Some Notes on The Girlfriend Experience

Second in the series of Edinburgh FF related articles-- Sodenbergh's new digital guerilla affectless capitalism allegory done on the fly. In which instance, is it More Godard or Jess Franco?---or maybe that's a spurious dichotom in either sense.

Watching Steven Sodenberg's new 'Girlfriend Experience' at the EIFF I was struck how there are no other movies addressing sociologically or metaphorically the recent meltdown. This in turn has been intimately connected with another debate discussed at the festival- the speed of movie developments- past and future, and its artistic ramifications. From script to final cut, over the last 15 years it takes on average 22-24 months. Compare this to Godard movies made in the 60's addressing the Paris Riots-or mainstream serious entertainments ‘All the Presidents Men’ or the lightly fictionalised “Three Days of the Condor”.

An optimistic view of the status quo is that, compared to albums , poems or blog-lit - -- the time factors exacerbated by funding restriction procedures have created a self-regulating system avoiding statements about politics which are quickly anachronistic or ill-thought through. That movies have to either exist as pieces of art beyond the transient buffeting winds of political incident-where , as the saying goes, a week is a long-time, or indeed sociological trend--or that movies have to be viable financially, art or art, according to a set of conditions that go beyond immediate chords.

From an industry perspective, political cinema being so contemporaneous to its loci of causality- its inspiration, whilst coterminous with relatively high distribution, is a new and partly technologically-enabled phenomenon. ’The Girlfriend Experience’ not only has been released in double QuickTime through the standard sources, contravening the planning-editing and distribution two year cycle, but it’s also become available upon a multi-platform—cable, pay per view, DVD, Cinema release almost simultaneously. Has this enforced reflective resulted in considered political cinema- if politics then is defined as broader, longer-term trends-- rather than resorting to constant discourses on the pre-defined concepts and circular themes of endemic political corruption and 20th century phenomena like PAC money, panoptical-anxiety and technological espionage?

Perhaps we’re in an age of post-politics and necessarily post-political cinema in the strictest sense- the logic of standard dialectic subsumed by the rhetoric analysis of text-objects from Derrida and the pragmatists filtering into the waters. Certainly the film invites an analysis which is in itself both logical and eventually contingent-sort of eventually post-Kantian, and in this sense the phenomology of montage cinema writ large- in it’s foregrounding of its imposing and eventually inscrutable desire-beckoning epistemology of meaning-making. The Girlfriend Experience in some way touches upon the necessarily circular , even typological themes of objectification, of mercantile vs existential value-of the power relationships involved in all human-value as commodity transactions. The simulation of the girlfriend' for one thing is hardly a new phenomena- the anxiety at the heart of the broker’s relationships to romantic value given their power status-the question of what constitutes attraction, and the conflicting allegiances between categories of 'relationship' between Gray's personae and her clients/boyfriend simultaneously. All those we find in Godard's capitalist critiques-just in terms of explicitly cinematic treatment.

As Mark Cousin’s noted in his 2001 article, the tendency in mainstream cinema has been to the conservative-corporate; which is of course traditionally interpreted as politically neutral which, being so imbedded, elides explanation-’normative’ in its evasion of the material.Of course it’s not just the length between matiere and story which is affected by the tech. Democracy but also issues of funding, equity-all contingent previously on structures of marketing and other interests of the studios veering towards the mainstream(demographic) and then towards the conservative (personal)- an interlocked cycle which had to some extent directed the expectations of movies across the board- their prerogative to question-steadily towards a version of the right.

There’s a political dimension to all cinema. The past can be relevant not only for its own documentary purposes but also a form of myth or allegory to stand in for the future—born, like all allegory, out of a universalism paradigm of human behaviour. Arguably there’s a political cinema out there-and like all politics through the microscope these days it’s existence and reception comes with a number of caveats; the chance to see adult film-star Sasha Grey-of the demeaning as art-school-playing a Manhattan escort in some ready made analogue for capitalism but also frisson of excitement, Sodenberg to have one of his art-films reach a mainstream audience in the same way Oceans 11/12 or Erin Brock did-, and the unwieldy Che gain some Kudos for ambitious cinema in the way Sex, Lies and Videotape did in the early nineties.

The Girlfriend Experience, with its imitation of life and imitation of art, and the standard vocabulary of art-shots, is a quite conventional model- as conventional as Milk or Frost Nixon when it comes to political cinema. There’s even a sense of art as high-end money-shot, as a glorified exploitation movie of aphrodisiac surfaces. Which distinguishes it as phenomena is not Sodenberg's low-budget, high visibility status, not his formal techniques in of themselves but the alignment of everything else to a contemporary piquant-a literalising or at least epistemic blurring of political cinema—usually documenting the past with consideration, how it analyses and documents history before it concretizes- the camera script weaving in amidst the falling rubble of the new Great Crash. With its fragmentation aesthetics though it harks back to the classic age of paranoia, the seventies-and its psycho-analytical associative structure ordered films about conspiracies which found their equivalent in the aesthetic paranoia of meaning-over-determination and elision alike.

It’s interesting how the audience are not necessarily pushed forwards in a linear sense, but against the conventional narrative parameters of cinematic time and space into an aural dimension, an aural depth. It also clearly demonstrates Sonderbergh’s "Chrono-Logic"; the film has an internal narrative - the time span that the events on screen are occurring within - but also an external narrative of the duration of the film within its screening in the market’s continual cyclical collapse. He utilises time as a cyclical emblem, reinforcing his ideas around the unstoppable recycling of events.

Sondeberg's characters here very seldom link their situation into a particularised point in power relations. Merely that previous years –during which Grey's character first began working-- constituted a boom-time in the economy. Not that her profession and loss of clients is in any peculiar way an analogue for late-century capitalism. For most of the movie her job is glamorous- simulating Karina/ Deneuve icon shots rising from the bed mixed in with SoHo set loft and Chelsea Hotel cinematographical rises. Conversations on the niceties of symbolism-relationship deconstruction with an experienced journalist who sees her as the epitome of the modern condition come spliced in with half-ert irony. And then in the end-a 'happy ending' premature emotional betrayal ejaculation, hug and overspill with a corpulent sort-after her experiences with a loathsome reviewer-played by Premiere's Glen Kenny.

The Glamour vs the muck becomes an analogue for the psychological process of trading--the traders up on what looks like airforce 1 clinking crystal and Cristal, discussing Vegas-with the near- suicidal plummeting , the lifestyle and ulcers they experience in the course of the movie. The movie itself is cold- dispassionate-emotionally hemlocked, and simulating ennui, its non-judgement is a comment on the psychopathology of corporate life. The abuse which Grey takes onlike performance art an analogy for voting Republican-maschocism. A self-interest which genuinely deludes itself as believing in a ‘natural order’, in what it enacts as ‘love’.

The intimacy that he wishes for gets locked in-messed into his outfit-his opinions those of sad sack condemned by ironies of history (vote McCain etc)- the experience offered is a double-blind-the broken down body against her false intimacy facade-which in of itself from a neutrally involved perspective of the camera just becomes another emission, becomes a condemnation of both parties. Just like Ms Grey herself; her reputation would suggest TGE would be a quite different type of movie in its treatment of the theme; a notoriety frisson selling an experience which demonstrably offers very little aside from a re-iteration of herself as distance-from clients, from persona, from herself. Discussions occur all the time about a hidden/innate self which the client would like to see- a s the prized asset. Just as here suddenly the prized artefact asset is Grey-clothed—a revolution game played with her image, that she becomes a piquant curiosity-like the markets, torn between supreme control and contingent instability. The promise of a less mercantile connection of straightforward desires. But in the end this can become in the marketplace just another fetish if everything is blank. As Grey's Chelsea is an intelligent blankness.

Normally she trades in the degradation- the risk taking bravado art-performance of the market place; the high-wire theatrics, with money or other terms of values-transmuting meaning out of ‘nothings’ to engineer new values for itself like junk-bonds, like sub-primes. Grey herself described the culture in this movie as 'looking for bigger mirrors', her Chelsea included. There's an uneasy shift between body and abstracts- she abstracted into money, relationships into a series of digits and ciphers, and stocktraders in turn back into hard-bodies like in a Bret Easton Ellis revisitation. It's Ellis' type of alienation which this movie tributes. Sodenbergh’s plane-dwellers on their way to Vegas are filmed in a lo-budget light like those eighties free-for-all ‘dirty cams’-the low-budget entrepreneurial grainy self-made s-tape, in a dialogue wth Sasha Grey’s own pre-existent persona. Or Sodebergh’s vacillation between the ‘clean’ business of social cinema and the high-gloss Vegas ‘whore’ of his commercial work. Between the two poles of modern film-making—self-reflexively commented upon.

It took years to process 9/11 filmically and yet now, from stories of death and solidarity, New York occupies once again-and this time more moribund-the spectre of a ravaged city in the financial district. The enemy within is more nebulous than the interlopers through airports security and flight-schools, the homeland security threat itself overturned by the bond-securities downfall; the anxiety of the body politic-diffuse expectations of Grey’s body, of her client’s bodies turn on the treadmills and as objects of scrutiny and, most of all, the financial body politics’ integrity. It can’t be honed or cured-but at best present the illusion of a natural relationship to commodities, present a veneer of confidence.

A freedom to buy anything- has more or less always exited for the rich-but with this techno-view- this apparent free-market liberalism democracy of viewings available through the digitised camera, through social mobility-a class which was once ossified has sprung up as the theatricity -as roleplay detached from material production and yet with values and lives still in the balance-plays the excesses of the ancient regime- has less to curb its tastes or the manner, the extent of its fee domination. But they too are confused-like in technology, so too the soteriologies of being, everything is more or less in flux- the historical lessons, like the lessons henceforth of allegory, also in flux within movie method and message along with the environment which-in its one certainty- it articulates in this, all this, slippage.