Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Cassie Wright is a pornstar past her prime. In order to go out with a bang (ahem!) she plans to film her attempt to break the world record for serial fornication. Six hundred men.
Snuff zooms in by giving us the perspective of four individuals involved in the proceedings: Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600; and Sheila, Ms. Wright’s personal assistant and the mastermind behind the project. It takes a while for the book to really distinguish the voices of the three men, whereas Sheila’s voice is always clearly defined. The three men start as a blur – minor representations of the collective jerk jockeys (Sheila’s term, but her constant use of similar slang terms is amazing.) – but through their interactions with one another they do steadily reveal their personalities. This could potentially make a great play; a character study of three men and a woman in a green room for a pornography film.
Cassie knew Marilyn’s secret name, the person Monroe dreamed of being. Not the baby-talking, hip-swinging blonde. Monroe dreamed of being respected, an intellectual like Arthur Miller, a respected, Stanislavsky-trained actor. A dignified human being. That’s who Monroe would become as she traveled without makeup, without designer clothes borrowed from a movie studio, with her famous hair tied under a scarf, hiding behind horn-rimmed reading glasses. It was that plain, intelligent, educated actress who called herself Zelda Zonk. When she booked airplane tickets or registered in hotels. Zelda Zonk. Who read books. Who collected art. That was who Marilyn Monroe, the blonde sex goddess, dreamed of being.
It is Chuck Palahniuk, so it is coarse, aspects of the pornography business are explained in great detail. There is an undeniably adolescent fascination with the flesh and all things bodily. By writing about the contentious subject of pornography there was an opportunity to explore some of the finer arguments surrounding it – briefly mentioned through Sheila’s point of view, but that all falls by the wayside very quickly in favour of advancing the story. The plot makes you think you know where it is going, proves you correct, but then twists things so suddenly that you almost feel naïve for believing you knew what was going to happen.
Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.
Didn’t one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie.
But, that is what also makes it so much, dare I say it, fun to read. Things don’t go exactly as you imagined them, but then there is that horrifying realization when you see where it is actually headed. To reveal too much would be to ruin the enjoyment offered by Snuff.