Wonderland: Porn and Parenthood

Over the past twenty years, partially thanks to the internet but also due to a softening of the laws around the representation of sexual imagery, pornography has become a big industry. Rumours abound that it has a larger income than Hollywood cinema, and art responding to pornographic's social impact has proliferated: Grant Morrison's The Filth is a bold attempt to innoculate the reader against the horror through the administration of a graphic novel, while Tumbling Doll of Flesh is a harrowing introduction to the extremities of  torture porn.

Wonderland engages with pornography's darker corners. A father and his daughter, in different ways, are drawn into the twilight world of violent, on-line pornography. Both are damaged - the daughter is rejected by her family, the father is alienated from his rather comfortable life - and Vanishing Point's dissection of the hidden brutality in sexual desire is unsettlingly ambiguous.

The father's story - he begins as a comfortable middle-class husband, at home with his wife, watching the television and enjoying domestic bliss - is the more forceful. Haunted by a grubby ghost, who insists that his desires are healthy, he gradually chases rougher imagery: an early encounter with a video-cam woman is replaced by full-blown torture and murder movies. The careful application of symbolic drama - it seems as if the father has committed a real murder - emphasises his brutalisation and his scene with the cam actress follows his decline from vaguely horny guy to vicious thug.

Director Matthew Lenton sketches out the reach of violent pornography: from the obscure location of the filming - probably somewhere in central Europe - to the polite middle-class homes of Scotland, it impacts on lives, alienating the husband from the wife, the child from the parents. Despite the flashes of nudity - male and female - it veers away from sensationalism, almost dour in its presentation of the filming. Lenton seems fascinated by the emotional consequences of watching violent pornography, illustrating the fragmented fantasies through a late intrusion of surreal visual theatre.

The almost casual finale shows the father, covered in blood and having lugged a suitcase across his front-room, attempting to reintegrate into his cosy life. Yet the ghost is now sat on the sofa, having previously been consigned to the outside, and the father's awkward gestures give the lie to the scene of marital unity. An earlier episode, when he frantically cleaned after a bout of on-line dirty action, pictured his guilt in a simple tableau. Lenton's awareness of the power of images - Kai Fisher's set allows the framing of certain moments as iconic tableaux- drives his theatrical imagination and doubtless informs his recognition of how watching violent pornography can corrupt.

It's perhaps telling that Wonderland does not follow many of the predictable narratives associated with pornography: the argument that it can liberating never comes up (interestingly, a moment of real danger during the filming reveals that the actors have no safe word, a commonplace in actual BDSM; the pretend pornography is potentially more dangerous than actual sex), the economic pressures that force women into pornography or prostitution are not explored, except in a brief, throwaway line. There's no attempt to identify pornograpy within a broader context of exploitation.

Since the characters are all unreliable witnesses - the father is a pervert, his taste for violent sex hinting at paedophilia, the ghost reckons himself to be some kind of Sadean messiah but looks like a tramp, the film-maker is a cynical capitalist, the daughter switches between her Alice and Heidi (her porn name) - and Lenton is constantly switching between the fantastic and the realistic, any grand statement would be as compromised as a man caught on the naughty pages by his mother-in-law.