The Long Goodbye: On Steven Soderbergh
Success as a Hollywood director requires, at the very least, pretending to be fascinated by celebrities. They come with the deal: you have to look at them all day, place them in compromising positions, apply emotional heft to their attractive surfaces, leverage their cultural capital. Once Soderbergh lost interest in conventional modes of performance—probably sometime around the release of Out of Sight, when he realized he had the power to make Jennifer Lopez seem destined for greatness—he became the cinema’s most mischievous manipulator of the celebrity-industrial complex. Somehow, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Channing Tatum, among others, have been happy to get played—and play along.
Soderbergh understands that surrendering one’s identity to the public’s illusions of it can offer liberation of a sort, and he knows that celebrities look for chances to indulge it. There is a joke in Ocean’s Twelve—a dumb meta-joke, really—in which Tess, the character played by Julia Roberts, is asked to pose as Julia Roberts in order to gain after-hours access to a museum. (She doesn’t quite pull it off.) Because of this clubby humor, the Ocean’s movies have been criticized as providing a thinly veiled excuse for a bunch of all-star friends to hang out in front of a camera and trade inside jokes. Manohla Dargis, who mostly appreciated Ocean’s Twelve, smelled an off-putting “smog of self-satisfaction.” Implied in such asides, perhaps, is the suggestion that the actors aren’t justifying their paychecks by doing enough work; if there’s no sweat on the screen, and if the stars seem insufficiently alienated from their task, the paying audience is somehow being shortchanged. But Soderbergh casts every role with an eye toward summoning a wide range of extra-textual associations. He knows that actorly presence, buoyed either by fame or a distinct lack thereof, can do as much as any stylistic gesture to signify a sense of intimacy. It’s difficult to imagine a “bad” performance he wouldn’t find interesting.
If Full Frontal (2002), also starring Roberts, remains Soderbergh’s most unjustly rejected movie, the distaste stems from a similar suspicion of inside baseball, and an obvious discomfort with the participation of real movie stars in a deliberately ugly, self-referential experiment in modes of disclosure. A fleetly produced, partially improvised ensemble comedy about artificial emotions and emotional artifice in the entertainment industry, the film was conceived as a spiritual sequel to Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Shot with a Canon XL1S camcorder, except for its 35mm Hollywood film-within-the-film, Full Frontal is an earnest early reckoning with digital video’s effect on cinematic realism. The movie’s climactic insight—that the handheld, grimy digital image is less reliably “real” than the Hollywood one—is not a revelation, but the drunken cast-party atmosphere (even Terence Stamp shows up, in character from The Limey) suggests that pervasive self-delusion undermines all distinctions between reality and wish fulfillment.
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Acting is always artificial, even though audiences judge performances on the basis of their relationship to the real. Performances that work, that generate affect—whether in the theater or on film—generally do so on the basis of established norms for the representation of reality. But what if the situation being represented suggests that affect is always commercialized and artificial? How might performance adapt to tell such a story? How might a director or an actor reimagine the performing body in an economy where the production of affect is a chief commodity?
For three of his most recent films, all of them concerned with labor, modes of affect and late-capitalist precarity, Soderbergh ingeniously opted to develop projects around performers known for various forms of noncinematic body work. For Haywire, he cast mixed martial arts star and ex–American Gladiator Gina Carano in a quietly radical feminist spy thriller that depended heavily on visceral, body-to-body combat. Magic Mike (2012), an irresistible smash hit, was conceived around star Channing Tatum’s past career as an exotic dancer. But the key work in this unofficial trilogy was easily the most creatively audacious.
Even for a director who works as quickly as Soderbergh, The Girlfriend Experience, from 2009, felt especially tethered to its zeitgeist. Shot cheaply in downtown Manhattan over a period of two weeks with a mostly nonprofessional cast, it directly addresses the 2008 presidential election and Wall Street’s financial collapse. The film offers an almost documentary-style index of the fears and preoccupations of the newly moneyed—and perhaps soon to be newly broke—transactional capitalists who bought into lower Manhattan’s real estate boom. With crisp digital precision, Soderbergh’s camera seeks out sleek, depersonalized urban spaces and opaque physical objects, and avoids exterior establishing shots.
The title of The Girlfriend Experience refers to the specific sort of encounter provided by the film’s protagonist, a high-priced escort who goes by the name Chelsea (her real name is Christine). For thousands of dollars, she offers the illusion of intimacy to her well-heeled johns. Her time on the clock is less about sex than the simulation of a monogamous relationship, which includes romantic dinners, movie dates and the illusion of an emotional stake in her employer’s well-being. She seems to spend less time getting physical than she does simply managing her clients’ economically determined emotional crises. The allegorical power of the rent-a-girlfriend phenomenon relies less on the commodification of emotion than on the application of corporate time-management philosophy to interpersonal relationships. For these masters of the universe, the allure of the “girlfriend experience” is that, unlike an actual girlfriend, Chelsea’s services can be compartmentalized into a short period of time, and she herself can be terminated as soon as her ministrations become redundant.
