This review is one for the ages. From www.news.infoshop.org :
“This is not a time for fight club, is it? The cynicism of the ’90s appeared to have reached some sort of apex of anomie near the end of the decade. We could no longer choke down our own image as bored consumers, pathetic workers, and depressed youth. The course of action became disturbingly clear: one could either kill everyone in their vicinity, or learn how to fight with others…Steven Soderbergh’s new cinematic trauma, The Girlfriend Experience, captures the world after this one.”
“In the early 1970s there was an advertisement shown in Paris movie theaters that promoted a well-known brand of stockings, “Dim” stockings… Anyone who watched even a few minutes of its images, however distractedly, would have a hard time forgetting the special impression of synchrony and dissonance, of confusion and singularity, of communication and estrangement from the bodies of the smiling dancers…Each dancer was filmed separately and later the single pieces were brought together over a single sound track. But the facile trick, that calculated asymetry of the movement of long legs sheathed in the same inexpensive commodity, that slight disjunction between gestures, wafted over the audience a promise of happiness unequivocally related to the human body.”
– Giorgio Agamben, Dim Stockings
“The young girl makes love in the same way she washes her car”
– Tiqqun, First Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl
“The Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes image”
– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
This is not a time for fight club, is it? The cynicism of the ’90s appeared to have reached some sort of apex of anomie near the end of the decade. We could no longer choke down our own image as bored consumers, pathetic workers, and depressed youth. The course of action became disturbingly clear: one could either kill everyone in their vicinity, or learn how to fight with others. With some dumb luck, the anti-globalization movement made an appearance and gave so many bullied children, computer nerds, and petty sociopaths a new collective house alongside the indigenous people of wherever, the left, and the lesbian avengers.
Then, as goes the activist version of Revelations, Osama Bin Laden came long and ruined all our fun—returning the image of darker skinned people who believe in stuff to a more scarier position than people with masks breaking stuff. The banality of cinema (exceptions included: Children of Men, JCVD, Let the Right One in, and Paradise Now) analogizes this trite world of false good vs false evil. In the bad ol’ days, we didn’t know it could be better, we tried to believe in things, and now, silence.
Steven Soderbergh’s new cinematic trauma, The Girlfriend Experience, captures the world after the world ended—and History is as banal and horrifying as ever. The Obama election and the economic crisis are a less than subtle background to an everyday life that reflects each and every shameful ounce of the emotional and material poverty of our times.
Sasha Grey, self-described existential porn star in “real life,” stars as Chelsea, a high-end escort. We follow her lukewarm calculated performances through all echelons of bourgeois society. We can thank Soderbergh for the most amazing, boring, and frustrating scenes of something like sex. Chelsea spends scene after scene talking to her agents and her website and brand development teams. Questions of anonymity are brought up alongside meaningless gestures of affect: “hows the family?”
We are reflected our own image—running into an old friend, a business acquaintance, a sister, having an interesting conversation, performing being-amicable. We press the “hows the family” button, a response. We press the “Ha! Remember when you…” button, a response. We poke fun at one friend’s less than charming qualities, multiple responses from the crowd. Others come to dine or get drinks at such a charming, lively, or “funky place.” This isn’t simply the shameful cultural habits of late capital, it is capital. Chelsea knows this, and would prefer to get paid for it.
The relationship between immaterial labor, care taking, and sex work, is illuminated in The Girlfriend Experience. Soderbergh, oscillates between scenes of Chelsea talking to men about their financial predictions, Google-ratings, and Obama as they undress revealing underwear with diaper-like qualities and scenes of her boyfriend, Chris, working as personal trainer with men and women in a gym, referred to as a “boutique.”
Nothing new to the seasoned craigslist whore, there is still an element of provocation in Soderbergh’s elucidation of the current postionality of workers in our biopolitical hell. The incredibly wealthy men with families could not function as such without their high-end escorts who play at being-the girlfriend. The friendly performances of Chris follow succinctly. The gay men need someone to hit on at the gym to function as gay men, the petty bourgeois woman needs someone to touch her, and encourage her to do her best. These John’s and Janes don’t even desire the sex-object anymore; they desire “the real thing.”
Chelsea and Chris as images being-images, are able to perform their way across the bridge of fiction into a whole regime of playing at being. In one montage, Chelsea negotiates with a web developer about how to increase her rates and hits. She poses questions in a pseudo-web speak, referencing “that thing that makes me show up in Google searches” which are fielded by the developer playing at being professional, who makes up pay-rate on the spot. He is clearly doing this labor through an expropriation of his work’s facilities which we see in the background. Chris, on the other hand, is searching around to increase his rate as well. He talks with a miserable gym owner about its faculties using synergy and nu-speak. They share laughs. The next scene he is trying to use his subtle transgression as leverage to get a raise. He’s been shopping around. The economic crisis is an ace card for Chris’s current boss, and of course, some blabbering about being a team player. Unfortunately Chris is not a “t-shirt kind of guy” By the end of the scene it, would appear Chris’s Boss’s sentimental maneuver—“you’ve been working here for years, man”—pays off.
The liberal project of neutralization is made no more clear than in the non-violent communication between workers and bosses, employers and potential employees, and contractors and who ever the fuck pays them. Only one thing can be communicated: a gesture in every direction, the total domination of capital. We can hear anyone of our assistant managers “If you have any problems, just come talk to me, as two individuals. Nothing is more pathetic than facing an enemy alone, as an individual.
At some point in the film Chelsea’s mystical “personology” books inform her that a John, a happily married John with children, might be the one. She is invited to go away with him for the weekend. Chelsea is perhaps confused about “this feeling that I have, ya know.” She’s convinced “it’s just something she has to do.” We wonder if she has never had a crush or if we have said such dumb shit in our lives too. Unfortunately, its probably both. It proves to be a surefire way to defeat her boyfriend’s hold on their previous positions about dating Johns. She goes. Rupture. Fizzle.
The Girlfriend Experience will not seduce everyone to smash windows across the world. It is not an action movie. Life is not action packed. However, intentionally or not, the film lays the terrain for some of the biopolitical conflicts of our time. If the concept of history as a history of social war is going to mean anything it must be understood as an elaboration of a concept of the history as class struggle. Soderbergh’s film presents us with just this cinematic gift. Through our lens of insurrection we can make total sense of the banal and horrifying life presented in The Girlfriend Experience. And perhaps, through our proletarian techné, we can profane the film’s status as a philosophical commodity form. If Sasha Grey wishes to make existential porn, and ruminate on yet another meta-character in a movie, so be it. It is her real positionality, played by Chelsea, that ought interest us. It is in the fact that the so-called existential porn-stars of the alt porn genre cannot be made separate from the material worlds they are attached to. Thus, Sasha Grey, alongside some Senator, alongside our high-school friend, share in a practice of increasing their facebook rates by any means necessary.