05 June 2009
the girlfriend experience
I don't have time to write about this now in the way that I would want to, but Soderbergh's new film, The Girlfriend Experience, is a brutal portrait of contemporary nu-language, immaterial labour, mysticism as ideological supplement, the Cv-isation of everyone and the impossibility of authenticity in a world swimming in the gloop of over-sharing. The dissociative framing of whatever strands of plot that exist, coupled with the simultaneously over-emotive yet equally flat conversations of the 'girlfriend', her equally empty boyfriend and her rich clients have a real sense of contemporary quotidian brutality, not least because the discussions of Obama, google-ratings, Dubai, message-boards and whether it's a good idea to buy gold or not were no doubt really taking place all over large American cities in recent weeks and months.
A.O.Scott at the NYTimes points to this discomforting presentism:
'Mr. Soderbergh, like Jean-Luc Godard in the second half of the 1960s, is less concerned here with finish or coherence than with an authentic, on-the-fly recording of a moment, and right now that moment — the weeks just before the last presidential election, when the financial system was in midcalamity — is at once too close and too emphatically in the past for it to make a lot of sense.'
The casting of Sasha Grey as a kind of meta-porn star - a real-life hardcore porn actress with an unnerving ability to look absent even (or especially) in the midst of some convoluted group penetration, is genius, as she perfectly combines the superficial beauty that someone who pays for a 'sophisticated' escort might expect, together with the walled-off blankness of someone who is just 'doing this for the money'. Her best conversation comes with a website designer when she tries to explain that she wants to be higher up on the hits when people search online for high-quality escorts. As he talks about links and erotic review sites, she glazes over, dreaming of her 'books', the numerology (or is it personology?) that she lives by as a way of gauging whether anything has any value: when clients ring up for the first time, she methodically asks them a series of questions she has adapted from her books. It ends up sounding, like so much of this film, like so much of contemporary immaterial life, like a job interview.
Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot has it re Grey:
'Grey also needn’t be a victim to have her persona critiqued. Her inability to emote actually renders her character simultaneously vulnerable and arrogant, and The Girlfriend Experience’s major coup is having Chelsea’s profession mirror Grey’s real-life work, with all its put-on airs of sophistication, and the film’s bridging of the two subtly comments on sex-for-hire’s increasing popular legitimacy. What’s important isn’t that swells will indulge their desire for sex with a hot young woman by paying obscene amounts of money to make the interaction vaguely resemble a genuine relationship—we know that. What’s important is that such behavior is now part of the expected surplus value of the capitalistic system of morality—if Chelsea fails at her boutique she’ll likely bank on a juicy memoir or luck out with a liaison with a high-profile politician, and everyone’ll win. Another way to put it: Chelsea would never exist without her clients, but these days her clients wouldn’t exist without her. Their illusionary work dealing in illusionary money is made tangible only by her services.'
[Dammit, I really want to write more about this! (patience, piglet, get better, finish the other things first. Yes, calming super-ego, I know you're right. Get me a glass of water!).]
