The pivotal revelation of Wesley’s reluctant stardom comes out simultaneously in two interviews that are intercut with each other as SVU personnel watch through one-way mirrors. Shooting scenes through windows or showing people watching through windows, particularly during interrogations at the station, is a signature visual device of SVU. One that could be interpreted as a self-reflexive commentary on television itself (“Your Window on the World”): an allusion to the privileged point of view of the audience, and to the affinity of this position with the diagetic detective work. The new pornography angle is, of course, even more insistently self-reflexive (as are all SVU episodes that feature a videotape of a sex crime). When Olivia expresses incredulity about the suspect’s gay porn story, he volunteers “I could screen the film for you if you’d like.” The detectives don’t respond, but the unfulfilled promise of explicit images hovers over the rest of the episode, functioning both to differentiate SVU’s text from porn (educating us about the difference between good sex TV and bad sex TV), and simultaneously to destabilize this very distinction — as SVU is obviously portraying porn (albeit with some delicacy) even as it condemns it. Elliot and Olivia drop in on a porn set, where the camera tracks tightly behind them as they stride through a labyrinthine corridor from the respectable outer office into the sordid interior, passing by the video equipment and crew before they stop short, their backs framing a tableau of Wesley’s wife Jaina, in a tawdry maid’s outfit, kneeling on the floor between two buff, shirtless men — a titillating picture indeed. On their second visit, the shots track across the literal border between realist illusion and televisual apparatus, crossing walls sporting lifelike domestic interiors on one side and scaffolding, machinery, and lounging talent on the other. The flick’s director goads Olivia by asking her, “You ever thought about doing a movie? You look like you’d be a real natural” — calling attention, perhaps, to her actual existence onscreen in a show about sex. In summary, then, “Sacrifice” serves as an example of the ways SVU’s language of investigation mediates the normative, as well as criminal, boundaries of sexual acts and desires, mobilizing critical ambivalences at the multivalent intersections of (homo)sexuality and perversion, family and eroticism, consent and violence, sex and consumerism, private acts and public performance, truth and simulation, revelation and concealment — a diagetic network of structuring ambiguities that reverberates intertextually and metatextually as well.
