irreversibly virtual on the
Internet, Mitchell's death punctuates the end of an era that he long outlived.
Today's aspiring versions of the Mitchell Brothers wouldn't dream of investing
in urban real estate or relishing public dustups with local politicians. They'd
be operating under the radar, selling their Web wares from some garage in
Bakersfield or a back bedroom in Fresno.
The Mitchells' inspiration, if you can attach that term to a business built on
lap dances and X-rated videos, was essentially theatrical. They were the city's
last true vaudevillians. That was apparent in everything from the paradoxical
look of their O'Farrell Theatre on the Tenderloin's western fringe (a sleek,
well-maintained warren of heterosexuality-for-sale venues adorned outside with
a mighty, mock-innocent mural of whales), to their flair for publicity, to
their market-savvy sense of the transgressively absurd.
Maybe it was just dumb luck that the star of their 1972 film "Behind the Green
Door," Marilyn Chambers, turned out to have an Ivory Soap box modeling stint on
her resume. And could they have wished for anyone better than a maternal Dianne
Feinstein in her business-suit bows and shellacked hairdos as a mayoral scourge
when she was in office? But few would have capitalized on such accidents as
avidly as the Mitchells did.
The brothers knew that sex was serious business -- and seriously funny as well.
They were the clown princes of porn, who grasped the importance of royalty in
other spheres. They were on convivial terms with Hunter S. Thompson, Herb Caen,
R. Crumb and many others capable of enlarging their myth. Who could say how
many times their own connections and personalities bailed them out of deep
legal or financial waters?
And then, in a twist that some sleaze-addled Shakespeare might have devised,
the Fates pulled them under the tide together. On a winter night in 1991, Jim
Mitchell shot and killed his alcoholic brother Artie in a Corte Madera bedroom.
He served three years in San Quentin for the fratricide.
By the time of his release, in 1997, the sexual universe was a permanently
altered place. The culture, then as now, was embroiled in questions about the
impact, ethics, legality and morality of widely available sexual content on the
Internet. In the great wash of that multibillion-dollar industry, Jim
Mitchell's passing has the feel of an archaic footnote. But it also provides a
vantage point, a place to pause and consider the long, twisting and often
confounding tale of our attitudes about commodified sex.
It's instructive to ponder some of the plot points that have emerged since the
O'Farrell Theatre opened for business in 1969. Here, in no particular order,
are some of them: the film "Deep Throat" (1972) and its documentary critique
and deconstruction, "Inside Deep Throat" (2005); the late Andrea Dworkin's
feminist attacks on pornography in such books as "Woman Hating" (1974) and
"Pornography -- Men Possessing Women" (1981) and the anthologies of women's
erotica or "chick porn" that now line bookstore shelves; the terms "sex
addicts" and "sex workers"; Viagra and the 1996 Communications Decency Act; the
homoerotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe; "Boogie Nights," the mordant
1997 movie about X-rated moviemaking; Paris Hilton postings on YouTube; and the
debates in schools, libraries and living rooms about Internet filters and free
speech.
To many social critics and observers, it's all part of a steady erosion and
degradation of the culture, an inexorable slide into a coarsely sexualized
society without standards or boundaries. Pamela Paul, author of the 2005 book
"Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Loves, Our Relationships, and Our
Families," tracks the spread of porn from VH1 and mainstream women's magazines
to rap music lyrics and lawyers busily dissolving marriages undone by a
husband's Internet sex fixation. Paul laments the simplistically polarized
thinking that pits free speech (pro-porn) against repressive moralists
(anti-porn) and argues for an evolving sensibility. "Once pornography becomes
discredited and derided by both men and women," she writes hopefully,
"consumption will become less brazen, and will eventually decline."
But as the statistics that Paul herself and others cite, a gradual, organic
withering away of the appetite for sexual imagery and content doesn't seem
imminent. According to a Kinsey Institute study that Paul mentions, 97 percent
of the sample had viewed pornography at one time or another; 77 percent did so
at least once a month. The Sexual Recovery Institute of Los Angeles says that
60 percent of all Web site visits are sexual in nature. And it's apparently not
just dirty old men clicking away. A Zogby poll showed that 37 percent in the
18-24 age group visit "sexually oriented" Web sites as compared with 22 percent
of people 35-54.
The mind soon shuts down at the thought of all those people peering into all
those computer screens. It makes the 38 years of traffic in and out of the
O'Farrell Theatre seems like a tiny and oddly convivial trickle. That, as much
as anything, may measure the distance between the sexual marketplace the
Mitchell Brothers entered in 1969 and today's global bazaar. Even as the wraps
were coming off in the sexual revolution of the late '60s, people still had to
gather at steamy strip clubs and seedy movie houses to feed their desires. The
Mitchells, who built a proudly handsome palace in the heart of San Francisco
and would soon ride the wave of X-rated videotapes for sale and rent, made the
first steps toward an easier and more open world of sexual material for sale.
To many that may seem like a dubious if not deplorable achievement. But the
Mitchells, like all merchants, could sell only what the public wanted. Sex
itself, of course, has always been a salable commodity. It's the way it's
packaged and presented that changes. Even as they went on hawking the
old-fashioned fare of striptease and pole dances -- still a going concern --
the Mitchell Brothers anticipated a world where sex would someday be as
strangely simple and mind boggling as a billion finger-clicks.
