Don Jon, and Losing Yourself in Someone Who Can Look Back

In a spotless flat in New Jersey, a young man slips out of bed after sex and opens a laptop, his face lit by the screen. He has already told us, in voice-over, the short list of things he cares about: his body, his flat, his car, his family, his church, his friends, his girls and his porn. The last is the one he prefers to all the rest. Somewhere else in the same film, a young woman sits in a dark cinema, smiling, her face wet with tears, watching two film stars fall in love.

Those two shots hold most of Don Jon, the first feature Joseph Gordon-Levitt directed, and the film cuts them alike: a face in close-up, lit by a screen, overcome. It is usually summed up as a comedy about a man who prefers pornography to women. It is more exact to say that it is about two people who each prefer a picture to the person in front of them, his assembled from pornography and hers from romantic films, and that the film is scrupulously even-handed about both. It does not rank the pictures.

This essay follows what the film sets against the two pictures, because it is not what the premise leads you to expect. It is not a lecture, and it is not willpower; the one attempt at willpower in the film does not last a week. It is a woman some years older than Jon, carrying a loss that has nothing to do with him, who is the first person in his life to see exactly what he is doing and say so, and who then lets herself be seen.

The film gives Jon his own words for what he wants from pornography. He can lose himself in it, he says, as he never can with a partner. Her answer is that if he wants to lose himself, it has to be in another person. This essay argues that her answer carries a condition the film shows rather than states. You can only lose yourself in someone who has found you, and who has let you find them. A picture cannot look back. Nothing in Jon’s life could, until she did.

It is also a film full of women on screens: the women in his clips, the star of the love story at the cinema, the women on a club floor turned into numbers, a sister who is always on her phone. A woman watching it may recognise herself in more than one place. She may have been measured against a screen. She may have held a picture of the man someone ought to become. She may be carrying a loss and want to be close to someone anyway. The film has room for all three, and it is kinder to each of them than its reputation suggests.

The record first. Don Jon was written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also plays Jon Martello; it was his first feature as a director. Scarlett Johansson plays Barbara Sugarman and Julianne Moore plays Esther; Tony Danza and Glenne Headly are Jon’s parents, and Brie Larson is his younger sister, Monica. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 18 January 2013 under another title, Don Jon’s Addiction, a change of name taken up below. It opened in American cinemas on 27 September 2013 and in Japan on 15 March 2014, and it runs ninety minutes.

Jon tends bar in New Jersey and is known as Don Jon for how easily he takes women home. His weeks run on a routine: the gym, his flat, his car, Mass and dinner with his family, the club on Saturday night, and pornography, which he watches constantly and prefers to sex. At a club he meets Barbara, beautiful and from a family with money, who flirts with him and turns down a one-night stand. He finds her on Facebook and courts her on her terms: a proper relationship, more than a month without sex, an evening class so that he can build a career outside the service industry, and the romantic films she loves and he considers fantasy. His parents adore her. When they finally sleep together, he is still unsatisfied. She catches him watching pornography and accepts his story that it was a joke email from a friend; when she later finds it in his browser history, she ends the relationship.

At the class he has met Esther, an older student he once found crying alone, who sat beside him and saw the pornography on his phone. What happens between them is where the film makes its argument, so this essay discusses all of it, including the ending and a loss in Esther’s past that the film reveals late and that this essay states plainly.

A note on method. The film was not screened for this essay. What is described comes from its published record and from criticism and interviews published at the time, each named where it is used. Lines of dialogue are paraphrased, never quoted as exact. The pornography Jon watches is not described, and the film’s sex scenes are characterised in a phrase and no more.

Most of the first half is a handful of scenes, repeated: the gym, the club, Mass, dinner with the family, the confessional, the laptop. The reviewer for Film Comment found the repetition wearing, and it is. It is also the joke, and the point. Jon’s life is a set of loops, and every loop keeps count.

At the club, Jon and his two friends grade the women across the room; Barbara, in their slang, is a dime, a ten. In the confessional he reports the week’s sins as a tally, the times he has watched pornography among them, and is given prayers to say in penance, Hail Marys and Our Fathers, which he then works through at the gym between lifts. The church gives him a count. The club gives him scores. The gym gives him repetitions. Pornography gives him what none of the others can: somewhere to lose himself.

Gordon-Levitt has been direct about what he was laughing at. When men get together to talk about women, he said in 2013, in remarks the Los Angeles Times reported, it can be “pretty brutal and pretty dehumanizing”; he found it both wrong and hilarious, and that, he said, was why he made a film about it.

What none of the loops contains is anyone who can look back. The women on the club floor are scored before they have said a word. The priest hears the numbers and gives back prayers, the same exchange every week, and as the film shows it, nothing in the exchange ever goes past the numbers. The women on the laptop cannot see Jon at all. Read closely, what he prefers in pornography is less what it shows him than what it lacks: a person who might see him, want something from him, or be let down.

The film is careful about how much pornography it shows. After Sundance, Gordon-Levitt swapped and cropped the clips to make them less graphic, because audiences had come away thinking it was a film about porn, and it was, he said, “not a movie about that at all.” What remains are short, recurring bursts, like punctuation, often announced by the chime of the computer starting up. The film shows the habit rather than the content, and so does this essay.

Many reviews in 2013 called Jon an addict, and so, still, does the encyclopaedia entry on the film. The film took the word off its own title. Months before the American release, Gordon-Levitt dropped Don Jon’s Addiction and published his reasons. The first was that he liked a short title. The second was that people were assuming it was a film about porn addiction and sex addiction, which, he wrote, really was not true: that was like saying The Maltese Falcon is a movie about a statue of a falcon. What the film was about, he wrote, was “how men and women treat each other, and how the media we consume can create unrealistic expectations that we put on one another.”

Jon himself insists to Esther that he is not addicted, and the film neither proves nor disproves him. Two years earlier, Steve McQueen’s Shame had followed a New York man for whom sex had become a closed room, and filmed it as something joyless. Don Jon takes a loop of a similar shape and plays it as comedy, which is itself a decision about how to look at the man inside it: as someone who is missing something, not as a case.

The clinical picture is worth knowing, if only because the word travels so easily. The eleventh revision of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, which came into effect in 2022, includes a condition called compulsive sexual behaviour disorder: a persistent pattern of failing to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges, which results in repetitive sexual behaviour over an extended period and causes marked distress or impairment in a person’s life. It is classed among impulse control disorders, not in the section for addictive behaviours, where the same revision placed gaming disorder. A 2018 account of the new category in World Psychiatry, whose authors included a member of the WHO’s mental health department, adds two points that matter here: the diagnosis should not be based on distress that comes from moral judgement or disapproval of one’s own sexual urges or behaviour, and whether the condition can be a form of behavioural addiction was, as they wrote, still a matter of active scientific discussion. In the United States, the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists says in a position statement that it does not find sufficient empirical evidence to classify sex addiction or porn addiction as a mental health disorder.

None of that is a verdict on Jon, and it is not meant as one. It is here because a label changes the question. Call Jon an addict and the film becomes a story about what is wrong with him. Leave the label off, as the film does, and its real question comes back into view: what is he missing, and why does the thing he prefers have nobody in it? The confessional, where his week becomes a column of numbers, is the film’s picture of moral counting, and the film is pointed about how little the counting sees. If someone’s own sexual behaviour feels out of their control and is costing them, that is a matter for a qualified clinician, not for a film or an essay about one.

It would be easy to make Barbara the problem, and some critics did. America, a Catholic magazine, called her trashy and manipulative. A later essay in the film journal cléo found that the film ends by deriding her as its villain. This essay reads her the way the film shoots her, which is the way it shoots him.

Start with her reasons. At the club she flirts with Jon and declines to go home with him, and her no is simply a no, not the first move in a game he is owed a chance to win. When he wants more, she tells him she does not want to do anything unless it means something. She sets terms and he accepts them: a proper relationship, in which they meet each other’s friends and family; more than a month without sex; an evening class so that he can have a career outside the service industry. Each is the romantic film’s version of a reasonable wish. She wants to be chosen by someone who means it, and she wants proof.

Then look at where she has been standing. She walked into a club where men score women out of ten, and she was scored. A story in which a man proves his love by giving something up is, among other things, a story in which a woman stops being a number. That is this essay’s reading, not the film’s statement, but it is what makes her fantasy legible as something other than vanity. After the love story they watch together, she says what moved her in it: he gave up everything for her, and it was meant to be.

The film calls that a fantasy, and it is careful to make it exactly the same kind of fantasy as his. Moore said the thing she loved in the script was that Gordon-Levitt set the porn culture beside the romantic comedy culture and “equated them as equal kinds of fantasy.” The camera does the equating. At the cinema, as Mapping Contemporary Cinema, a film guide published by Queen Mary University of London, describes it, Barbara’s smiling, tear-stained face in close-up is intercut with flashes of the love story, just as Jon’s face is intercut with flashes of the clips on his laptop. Two people in the dark, lit by a screen, each absorbed in a version of love that nobody real can interrupt.

Where she is plainly right, the film agrees with her. He lied to her. She caught him, accepted the story about the joke email, and found the truth later, and the last exchange the film gives them begins with his apology for lying. Where she is wrong, she is wrong in the same way he is: she has a picture, and she wants the man in front of her to fit it. Johansson described that with some sympathy. Barbara had a lot of conviction, she told an interviewer at the Toronto film festival, and was guilty of something a lot of us are guilty of: “wanting to put your partner in the little box that you’ve made for them and that they fit so perfectly into.”

The box has one detail the film lingers on. Jon cleans his own flat, carefully, and enjoys it; it is one of the few things in his routine he does for its own sake. Barbara tells him it is beneath him and that her family’s maid should do it. Moore thought this was one of the places where the film turns, the moment Jon has had enough, because the thing being taken is authentically his. “And what’s wrong with liking the things that we like?” she asked. “You have to allow for it in your love and in other people’s lives.” In Barbara’s picture of him, he does not clean. In his life, he does. The picture has no room for the man.

Set the two side by side and they turn out to be built the same way. Each offers the feeling of being with someone while removing the one thing a person brings, which is the power to see you and to answer back. Jon’s clips give him sex with nobody there who could look at him. Barbara’s films give her a man who has already been written, whose every move is known in advance, and whose sacrifice proves his love without her ever having to know him. His fantasy has no person in it. Hers has a person, but not the one she is with.

Each also becomes a measure. The women Jon takes home never measure up to the clips, and he tells us so in voice-over, at length. Jon never measures up to the man in Barbara’s films, and at the end she as good as tells him so. The film even gives Jon, about her films, the sentence that fits his own. Watching the love story beside her, he tells us that everyone knows it is fake and still watches it as if it were real life. He could be describing himself.

This Library has argued, in “A Fantasy Is Not a Request”, that the scene a woman carries in her head is not an order to anyone, least of all to her, and that the damage begins when a fantasy is taken for an instruction. Don Jon shows the same mistake made by the fantasy’s owner. Neither Jon nor Barbara is wrong to have a picture. Pornography and romantic films are both pictures, and people are allowed pictures, of sex and of love, without anyone’s permission. The trouble is that each of them has turned a picture into a request addressed to a real person: be like this, or you are not enough.

Gordon-Levitt, explaining the film to the BBC, said that different kinds of media seem to have given us “a checklist of expectations like never before.” A checklist is a picture with boxes to tick. The person in front of you is never on it, because the list was written before she arrived.

The film’s funniest scenes are at the Martello family table, and they are also its most exact. Jon’s father, played by Tony Danza, watches football on a very large television through the meal. His mother, played by Glenne Headly, wants to know when her son will settle down. His sister is on her phone and stays on it, at the table and even at Mass. Johansson, speaking about these scenes in Toronto, put their subject in a sentence: “None of these characters really see each other, but they have such intimate relationships.”

That sentence is the argument of “Intimacy Is Not Closeness. It Is Being Accurately Known.”, which set a long marriage whose partners could not say what the other was afraid of beside two people who had met twice and knew each other exactly, and argued that the difference between them is not distance but accuracy. The Martellos are that marriage multiplied into a household. They are as close as people get: the same table every week, the same church, the same name. What they lack is an accurate picture of one another, and nobody at the table is trying to get one. The television, the phone and the wedding the mother hopes for are three ways of being together without looking.

Then the sister speaks. Monica has said almost nothing all film. When Jon finally tells the family that he and Barbara have broken up, and his parents are upset, she says bluntly that Barbara only wanted someone she could control. It is the film’s best joke about attention: the one who seemed to be watching nothing but a screen had been watching everyone. It is also, this essay would add, only half fair. Control is what every picture requires. A picture of a person can only be kept if the person is managed into it, and Jon had been doing the same thing, by comparison, to every woman he took home. Monica’s verdict on Barbara is a verdict on them both.

Esther arrives sideways, the way people who matter often do. Jon comes across her crying alone at the evening class, and later, when she sits beside him, she sees the pornography on his phone. Afterwards she shows him an old erotic film that she thinks shows sex more honestly. It is worth pausing on that, because it is not what a sermon would do. She does not tell him to stop looking at pictures. She suggests there are other pictures, and that the question is what a picture is for.

She is also the first woman in the film whom Jon meets without scoring her first. There was no club floor and no number, only a person in tears. Moore described Esther as someone who, because of what she has recently been through, cannot be anything but completely authentic, with a quality that is, in Moore’s words, “almost skinless”, and that makes her “extremely present”.

After Barbara ends it, Jon and Esther sleep together in her car, and afterwards she asks him the question nobody else in his life has asked: why he loves pornography. He answers as truthfully as he can. He can lose himself in it, he says, as he never can with a partner. She suggests a week without it. He cannot manage the week.

What she tells him next is the hinge of the film, and it is not about technique; the film is not a manual, and neither is this essay. His sex, she tells him, has been all about himself. If he wants to lose himself, it has to be in another person, and it has to go both ways. That is not an instruction about bodies. It is a description of where his attention has been: on the picture in his head, and on himself inside it, and not on the woman who was actually there. It is also what consent looks like when it is working, although the film never uses the word. To be with someone is to be able to see her and to hear her, including when she wants more, or less, or wants to stop.

It is here that the film keeps Esther from being only a teacher. Her question is also a disclosure. She has been paying attention to him, which is what people do when they want something, and the film lets her want something: company, and to lose herself too. Her lesson on its own, the week without pornography, changes nothing. What changes him is what comes next.

It happens at her house. She suggests they take a bath together, then begins to cry, and does not get in. Her husband and her son, she tells him, were killed in a car crash fourteen months earlier.

The film says it that plainly, and so does this essay. The film does not explain her grief, give it a name or tell us what it has done to her, and neither will this essay. It lets the fact sit in the room. Moore said she thought Esther was probably not always like this, that it was just a moment in time when she was this way. That is a kind of respect. The grief belongs to her life, not to his education.

Two things happen in that scene. The first is a yes that is taken back. She offered the bath and then could not, and in that moment the film asks nothing of her but what she chooses to tell. A yes can be withdrawn at any point, and in the one scene where the film shows it happen, nobody treats the first answer as owed.

The second matters more. For the first time in the film, Jon has to attend to someone else’s reality: not her body, not her approval, not a score, but a loss that has nothing to do with him and that he cannot fix. The week without pornography failed because it was about Jon. This cannot be about Jon. It is the first thing in the film that refuses to fit any picture he has, and it is what reaches him. After it, their honesty with each other draws them close, and for the first time sex with another person means something to him.

This is where this essay parts company, gently, with an earlier one in this Library. “There Is Always Another Man in the Room” read Don Jon as a film in which both partners run a script, and in which the relationship that finally reaches Jon is the one where somebody interrupts. That is right as far as it goes, and by its own choice it went no further than the premise and the arrival of a second woman. Past that point the film suggests a narrower claim. Esther does interrupt him, with her question and her week, and in the film the interruption alone does not change him. What changes him is what she lets him see. Being interrupted tells you that you have been performing. Being shown someone else’s loss gives you something to attend to instead.

Go back to the phrase the film turns on. Jon wants to lose himself. It is not a shameful wish. People lose themselves in music, in work, in a novel, in a film in the dark; Barbara loses herself in her love stories as completely as Jon does in his clips. It is one of the oldest pleasures there is, and nothing in this essay argues against it.

What the film discovers is where it can happen with another person, and the condition is the reverse of what pornography offers. In the clips, Jon can lose himself because nobody can find him: nobody looks back, nobody asks, nobody is let down, nobody is there. With Esther he can lose himself because somebody already has found him. She saw what was on his phone. She asked why. She told him what she saw. And she let him find her, fourteen months into a grief that was never about him. The finding comes first. The losing comes after, and in the film’s last scenes it comes to both of them, together.

Spike Jonze’s Her, from the same year, is about a man who falls in love with an operating system built to learn and grow, and this Library’s essay on it, “Her and the Seduction of Feeling Perfectly Understood”, argued that friction is how you know someone is there: a real person can surprise you, misread you, have a boundary of her own. Both of Don Jon’s pictures are built to remove the friction. The clips never refuse him. The hero of Barbara’s films never surprises her. Esther’s grief is friction in its plainest form, something that will not be arranged around anybody’s comfort, and that is exactly why she is the one he can finally be with.

Two scenes close the story, and both are about being seen, or not. In the first, Jon goes back to the confessional and tells the priest he has stopped watching pornography. He has slept with a woman outside marriage, he says, but it felt different, special, unlike anything before. The priest does not acknowledge the change, and Jon comes away disillusioned. The point is not about the church. It is that a place that counts can register a number going down and still not see the person the number belongs to. Jon had never really been looked at there either.

In the second, he meets Barbara once more. He apologises for lying to her, which he owed her. Then he tells her that her expectations were impossible too, which he also owed her. She answers from inside her picture: a man, she tells him, should make any sacrifice for the woman he loves. Then she tells him not to call her again. The film neither punishes her nor changes her. She ends where she began, with her convictions intact, which is either the film’s limit or its honesty, and probably both.

Then comes the ending the film chooses instead of a wedding. Neither Jon nor Esther wants a conventional marriage. They begin to see each other, and they lose themselves together. Moore said that, unlike a lot of romantic comedies, the film does not assume a happily ever after. It just says, as she put it, “Let’s see what happens.” And a moment later: “This is what we’re paying attention to.” The film’s last word, in other words, is attention: two people who have found each other, for now.

Don Jon reached Japanese cinemas on 15 March 2014, released by KADOKAWA under a transliteration of its title and rated R15+. One part of it arrives in Japan as a foreign custom: the confessional, where a Catholic tells a priest his sins and is given prayers to say in penance. It helps to know that much for the joke to land, and to know that what Jon makes of it, a weekly tally and prayers said between lifts, is the film’s portrait of one man’s routine and not of anyone’s faith.

One Japanese fact belongs in this essay, because it answers the central promise of Jon’s pictures. Pornography sells sex with nobody there. There is always somebody there. In June 2022 Japan passed a law to prevent and remedy harm to people who appear in adult videos, in force from 23 June that year, which the Cabinet Office describes as a law to protect individual dignity in matters of sex. Its rules amount to consent made operational. The contract and a written explanation of it must be handed over and its terms explained, and filming may not begin until a month after those papers are delivered. A performer may refuse any filming or any act they do not want and may see the footage before release, and nothing may be released until four months after all filming ends. And any performer, whatever their age or sex, may cancel the contract without conditions before filming, before release, and for a year after release, or longer for contracts signed in the law’s first years.

This essay makes no claim about the industry, or about anyone who watches. The film never asks about the people in Jon’s clips, and that is one of the questions it leaves out. But the law begins from exactly what Jon’s pleasure depends on forgetting: that the person on the screen is a person, whose yes is not a signature given once.

For a woman living in Japan in her second language, being measured against a picture can take a particular form. The picture may be of a category rather than of her: the foreign woman someone had already imagined before they met. The remedy the film arrives at, being seen and told rather than guessed at, has to cross a language to reach her, and it may take longer. When it arrives, it is the same thing.

The film has serious critics, and each of their objections touches this essay as well as the film.

The first is that the film becomes what it mocks. Morgan Wilcock, writing in Film Comment, took its opening parade of women on television for the set-up of a satire on a degrading media culture, and found instead that the film “becomes part of the problem”: Jon’s voice-over lists the shortcomings of the women he sleeps with in detail, and most of the jokes are about women’s looks. That is fair. The film asks us to laugh along with Jon’s scoring long before it asks us to see through it, and an essay about being seen should not pretend that the film always sees its women.

The second goes deeper. Eleni Deacon, writing in cléo in 2014, argued that the film dismisses every screen fantasy only to put another in its place: it “fetishizes the notion of meaning itself.” Its final montage, she noted, borrows the grammar of the romantic comedy it mocked, a sunset included, and Esther is the manic pixie dream girl, the critics’ name for the whimsical young woman who exists to teach a young man how to live, turned inside out: a maternal figure who schools him in life’s realities. Both women, on this account, are categories rather than people, and the whole design is divided by sex: women watch romantic comedies, men watch pornography. Much of this is right. The ending is a picture too. The division of fantasies by sex is a simplification the film never questions, and nothing in life requires it. Moore herself, when an interviewer suggested that in another version of the film Esther could have become the woman who exists to help a young man find himself, agreed that it could.

The third is about sex itself. Luke Winkie, writing in Salon, found the film’s cure oddly conservative: one right kind of lovemaking, quiet and sincere and eye to eye, with no room for aggression, submission or play, so that for a film about losing yourself, its definition of losing yourself is “discouragingly narrow.” This essay agrees, and narrows its own claim to match. The argument here is not about style. Whether sex is quiet or loud, tender or, by agreement, rough, solemn or playful is nobody’s business but the people in it. What the film gets right is only the condition underneath: that the other person is there, can see you, can answer, and can stop it. A great deal of sex that looks nothing like the film’s last scenes meets that condition. Some that looks exactly like them may not.

The fourth concerns Barbara. Johansson said plainly that if the film was going to show Jon grow, her character had to be the antithesis, the one who would have kept him stuck, “a foil” for his journey. The Queen Mary guide found her left one-dimensional, never given the chance to change. Both are right, and this essay’s fairness to her is partly supplied rather than found in the film. The reading of her fantasy as a defence against being scored is this essay’s, not the film’s.

And the last is aimed at this essay’s own centre. It has argued that what changed Jon was being let into Esther’s grief. That is also an old and uncomfortable pattern, in which a woman’s pain becomes the turning point of a man’s story. The film does make her loss the hinge of his change. The most this essay can say is that the film does not use her grief up: it states it, leaves it hers, and gives her an ending she chooses. That narrows the objection. It does not answer it.

Three things, and none of them is a rule.

Pictures are not the enemy. People have always had them, of sex and of love, and the film does not ask anyone to give them up. Its hero stops watching pornography only after something else has arrived, not because he was shamed into it.

A picture does harm when it becomes the measure of a person who is actually there. The women Jon took home did not fail to be the clips. Jon did not fail to be the hero of a love story. Neither was ever the question, and a woman who has been measured that way was never the one who fell short.

And being with someone is attention that runs both ways: seeing a person accurately, and letting yourself be seen. That is what this Library has meant by being accurately known, and Don Jon adds one thing to it. You can only lose yourself with someone who has found you, and who has let you find them. The finding is not a preliminary to the pleasure. It is what makes the losing possible.

This essay is cultural analysis. It is not clinical or therapeutic advice, and it diagnoses no one. No clinical label is applied to Jon, to Esther or to anyone else in the film; Jon’s own statement that he is not addicted is reported as his. The international classification is described, not applied.

It gives no figure for how many people watch pornography, or how often, because its subject is one film’s argument and not a population. It is not a verdict on pornography, on romantic films or on anyone who watches either, and it does not claim that any one kind of sex is the right kind.

Esther’s loss is stated as the film states it. Nothing is said about what grief has done to her, and no one’s grief is given a name.

It rests on the film’s published record, on criticism and on interviews, not on a screening, and all dialogue is paraphrased. The words of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore come from interviews and statements they gave in 2013 and are treated as their accounts of the film, not as proof of this reading.

The Japanese law on adult-video performers is described, not applied, and no claim is made about any company or person. Nothing here implies that anyone who made or appears in the film, or any critic named, knows of or endorses this Library.

A few questions, for anyone who recognised a room in this film.

Whose picture have you been measured against, and did you ever say so out loud? What picture do you carry of someone close to you, and what would it cost you to let them not fit it? When did someone last see exactly what you were doing and say it without contempt? What have you never let anyone see, and is there anyone you would want to show?

The film ends without a wedding, a promise or a cure. Two people who have found each other are losing themselves together, for now. That is less than a love story promises, and more than any picture can give.

If you have ever been measured against a screen, the measuring was never about you. A picture cannot look back. You can.