I watched Don Jon last month and have been rolling it around in my head ever since. What's most interesting about Joseph Gordon-Levitt's film (he wrote, directed, and starred in it) is its acutely reactionary take on our pornified culture.
When I say reactionary, I don't mean "conservative," the normal shorthand. Rather, I mean its more specific definition, that of wishing to return to a previous, usually wholesome and superior, state of affairs. Don Jon rejects our pornography-obsessed culture, instead wishing for a time in the recent past when skin flicks were arty and free love helped mend people's souls. (Some spoilers below.)
The film opens with a montage of the titular character's life. Jon (Gordon-Levitt) spends his days hitting the gym, hitting the club, hitting the ladies, and then hitting pornography websites, typically while the ladies are hitting the sack one room over. It is an empty, almost robotic, existence—like one of Pavlov's dogs, the sound of Jon's laptop booting up gets his juices flowing. Clips of hardcore pornography are spliced into the film so we can see the plastic bodies and plastic expressions of the performers; we quickly grow as numbed to it as Don does.
As the film progresses and we see the world through Jon's eyes, we come to recognize that we have been just as numbed to the pornification of culture as he has. Cosmo covers offering sex tips and Carl's Jr. ads featuring bikini-ed women and night club dresses that leave little to the imagination: Sex, or more accurately, a simulacrum of sex, surrounds us.
Don is a pornography addict, though he at first tries to deny it. He says he loses himself in the explicit sex scenes in a way that he simply can't while having sex. Even after he falls in love with Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), spends the first half of the film wooing her, and then manages to bed her, he still turns to his porn machine.
While taking night classes at the local community college, Jon meets Esther (Julianne Moore), a middle-aged woman who catches him watching pornography on his phone. Intrigued, she comes into class the next day with a copy of some 70s-era arty porn (I forget the title, think Emmanuelle or some such). When Barbara, having discovered Jon's habit, leaves him, he falls into Esther's arms. She teaches him that what he's watching on the computer is not sex, not as it has been understood throughout history. It is just a mechanized act in an age of mechanical reproduction. Love-making—real, soul-fulfilling love-making—has little to do with the various activities he has been losing himself in. The 60s, the 70s, free love, man! That's what makes life worth living. At the film's close he is spiritually fulfilled and ready to tackle the world.
And this is why I suggest it's a reactionary rather than a conservative film. Don Jon rejects the pornification of culture as an unfortunate side-effect of the culture of free love. Sex without commitment is fine, even healthy: As the film draws to a close, Don says that he and Esther aren't together, have no interest in being together, and are instead finding their way forward through the physical act of love. But sex without feeling—the kind of sex that occupies such a huge portion of the Internet—is dehumanizing and stultifying.