Jon Ronson crafts a near-perfect retelling of a complicated tragedy.
On December 5th, 2017, the body of adult film star August Ames was found hanging in a public park. Despite being well-liked in the industry, Ames had attracted a Twitter “pile-on” in the 24 hours preceding her death after retweeting a refusal to work with gay or “crossover” male talent. The story seemed tailor-made for Jon Ronson, both the author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and the host of Audible’s porn industry podcast The Butterfly Effect.
And that’s as far as simplicity gets you.
In his new Audible offering The Last Days of August, Ronson almost immediately reveals that nothing about August Ames provides an easy answer. She’d been publicly humiliated...but was dead for hours before the worst of it was posted. She wrote of being traumatized by a scene she’d recently done…of which self-described close friends disputed her recounting, and the Ronson couldn’t confirm. Her marriage to “controlling” industry player Kevin Moore, not his first mental-health-crisis-plagued significant other, was on the rocks...but no accusation sticks except his own admission of glaring but human flaws. There is no easy resolution, no pat moral to an ugly story; Ronson even undercuts his own chance at an attention-grabbing but dishonest twist, announcing early on that he will not spin a “murder mystery” from industry rumors about Moore.
While Ronson’s professional expertise doesn’t dovetail with the details in the way one might expect, it’s a perfect match for his faux-naif style; Ronson becomes a character, and the telling bleeds into the story. Moore’s nuances and contradictions play out over Ronson’s stories of his frequent swings from aggressive to open to distant, while his reputation in the industry is woven together from a furious midnight-oil cold-call from a business partner, glowing testimony from former collaborators, and a trip down the warpath with an old colleague (who comes with his own unresolved history) and a reclusive ex-wife.
Ronson also wisely uses the murkiness of the August Ames tragedy as a mirror for the industry itself: a seeming refuge for outcasts and a haven of progressivism undercut by bare-knuckle industry politics and a willingness to ignore elephants in the room. The ringleader of the pile-on, actress Jessica Drake, is clearly shattered by its consequences, and she’s believable when she says she only meant to take a stand for equality; Ames’s friends point out that her contract, an industry rarity, allows Drake a far more expansive “no list” of performers non grata, the gatekeeping mechanism Ames was trying to exercise. Meanwhile, in the wake of his wife’s death, Moore (whose control over his wives’ “no lists” is an unresolved question) tries to create an “it gets better” video series for struggling porn talent, only to discover he can’t find a porn star who’s adjusted to the mental health issues common in its talent pool. Ronson also makes an illuminating note during an awards-show in memoriam highlighting his subject’s death: her death at 23 is not notable among that year’s departed stars, the oldest of whom was 35.
That Ronson abandons any easy conclusion enriches rather than detracts from his fantastic retelling. We’re left with a unanimously recognized tragedy, a pile of unanswered questions, and a sobering look at an industry defined by easy pleasure and the real pain that oils its machinery.
