Movie of the Month: Desperately Seeking Seka

Desperately Seeking Seka is the story of Swedish journalist Stefan Nylén’s quest to find the 1970’s porn starlet who once captured his imagination. Seka (the inspiration for Amber Waves in Boogie Nights), a tall, blonde Norse goddess, was a legend in her own time, a time when porn was both edgy and creatively vital. Before the rise of video in the early 80s and the resulting glut of content in the adult industry, porn was shot on film – people wrote scripts! Desperately Seeking Seka is as much a love-letter to that time as it is to Seka herself.

Unfortunately, the search isn’t all that suspenseful. Nylén flies from his native Sweden to the AVN Adult Video Expo in Las Vegas. There he meets porn starlets past and current, asking them how the industry has changed since Seka’s time. Easy answer: it’s gotten bigger, cruder, and more profitable. The women are no longer the girl next door, but bottle-blonde silicon Frankensteins of silicon and collagen. Attractive Frankensteins, sure, but when one interviewee comments, “They even have the same voice!” you have to get nostalgic for that mythical golden era.

At the same time, porn’s swelling from a $1 billion/year industry into a $10 billion/year one means there’s a lot of meat for the gristmill. Few girls will ever make it to Jenna Jameson’s stature within the industry; fewer still will be like Seka, fondly remembered 20 years later.
By halfway through the film, Nylén is off to Chicago. There he finds his Holy Grail – the Norse goddess who was actually from Virginia, and who adopted the name “Seka” because it sounded exotic. She got into porn because she was good at it and knew she’d make money doing it. She liked sex; there are no deeper motives on display here. And when Nylén asks why she quit the business, she gives a fairly unsurprising answer: like a lot of people, she got old. Porn is a young woman’s game; “Seka” got tired of working to keep herself looking young and pert. She wanted to just be who she was.

So Nylén’s fantasy girl can’t help but seem a little deflated. If we were looking for drama, for a quest loaded with near-mythical themes and import, it was not to be found here. Here there’s only a woman who, for a time, had sex on camera. And then she moved on.

– Dainty Miscellany