Throwback Thursday — Love And Lust Edition: 90’s Cable Lust With David Duchovny

And you don’t even need to watch it scrambled!

Hey Fleshbot fans! Remember before the age of widely available Internet porn, there were late-night cable shows with spicy stuff on them! I was obsessed when I was younger with getting to see today’s Throwback Thursday pick, Red Shoe Diaries (1992), not really as much because of the naked people, but because it starred David Duchovny who of course played Agent Mulder on The X-Files which was one of my first fandoms, and I was obsessed with him for some reason. My family did subscribe to Showtime, but at my age at the time, late-night cable movies were definitely one of the few things that were verboten to me as far as media. The X-Files is now 32 years old (oof!) and I’ve finally gotten to check this out because it’s randomly on streaming! Content warnings apply for a major suicide-related plot point, so please take care of yourself.

Red Shoe Diaries is directed by Zalman King who directed such smutty fare as Wild Orchid and wrote 9 ½ Weeks. The premise of the movie is that an architect named Jake (Duchovny) finds the diary of his fiancee Alex (Brigitte Bako) after her suicide and apparently, she was quite thirsty, detailing her sexual adventures outside of their relationship. Their relationship is not loveless or sexless, in fact far from it, but she is working through some trauma, using promiscuity as a coping mechanism. She has a recurring thing going with a construction worker named Tom who has another job as a shoe salesman, hence the red shoes. Jake has a lot of emotions to work through when he reads the detailed accounts of her affair and he really has no one but his dog Stella to comfort him about this, but he simply can’t look away, it seems The film ends with Jake placing a newspaper ad (remember those?) asking women to send him similar accounts of their slutty pursuits outside of their relationships under the name “Red Shoes”, which forms the basis for the anthology series.

It is my opinion that Red Shoe Diaries is a bit subversive, especially for its time because it gives its main female character a lot of sexual agency, even though she is mentally ill, which is a big sticking point, but each episode is different after the first movie, with varying situations for the characters. It was successful enough to run for five seasons and 66 episodes. I also enjoyed Duchovny being quite brooding and comely, as he is described in a fun little song that a fangirl wrote for him. In a way, both Duchovny and his X-Files co-star Gillian Anderson have helped normalize female sexual agency and freedom in their various projects.

Red Shoe Diaries (the movie) is available to stream (at press time) on the free streaming service Tubi. The Red Shoe Diaries TV series does not seem to be available for free or paid streaming or purchase, not even with Showtime where it aired originally. Let’s hope that it doesn’t have a fate similar to that of HBO’s Real Sex in the Land of Lost Media. I did find some fun clips from the series on YouTube if you care to check them out!