Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience is an idea pushed forth to its logical conclusion. It is the film of a person completely reduced. Its method, of carrying an idea to its apex, is one that Jean-Luc Godard often praised in his writings as a film critic, and one that he evinces in his own work as a director. Indeed, Mr. Soderbergh’s film has even been referred to as “Godardian,” which to most who use the comparison means “the filmmaker JLG who died in 1968,” not “the director of 2009’s Socialisme.” The idea here, taken perhaps from Godard’s own preoccupation with prostitution in Vivre Sa Vie (1962), or his keen observation of consumer politics in Masculin, Feminin (1964), or the collision of the two in Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), is one of commodity fetishism and what Foucault identifies as the modern problem of representation. Namely, that we increasingly relate to the signs of language and commerce (symbols, letters, images) less for the content that they signify than for the signifiers themselves. Logos assume value in and of themselves. Personal branding becomes not only the norm but a necessity.

Godard anticipated Mr. Soderbergh’s present aim as early as the mid-60s (earlier, probably) in a scene from Two or Three Things I Know About Her, where Marina Vlady and a fellow prostitute pace around in their underwear with TWA duffle bags over their heads, to the delight of an especially wealthy John. It was around this time that Godard’s cinema became disenchanted with American consumer culture, and the Children of Marx and Coca-Cola smashed their pop bottles in the street and fled to the East. Capitalism and the American hegemony will, in time, make dancing shapes of us all.

Unlike in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, however, Mr. Soderbergh is not speculating at some distant point along the horizon, a point where human lives are reduced to corporate emblems for the sake of streamline capitalism. That point has already been passed. He is merely putting his camera to the ground to catch a glimpse of Godard’s nightmare, manifest, as it is today, in the torpid shape of porn star Sasha Grey (her face, one of the most marketable commodities in the adult entertainment industry) and the present machinations of global commerce. The film’s narrative, about an upwardly striving, fiscally irresponsible call girl in the personal branding age, is the logical end of Vlady’s TWA scene in Two or Three Things. Grey’s character, escort Chelsea/Christine, spends her time between clients worrying about SEO (search-engine optimization), finding the perfect photograph with which to advertise her services online, and constructing the persona of a “high class” call girl. She measures out her days in brand-name lingerie and 5-star restaurants. She is affectless, wooden, a porcelain sex doll trading hands across Manhattan. Her interior life is almost entirely ignored; with the exception of her fondness for Personology books, we know nothing about her. This is exactly how Mr. Soderbergh would have it, how Chelsea/Christine would have it, how personal branding has it—an almost glib impersonality.

Where The Girlfriend Experience fails is in its casual approach to this criticism. We live in a time so overly commodified and humanly cold that it is difficult to differentiate between an attempt at social realism and one of deriding social commentary. Certainly they coexist (a McDonalds advertisement is practically a satire of itself), but the line Mr. Soderbergh draws between the two is so consistently thin that I wonder if most people won’t miss the point. Primarily, that when we jeer at Chelsea/Christine’s lifestyle, her naivety and petty preoccupations, we are jeering at a reflection of ourselves.

Sadly, the art of reading subtext is a dying one, poorly tended in this age of signs and symbols. And because of this, Mr. Soderbergh’s film falls victim to the very system it is rebelling against. Just as Chelsea/Christine fails to become anything more than the symbol of her sex trade, to her clients, to the audience of The Girlfriend Experience, so too is the film itself absorbed at face value. The cluttered shot of a sporting goods store or boutique is processed solely as an establishing shot, which is its immediate function, yet that which it signifies, the wolfish culmination of overproduction and capitalist greed, is elided in our minds because of a widening perceptual disconnect between the signifier and the signified, between the image of a thing and the thing itself. An entire lifetime of exposure to flickering adverts and disembodied symbology has rendered us fundamentally incapable of realigning the two. We see the shapes of the film dancing but we fail to ask why they dance. Might it have been better for Mr. Soderbergh to blanket The Girlfriend Experience in expository voiceover, as Godard was so fond of doing? Possibly. But there is an equal danger in forced ideologies as there is in latent ideological tendencies. In the latter scenario the message is missed completely, in the former it is heard but not questioned. Which is worse?

All of this is to say that perhaps I misspoke earlier. Perhaps it is not a case of The Girlfriend Experience failing the audience, but of the audience failing The Girlfriend Experience. Or, more apropos, like a man trying to tell a rock that it’s a rock, of each failing the other in turn. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 9/29/09

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