Warning: This review of the Netflix serial Adult Material contains spoilers from the get-go.
Netflix’s Adult Material, a drama series about the machinations of the porn industry, consists of four episodes. For the first three and a half of them, it looked like it was going to tick off every single ‘Life of Vice & Its Consequences’ cliché there is. To be fair, it did do that, but somehow, the end of the final episode wrapped things up so nicely that I forgave them. It’s not porn that’s the problem, realises the main character, performer Jolene Dollar (Hayley Squires), it’s the patriarchy. And that’s a sentiment I can totally get behind.
I started watching Adult Material, thinking I would have some kind of insider insight into the subject matter, but then I realised that I don’t actually have that. I write smutty books, but I don’t know anything about the porn industry. I don’t even watch porno films. I have absolutely nothing against porn; I just find the videos a bit awkward and cringy. I prefer my smut to come via the written word.
The first episode lays the groundwork for introducing Jolene. Her real name is Hayley, but I can’t be doing with referencing two names every time I want to talk about her. So, Jolene it is for the duration of this review. Even though a lot of the time she’s being Hayley, wife, mother and alcoholic rather than Jolene, perky-breasted veteran porn star.
Jolene has all the trapping s of porn star success, with a shiny pink fancy car, a deadly-llookng manicure, and artificially enhanced boobs. She seems happy. But is a life of being fucked on camera for money all it’s cracked up to be?
Of course, it’s not, and this programme lays on the seedier side of the porn industry with a trowel. The film set is shown as a fairly grimy-looking place, and the director (Phil Daniels) is Every Possible Cliché About How You’d Expect About a Porn Film Director to be. Except one. The makers of this film didn’t give him a moustache. If he’d had a big ol’ 1970s porn moustache, it would have been the full set.
In the first episode there’s a sweet innocent new girl on set called Amy (Siena Kelly). Jolene feels responsible for her, and suffers guilt when having left her on set, Amy gets pressured into shooting an anal sex scene and has a rectal prolapse. (The episode title is ‘Rosebud’ which is apparently a euphemism for a prolapse. I’m sure I’ve seen ‘rosebud’ used as a euphemism for arsehole in books I’ve read. In fact, I may have even used the word myself. I’ve made a note not to do that now. I don’t want to confuse my readership into thinking that people’s rectal walls are falling out of their bottom when I’m actually writing straightforward, incident-free bum sex.)
Amy isn’t as sweet as she seems, but that doesn’t become apparent until a bit later on. She swings between innocent newbie and calculating psycho in a way that’s quite hard to fathom a lot of the time. (She also becomes a walking drugs cliché. Steals her mum’s jewellery and everything.) Jolene sums it up nicely in the final episode when she says to her, “I don’t know whether to hug you or perform an exorcism”.
So what with the perceived dereliction of the duty of care by the filmmakers and then her mentor and friend Carroll Quinn throwing a party for Tom Pain, an abusive arsehole played by Julian Ovenden, Jolene is feeling pretty cheesed off with the people in her industry who are meant to be taking care of them.
Quinn is played by Rupert Everett, and he is – as ever – a delight. He brings layers of personality to a role which could have been very shallow and unsympathetic. Not that you should have any sympathy for him. He’s a monster. But Everett masterfully depicts why other people haven’t realised that and continue to put their trust in him.
Jolene publicly denounces Quinn’s working practices and ends up being sued for defamation. The run-up, execution and fallout of the court case make up the majority of the drama in Adult Material.
Jolene won’t back down. She’s a principled woman. But she’s also flighty, self-centred, quick-to-anger and often drunk. She doesn’t do herself any favours by saying things that she shouldn’t on social media.
Another great supporting character here is Stella Maitland (Kerry Godliman), a disgraced MP who takes on the role of Jolene’s advocate. The scenes between Stella and Jolene have an authenticity to them, which contrasts well with Jolene’s other relationships. This is, after all, a programme about separating truth from fakery.
There are an awful lot of supporting characters here, actually. Rather too many for a four-part series. We have Jolene’s three children, including 18-year-old, Phoebe (Alex Jarrett), who’s going through a bunch of stuff of her own. And there’s Jolene’s husband, Rich (Joe Dempsie), who supports her career by managing her admin and looking after the house and kids. He gets very little thanks for it, and Jolene constantly berates him for living off ‘her’ money. It’s a neat gender-reversed twist on the lives of the millions of women who have sacrificed themselves to support their husband’s careers and not received thanks and acknowledgement.
Jolene lacks any self-awareness in the earlier episodes. When her daughter is suspended from school, Jolene launches into a tirade after some perceived judgment from Phoebe’s headmistress. “I work in the only industry in the world where women are paid more than men!” she shouts. “You know what Paul’s father does?,” she says referencing the boy who’s involved with her daughter’s suspension, “He makes bullets. And you named a sports hall after him!”
This is all good and noble sounding, but, well, the whole reason that Jolene is in the headmistress’s office in the first place is because Phoebe has posted revenge porn featuring Paul. So, you know Jolene’s profession wasn’t entirely irrelevant. If Paul had been in trouble for bringing a gun to school, his dad’s job would have probably made it into the discussion.
Due to the court case, Jolene loses any opportunities to work; she drinks too much, she gets cirrhosis of the liver, her husband leaves her, and she loses her kids. In short, she becomes a Poster Child for The Unavoidable Moral Consequences of a Life of Vice.
And at that point, I became annoyed with the whole thing. Because I’m fed up with seeing women on screen punished for their lack of sexual purity. It’s tired. Which is why the last half of the final episode was such a relief. It’s not all sunshine and roses; after quitting the porn industry for a year, Jolene makes a film with Tom Pain in order to make enough money to pay off her debts. But it’s done on her own terms. She has moved away from Quinn and his controlling empire.
She decides to move into ethical, woman-centred pornography rather than being the pawn of other people who are making money off of her (literally) putting her arsehole on the line and who were ready to drop her the minute things get rocky.
“You all treated me like I was biting the hand that feeds me”, Jolene tells Quinn in their last confrontation. By this point, she has realised that she was the one feeding them, and she is ready to resume that power.
This isn’t a great series by any means. The ridiculous number of times I have used the word ‘cliché’ in this review shows that. And for a while there, I thought I would be entirely scathing in my review of it. But it turns out that all I needed was a bit of female empowerment at the end. Any programme that ends with the female protagonist kicking the patriarchy in the balls (sadly only metaphorically in this case) gets a thumbs up from me.