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Rocco Siffredi and the men of his family are sharing a laugh in Supersex Episode 6. They’re attending the Hot D’Or awards, porn’s answer to the Cannes Film Festival, and the American woman who’s just won Best Anal Sex Scene has thanked her “mommy” on stage. I don’t blame them: It’s pretty funny.
Minutes later, Rocco Siffredi is thanking his family from that very same stage, as they look on beaming and cheering with tears in their eyes. He’s thanking them, talking about how unlikely it is that some small-town Italian kid would ever win the equivalent of an Oscar for working with his dick, and his father and brothers and cousin are thrilled.
“We laughed at Tiffany, but I got her,” Rocco says. “She’d given the most intimate part of herself to get there, and that part belonged to her mother, just like my entire life was captured in my mother’s eyes.” He owes just as much to his family as any other successful person, and is just as eager to say so publicly as any grateful person. For now, at least, the field in which he achieved his success doesn’t matter. He’s happy. They’re happy.
Earlier in this same episode Rocco hires a doctor to circumcise him without an anesthetic because his mother suffered as she died. She was in pain. Now, anytime he gets an erection, he’ll be in pain. It’s played for laughs eventually, but the bottom line is that this man mutilated his penis in honor of his mother.
Do you see what’s going on here? “Resurrection of the Bodies” ties Rocco’s love of sex to his love of his family tighter than ever, until they’re inseparable. His brother and father attend the porn awards to cheer him on, as he’d earlier seen his father at a porn theater, watching one of his movies. Before she moves to a hospice, his dying mother asks him to pack up her things; he starts with her underwear and finds a hidden cache of porn magazines starring himself, which she acknowledges with a smile.
His cousin Gabriele, who claims to have taught him how to jerk off, applies ice to his wounded penis in a misguided attempt to care for it, then rips it off again when it fuses to his skin. Rocco locates his entire birth as a sexual being with a glance and a wink from his mother. Even when he lifts her into her deathbed there’s an unmistakable sexual energy to it given how many times we’ve seen him use his strength with women. Repeatedly he has argued that life is porn. For him, this may well be true.
It extends even to the burial of his mother. Right there, in the graveyard, he effectively orders Lucia to bring her son Claudio to Tommaso, from whom they’re all estranged at this point. Then a friend of his mother’s, the same age as his mother, offers her condolences, drops to her knees, and sucks him off. There is no off switch for Rocco. As long as women want him, he wants them back.
How can he tell, though? Taking over the direction of his own films, he begins staging porn that’s far more intimate than the cheesily elaborate productions common at the time, but also far more reliant on his own judgment as to whether or not his scene partner is enjoying herself. His belief is that by maintaining eye contact, he can always tell how into it a woman is — even if she’s scared, he can see if she wants what he’s doing anyway. When Lucia arrives to visit him on set in order to beg him to send money to Tommaso — whose hometown cafe, named after their mom, is in danger from his old Roma enemies — what he’s doing is fucking a woman in the ass while dunking her head in the toilet.
Rocco and Lucia’s back and forth about this act is one of the smarter conversations about porn that either toys with or perpetrates misogyny depending on your perspective, which is indeed what a lot of women as well as men enjoy watching and making. “It wasn’t your face in the toilet, while she was putting it up your ass,” Lucia says.
“You can’t take the power out of sex, otherwise it’s nothing,” Rocco says. “That’s the truth. Was she scared? Yes, she was scared, but she was turned on.” “There’s a bit of difference between desire and truth,” Lucia replies.
“I don’t judge women,” Rocco says. “I don’t punish them. They see that they can trust me, they can let themselves go, enjoy themselves.” He and they, he argues, are “the same” in any given scene in this respect. “She was wet,” he adds; the “case closed” is implicit.
“Her face was wet,” Lucia retorts. She tells a story from her time in Pigalle, when a john whom she found physically repulsive went down on her. “I’ve never been so wet in my life,” she says. “The next morning I threw up.” The body is not a reliable barometer of the mind or the heart, much as Rocco has conflated the three.
And in the end, hasn’t Rocco been dunking Lucia’s metaphorical head in the toilet all his life, from when he fantasized about her as a boy, to when he judged her version of sex work while lionizing his own, to when he sent her to Tommaso at the funeral despite her obvious misgivings?
Tommaso is Rocco’s shadow self, the Tano brother who could not channel his boundless need to be loved and desired into a productive pursuit. I’ve come to truly love the work Adriano Giannini is doing as Tommaso, a man with seemingly no core sense of self. He wildly vacillates between hate and love. He refuses to attend his mother’s funeral, going so far as to refer to her as Rocco’s mother only, even while building a café he’s naming after her. Rocco and Lucia, too, are objects of intense desire and intense loathing for him, up to including his fixation on the idea that they’ve had sex; one wonders if he hates the idea more or less than he loves the image.
I feel so bad for this poor guy, who, again, refuses to go to the award ceremony but winds up calling out Rocco’s name as he’s taken to the hospital that same night after the hated “gypsies” stab him and burn down his restaurant. Why? Because he called Rocco a pervert, and they followed his lead, and he got murderously angry with them for it.
Watching Supersex is like shaking a snow globe filled with particles of the densest psychosexual shit imaginable, then seeing how these poor bastards deal with the fallout. Its frankness and ambition in this are unparalleled in my memory.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
