Bella Thorne, an actor, rapper, businesswoman in fashion and makeup, author of poetry and novels, model, manager of a record company, and all-around well-known individual, has now added “director” to her CVS receipt-sized résumé. She finally put together a full narrative effort in the 31-minute short film Her & Him after dipping her toes in the water with a couple music videos for ex-boyfriend Mod Sun. An alumna of the Sundance Film Festival, Thorne chose a little unorthodox path and had her official auteur debut at the Das Internationales Filmfest Oldenburg in Germany before the movie went live on PornHub Premium.
Thorne was chosen by the adults-only video hosting site for their Visionaries Director’s Club series, which gives up-and-coming talent money and resources to utilise anyway they see fit, as long as the final film contains at least a modicum of unsimulated sexual behaviour. The project is meant “to diversify porn production and help develop more diversified content with multiple types of viewers in mind,” according to PornHub’s official language. And it’s true that the twenty-one-year-old Thorne offers a fresh cinematic vocabulary to the XXX universe. In it, she sees the rarely displayed sex as an accessory to a larger thesis about connection and volatility that she’s been developing over the course of years across several platforms.
Unlike most porn, which centres on the sight of pleasure as it is mediated through many channels of desire, Thorne starts with a conceptual interest and works carnality into it. Her movie stands on its own without relying on penetration as its main basis, while having two discreetly concealed, brief sex scenes. Thorne uses wide-angle photography to enhance the interaction between her performers while still allowing us to see everything.
The Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray by Thorne, which was just published, poured a stream of tortured consciousness at readers, providing a window into a mind under incredible stress. She spoke in passing to the strains of growing up without a father, living under constant media attention, dealing with the abuse’s enduring effects, and the poison these things can have on intimate relationships in her adult life. Her & Him, which follows a tumultuous period scrupulously covered by the tabloids, is chiefly informed by that last one. While Thorne and her new boyfriend Benjamin Mascolo have been sighted together all summer, she terminated a polyamorous relationship with YouTube star Tana Mongeau and hip-hop newcomer Mod Sun early this year. Mod Sun also contributed incidental music to this project. Instagram posts that hinted at conflict between them provided the appearance that their infatuation had soured, and this idea has given Thorne’s creativity free rein in her most recent work.
The unnamed leads, played by Abella Danger (who was perfectly cast for her sultry, expressive voice) and Small Hands (who, with his tattoos and bad-boy good looks, seems to be Thorne’s type), first appear to be a typical pair like any other. After a difficult night, He awakens to discover Her playing house, or at least her version of it, which comprises serving a drive-thru veggie burger (oh, Los Angeles!) on a plate as though it were a home-cooked dinner. As their conversation progresses and we realise that the pair is everything but the sex-punk Lucy and Desi of the initial impression, this idea of playacting domesticity turns into a mockery of itself. They are trapped in a violent game that may not even be a game, where enjoyment and violence coexist, though not necessarily peacefully.
They enjoy exchanging power, which is a very typical erotica plot device. When the boundaries of their swinging between domination and submission blur the distinction between pretending and the real, everything start to fall apart. He discovers that Her phone is conducting an online search for the term “how to kill your partner and get away with it” using the Google rip-off Gargle, whose logo is made out of curled penises. Are they indeed in a dysfunctional Hitchcockian kiss-me-or-kill-me situation straight out of Spellbound, or is she just playing a joke on him? More crucial, would the realisation that they had switched from acting to pretending scare him away or inadvertently entice him in with the prospect of a new extreme?
Their mating-eagle-death spiral is fueled by contradictions, and Thorne is skilled at the way that lust and devotion to another person can cloud your judgement. The tea She serves him as a sign of sensitive loving care scalds his lips, the sense of life-threatening danger only tempts Him to enter, and as he says later on after ejaculating, “You know, when you tell me not to come, it’s so hot, it just makes me want to come more.” This logical fallacy and Thorne’s colour experiments combine to produce a surreal ambiance that is very much in keeping with her well-known “psychedelic home decor.” She still has potential to develop, though, solely from a technical standpoint. Thorne encounters the age-old, intractable difficulty of recording dialogue coherently over the sound of a running shower and wastes priceless audio due to background hiss.
For the director’s benefit, she mostly expresses herself through an audiovisual language that favours formal suggestion over declaration. As she appropriates the principles of withholding meaning and stressing association through editing for her own objectives, I would position her in line with filmmakers like Robert Bresson and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, at most semi-facetiously. Her style places more weight on gestures and images than on words. Colin Burnett, a scholar, previously spoke of “optical transition devices” in Bresson and Hou’s works; Thorne twists this idea to connect her themes of attraction and repulsion. This movie would still be understandable with the sound cranked all the way down to the point of furtive masturbating, like so much of the best porn.
According to user feedback on PornHub’s official upload, some hairy-palmed viewers preferred something more straightforward and graphic than Thorne’s methods. They object to adult movies that ask their viewers to do some of the effort and focus more on significant facial expressions and body movements than on square pegs in square holes, such as grasping hands and twitching muscles. The numerous comments criticising Thorne for not appearing on the other side of the camera show out that their criticisms are the result of unrealistic expectations rather than an analysis of the situation. (At least in part, this is due to all the cheekily inaccurate headlines announcing Bella Thorne’s pornographic debut.)
However, Thorne described her work as a commentary on Romeo and Juliet, and I must respectfully disagree with that interpretation. The conflict between Her and Him has been created within, but the star-crossed lovers committed themselves to one another despite every obstacle standing in their way outside of themselves. Although the rapid slip between passion and danger binds these relationships together, the conditions of those sentiments couldn’t be further apart. Shakespeare’s passionate teenagers were prepared to close off the outside world and just need one another. It’s possible that Her and Him won’t last through their relationship.
They all share a high drama content, which is the irresistible driving force behind a large portion of Thorne’s spectacular work. A Bella Thorne work can never be anything other than a Bella Thorne work, neither more nor less, regardless of format, platform, or medium. She more than makes up for any lack of discipline she may currently have with her pure creative certainty. She has an eye and thoughts, and with the help of the mediating power of narrative, she is learning how to articulate them at an angle (as opposed to the directness of her unlocked-diary writing, or the bluntness of her songcraft). She is developing into a genuine multimedia artist, which makes her even more alluring for her personal flaws.
Film and television critic Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) resides in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his writing has also featured in a plethora of other respectable-looking magazines, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, and Vox. The movie Boogie Nights is his favourite.
