The 1980 movie Insatiable is one of the classics of cinematic pornography. Thirty years on, it raises strange questions about the longevity of porn versus that of ‘70s Ferraris. Here, in all its big budget and completely SFW glory, is Marilyn Chambers driving a black Dino for several helicopter-shot minutes.
Thirty years is a long time for things to age, and there are two things in Insatiable which have aged: porn and supercars. The movie was made in a weird point of time, because 1980 was the Golden Age of nothing, except maybe Olympic boycotts and very dumb invasions of Afghanistan. It’s certainly the Golden Age of neither porn nor supercars: AIDS and the Ferrari Mondial were right on the horizon, and you didn’t need a medical diploma to spot the very visible signs of serious cocaine abuse on 1970s porn god John Holmes’s 16.5 inches of flaccid fame, making a guest appearance in the last few minutes of the movie.
When Insatiable was filmed, the Dino had already been out of production for four years. An epoch in modern production cycles, but a detail which probably escaped the notion of most contemporary viewers, who had to piece together their knowledge of Italian exotics from paper magazines. That said, the Dino has aged rather well. It’s pretty and menacing at the same time, a fine fit for the movie’s star Marilyn Chambers, who drives it in a yellow Ferrari T-shirt with the T-top removed.
Speaking of that T-shirt: How did one score a Ferrari T-shirt decades before Ferrari merchandise spawned in every airport mall? It’s a great little detail about money and exclusivity, and it’s completely lost when modern twenty-somethings wear Ferrari-branded Puma sneakers.
But the most delightful part is all the helicopter footage. Seriously? Minutes upon minutes of scenic aerial shots of a Dino in a porn flick? Not even cubic feet of pubic hair will date pornography like that. It seems impossibly unreal, and yet it is proof that porn movies really were cinematic productions before video cameras distilled the genre into its internet-happy present.