America doesn’t talk much about porn, but it thinks about it all the time. We all tee-hee when PornHub puts up its yearly porn consumption stats  and talk about Stormy Daniels having sex with our current President without — quite — talking about the other sex Stormy Daniels has had, for money and on camera.

So it’s inevitable that non-porn movies end up addressing porn, and in 1997, there were two: Boogie Nights, an energetic, two-and-a-half-hour tour de force from Paul Thomas Anderson’s journeyman years, and Orgazmo, a ninety-minute farce from the South Park guys. One of these features a long shot of an enormous dick. The other got slapped with an NC-17. Go figure.

But in the big picture, it makes perfect sense. Boogie Nights is a tragicomedy, the story of a big star (with a big cock) who reaches fame and fortune, only to fall into addiction, impotence, and crime. Orgazmo, in contrast, has our hero get heavenly approval for his career in porn. There’s no way American audiences, much less the notoriously repressive MPAA, was going to consider that second one anything less than too hot to handle.

It’s too bad, because Orgazmo deserved a bigger audience. While it certainly has a bit of a panglossian perspective on the porn industry, it is better than Boogie Nights at portraying its performers as actual breathing humans, not tragedies in the making or broken, cocaine-addicted dolls. (No matter your opinion on pornography in general and the American porn industry in particular, it’s refreshing to see people who are usually treated as pariahs or punchlines getting to be regular folks with unusual jobs.) The movie also has an undeniable sense of fun and play, with a cheerful, generous energy. Starting off with our hapless hero and his partner getting thrown out by a sweet, kindly little old lady who gets real, real mad when she realizes she’s dealing with Mormons trying to recruit her, the movie never stops telling jokes, or finding ridiculous situations for its hero Joe (“Joseph Young,” of course — as in The Book of Mormon, these jokes come from people who know the territory) to try to get out of. But the movie also seems genuinely fond of Joe, his friends and family, and his hapless fiancée Lisa, whose desire for a real Temple wedding gives Joe a lot of his motivation. (It’s worth noting that Mormon missionaries, especially those living in high cost-of-living areas, are pretty notoriously underpaid.) It makes good, sometimes hilarious, use of its shoestring budget. It’s honestly just a hell of a lot of fun.

Boogie Nights was always going to be the bigger movie, even if it hadn’t been the movie that reminded us that The Porn Industry Is Bad. Well, some of the porn industry; it starts with an almost utopian studio, where everyone is happy, if a bit too dependent on cocaine, and then, as the 80s hit and the VHS era takes over, takes a turn for the sleazy and violent. (The truth, no doubt, lay somewhere in between; Linda Lovelace has made no secret of how exploited and mistreated she was during the very era Boogie Nights waxes nostalgia over.) It’s also a better movie, on almost every level. The performances are top-notch, the script is pretty decent, and there are scenes that are completely indelible in my brain (New Year’s Eve, 1979; “Sister Christian”). Boogie Nights is a sophomore feature from a master starting to come into his power; Orgazmo is a silly little footnote from the South Park and Book of Mormon guys. But I’ll always have some fondness for it, and for Joe Young, who just wanted to give his girl the big, expensive Temple wedding she dreamed of.

Maybe the US is too ridiculous about sex to ever have a movie that’s unflinching about porn, falling either into the “’everything’s fine”’ or “’everything’s terrible”’ trap (or awkwardly agreeing with both positions like Boogie Nights. Some of it’s probably just that a lot of industries have trouble looking at themselves, and if the mainstream movie industry can’t even be honest about itself much of the time, it’s they’re certainly not going to handle the adult film industry well. But it’s strange to think that an industry that makes more money than Major League Baseball, The NFL and The NBA combinedand whose sites have more monthly visitors than Netflix passes by us so often with so little commentary or attention. At least we have these two movies from 1997 to remind us that, as a culture, we’ll never stop thinking about sex, or even, sometimes, about the people whose jobs it is to keep us thinking about sex.