I have a confession to make: I am really not up to date on the newest latest trends in contemporary porn. When I used to work in a video store, the culture of AVN and Vivid Video was impossible to ignore, but I guess I’ve gone respectable. So when I saw Chris’ post earlier today about the casting of Sasha Grey in Steven Soderbergh’s prostitute drama The Girlfriend Experience, I wondered if the part about Grey being a fan of “Godard, Bertolucci and Breillat” was a joke.

But then I discovered Grey’s Wikipedia profile, which offers evidence that the 20 year-old (recently the youngest actress to be named AVN’s Female Performer of the Year) has actually made attempts to position herself as The Porn Star Who Likes Art Films. Some choice excerpts:

• “Originally she toyed with the name Anna Karina (the name of Jean-Luc Godard’s ex-wife) before deciding on her present name.” This tidbit is sourced from a Los Angeles Magazine story, which also notes, “For an 18-year-old porn star with a spotty high school education, she has tastes that would make Cumisha or Ms. Panther go blank. Besides Godard, she likes the directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog, and Lars von Trier.”
• After graduating high school a year early, she starred in, co-wrote and produced an “unreleased experimental film named Unknown Pleasures.” We’ll assume the reference was to Joy Division and not Jia Zhang Ke, but who knows?
• In other extracurricular activities, she’s part of an “experimental music/art project” called Telecine and she’s apparently making a documentary about her own life as a porn star.
• Quoted directly from Wikipedia, which atrributes no source to the information: “Sasha has expressed a strong interest in existentialism while posing the question ‘how many porn stars are existentialist?’”

I can only imagine that Jean-Luc himself would disapprove of a creation like Grey, a literal embodiment of the pornographic endgame of mass media, aligning herself with his name and work — but I’d bet he’d get a laugh out of the idea that she tried to name herself Anna Karina before her porno agent talked her out of it. In any case, if there’s anything more mind-blowing than the fact that Grey exists (and has won awards for her work in films like Fuck Slaves, no less), it’s that Magnolia and Soderbergh stumbled on her at just the right time. Because if anything’s going to top the Diablo Cody mythos, why not a porn star with a working knowledge of auteur theory?