Joseph Gordon-Levitt: ‘Don Jon’ About Porn Addiction, True Intimacy

For Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Don Jon is about the fight between porn addiction and true intimacy along with the way people project their unrealistic expectations for love onto their lives.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Joseph Gordon-Levitt says Don Jon isn’t intended to “shock people,” but it will still earn a R rating.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt actually shortened the name of Don Jon from Don Jon’s Addiction, saying he “certainly wasn’t interested in making a movie about pornography per se”:

“I called it Don Jon’s Addiction because there’s this central symbol in the movie of this rut and this habit that Jon is in. It’s about a guy getting out of this rut, learning to be present and have more engaged and realistic relationships.”

Don Jon focuses on a man who prefers pornography to real women. This modern day Don Jaun spends time at bars but he has a regimented schedule, even a weekly and daily to-do list, surrounding his porn addiction. Even when Don Jaun meets a woman named Barbara who is a perfect 10 (played by Scarlett Johansson), he still finds himself drawn back into the web of porn addiction.

Actress Julianne Moore recalls initially being disgusted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, thinking it was only about porn:

“And I started reading it, and I looked up halfway through, and I said [to my husband], ‘This isn’t about porn. This is amazing.’ Really, it’s a movie about intimacy to me. I found it really surprising, really touching, very, very funny, very original and I was completely taken with it.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote Don Jon to convey the point that many people, both men and women, have unrealistic expectations for how love and sex “should be” based upon what society is teaching us. Don Jaun falls into the trap of porn addiction, believing the sexual fantasies should represent real life and love. Barbara falls into her own trap of believing the way love is portrayed in Hollywood’s comedy movies, where everything has to be perfect and emotional in order for the love to be real.

For good or for ill, Joseph Gordon-Levitt believes the media has a large role in defining love in today’s society:

“The first kernel of an idea was trying to get at a story of how people treat each other more like things than like people and how media can play into that. I think it’s something everybody does to everybody else. We sort of have a tendency to pigeonhole each other.”

What do you think about Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s message in Don Jon?