In perhaps the most telling moment in The Girl Next Door, a disjointed but fascinating documentary about porn star Stacy Valentine, the actress explains that she'd be more hurt seeing her boyfriend, a fellow performer, holding hands with another woman than having sex with her on set. Such a backwards rationalization is intended as a show of good health, proof that she's capable of keeping her job and her personal life separate. But as director Christine Fugate subtly implies, Valentine's success in the industry is plainly destructive, because the more she's divorced from the emotional component of sex, the more she's divorced from herself. A former housewife from Oklahoma, Stacy Valentine is really Stacy Baker, though she's given to using both names, which are about as related as "mother" is to Norman Bates. Valentine is ostensibly her fake self, the seasoned professional with generous lip and breast implants, regular liposuction, and a willingness to take on two men at once for $1,700 per day. Meanwhile, Baker is the needy, vulnerable, lonely young woman from a broken home, still scarred by her abusive father and the equally abusive ex-husband who initially encouraged her to join the skin trade. The Girl Next Door tracks this split personality over two years' worth of video shoots, awards ceremonies, and cosmetic procedures, with a brief and touching detour back to her mother's home in Tulsa. While Fugate fails to shape the footage into an especially coherent or incisive character study—her inclusion of bad pop-song montages is particularly ill-advised—she sidesteps mere sensationalism. Given full access to the sets, she discreetly avoids shooting the bump-and-grind of Valentine's scenes, but never flinches during her grotesque surgical procedures. This kind of self-mutilation, Fugate implies, is what the porn industry is all about.