Spiraling
This theme is major throughout the film. As we watch Eddie Adams become Dirk Diggler he embraces many vices that run throughout the pornographic community including drugs, jealousy (to the degree of Little Bill killing his wife, another man, and himself), and most horrible of all child pornography. Anderson creates a film that doesn't judge the pornographic community, but certainly creates the true to life horrors that cause an Eddie from suburbia to spiral out of control into Dirk Diggler, a man willing to rob and steal in order to eat and have drugs. He spirals so far out of control that he doesn't believe he can be accepted back into society, and thus goes back into the systemic abuse of the pornographic industry.
Loss of Identity
Eddie is a high school drop out with a girlfriend and an abusive mother. He hasn't been taught who he is, only who he isn't by his relationship with his mother. In Jack Horner he finds a man that allows him to become anything he wants, Jack doesn't put constraints upon him. Instead, he allows Eddie to be "free" to do anything, to lose his inhibitions by having sex on camera for money. Eddie becomes Dirk Diggler, an identity that he believes is that of a star. But, the truth is revealed that by the end of the film that same young man who was abused by his mother is still wounded within and searching, by any means possible, to find acceptance in a world that he has grown to believe will only spit on him.
Stigma
The stigma of being a pornographic actor is explored in this film, specifically in Amber's storyline when she attempts to regain custody of her child. Though she may be an excellent mother, even better than the child's father, the courts won't give her custody. Not because she can't afford to take care of her child, but because she works in the pornographic film industry, and to the courts that lifestyle is not one for a child to witness secondhand. This becomes a catalyst for her continuing to work in pornography, seemingly never getting out.
