Dirty Entertainers: Streaming Meets Sex In This Fascinating Yet Facile Documentary

IN A SEQUENCE from DocuBay’s Dirty Entertainers: The Business of Indian Erotica, a male porn actor describes the process of birthing an erotic script: “It happens on the spot. Sometimes, if they see you’re fair, they turn you into an foreigner. Or if you’re wearing white, they’ll turn you into a doctor”. It’s a casual, almost startling admission of the randomised uniformity of global porn. Perspective resides in what the body seems rather than what it wishes to evoke. Much like beauty, sexuality also resides in the eye of the beholder. The philosophical depths of that bewildering, bottomless well are so casually disbursed in this documentary that you can’t help but admire this awkward foray into the fascinating world of India’s underjourneyed — now streamed and banned — soft porn industry.

Earlier this year, in July, the government moved to ban close to 25 apps streaming soft porn content in the country. That large swipe of the brush provides for a timely premise. That this country is hypocritical about its sexual values and morality is a fact as old as time. But that the streaming age would prove to be the gilded, somewhat guerrilla burst of India’s porn underbelly is a fresh narrative. Dirty Entertainers doesn’t do anything radical per se. It spells out a landscape that has come into existence over the last few years. And it paints the ability of sex to proliferate where content can’t, as a stark but humbling reminder of the human condition. Again, nothing that we don’t quite know about how India, or the way its history collides with cultural taboos — sex occupying maybe the top of the pyramid.

But where Dirty Entertainers really gets interesting, or evocative, is in its frankness, its breakthrough ability to put faces to this recent surge of erotic content, and frame it not simply as an oddity but also a statistical victory. From actors like Shakespeare Tripathy to directors who have helmed the rise of soft porn on apps like Alt Balaji, UIlu, etc, characters that have leveraged tech to shape this new resurgence give you their account of the geometry of desire. From the archaic pettiness of the job to the surprisingly polished humans who perform it, this feels like the making of an alternative world. This is no Silk Smitha, or Kanti Shah, the streaming age of porn is being spun by educated, ambitious and in the odd case, dire, men and women who believe that the funnel can be clipped, but it can’t really be blocked.

The fact that Ullu, a very obvious but brave idea packaged by the aggressive and outspoken Vibhu Aggarwal, was on the verge of raising public money before running afoul of the regulators, also hints at the ironies at the heart of the streaming business. Ullu’s books, its numbers, and its subscriber base raced faster than the might of the globally run Netflix. It points, in the mind of the onlooker, not just to the obvious vacuum of a certain type of content but also to the way the streaming model should or could be approached — make cheap, ship faster. Quality, a benchmark reserved by the elite for festival-destined cinema, becomes an accessory when money finds its way to the drain instead of the sea. Given this explosion of soft porn apps, their easy proliferation, the high-profile controversies that have circled this boom and the subsequent ban, the documentary also points to the inevitability of their comeback. Sex and pleasure aren’t going anywhere. Only the route map may have taken a turn for now.

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Where this entertaining first look at the generation 3.0 of India’s soft porn industry really misses the point is its inability to get to the heart of the changes streaming has introduced and the morality it has, in a way, exposed. Arguments built on the Kamasutra, Khajurao, are now old. The new generation demands a recalibration of the argument. There are no victors and losers, but the near inevitability of that very debate. The other disappointing bit is the production value, the hurried nature of the design language and the sheer lack of will to explore the philosophy beyond the practical realities. Though interesting, they on their own can’t direct notions of voyeurism towards more worthwhile conversation.

That said, Dirty Entertainers certainly ticks a giant curiosity box: who are these people making soft porn films in tier-3 cities in India? Moreover, the film also reveals a pleasingly literate side to the operation. i.e. English-speaking, articulate individuals who have — unlike you’d presume — come to this life with a certain amount of conviction and bodily as well as mental self-awareness. Contrition naturally follows, but there is still something out-of-body about imaging hundreds of competing erotica apps — some of them bafflingly doing better than Netflix, Amazon — being run almost as chaotically or impressively (depending on your moral compass) as a routine Hindi film set. The distance isn’t that far, nor is perhaps the denouement. Only the narrative is questionable, unpardonable and sinful. Or is it really?

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