the case for The Girlfriend Experience

(Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel--on the passage from boyhood to manhood-"The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination -- he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion. He no longer went through the torment of the...flight and pursuit.")

Stephen Soderbergh's twentieth film, The Girlfriend Experience, introduces Sasha Grey to audiences less acquainted with scenes of gang bang and anal penetrations. Sasha, a notorious young porn star, written about in mainstream press for describing her porn work as Performance Art, contextualizes her career/craft ambitions with those of Anna Karina and J-L Godard.

The girlfriend experience is, on one level, a specific type of escort work, one designed more as an actual date with more kissing/intimate actions than is usually normal. On a second level, the film refers to the experiential nature of acting as if: his camera quietly follows as it rips down commonly shared beliefs on what is a real and what is a false (one with services bought and sold) relationship. Men and women can inhabit the role of gf and bf with or without $ to very similar if not identical results.

Soderbergh's film quietly (and not chronologically) chronicles the objectification of both genders in romantic relationships; the element of performance and leap of romantic faith as fantasy that each partner must choose to take when believing love as an actual quality of life. These are common lies that his film lays bare.
Soderbergh , as Amy Taubin aptly pointed out, makes somewhat structural films (a la Che and The Limey) where application and subject merge. As with Che 's merging themes of strategy and tactics, TGE is as much about escorts as it is about the process, though here it's more specifically the politics, of seduction. Perhaps inspired by Ashley Du Pre/Spitzer and the corporeal politics of finance and recession, TGE eludes any easy category of expose or sycophant- like escort worship. It is a film about stories, and structures, and lies. The Capitalist leap of magical thinking needed to trust the 'Market' is foregrounded here by similarly magical cultural myths weighing down gender roles in conventional coupling. Ideology informs the myth of boyfriend /girlfriend. The heterosexual power couple as commodity fetish-- as altered by competition and infected by profit motive as anything in the marketplace.
TGE catalogs it's protagonist's experiences out of chronological order. Scenes of Chelsea (Sasha's character on the job) and scenes of Christine (Sasha's character off the job) are like Che part 1 and Che part 2, following what Soderbergh described as a call and response relational system. No voyeuristic seduction is used to suck the viewer in to some lurid view of our heroine. Soderbergh prefers this journey as cool and chilly as its color template. The film believably favors the perspective, constantly masked and operating on multiple levels of performance as it is, of Sasha's character.

If countless moviegoers and critics alike missed the point when reading Sasha as 'cold' or 'plastic' then it is even less surprising to read A. O. Scott write that "The idea that Chelsea, the girlfriend for sale, is herself succumbing to the false allure of the girlfriend experience, is an interesting one, but neither the script, by Brian Koppelman and David Levien (who also wrote “Ocean’s Thirteen”), nor Ms. Grey’s cool, tentative acting can quite sustain the level of emotional complication necessary to bring it to dramatic life." (NYT 5.22.09) Perpetually saddened by the lack of gender intelligent film critics, I can't feign surprise at such comments. Scott is wrong because he fails to understand a basic fact of sex work. These work relationships are real relationships. And as Soderbergh asserts on this boomerang fold that endlessly reflects back on itself, real relationships are work relationships. love is a system of transactions. Business necessitates leaps of magical thinking and romance is a stage where we simply role play.
Chelsea/Christine/Sasha is a businesswoman who smartly organises her clients. But they are nonetheless actual relationships. This is hard to believe for most men since she is a 'woman' and she is a 'sex worker' but She is a person , with real affection, actual love ties, masks and all.

The Girlfriend Experience or How it Feels to be Transient

CUMMING soon...

still working out the *kinks* on this piece.

1st list* 2009

09 list #1

1 the girlfriend experience
2 tie: Public Enemies/ ne change rien
3 inglourious basterds
4 Tie: Fantastic Mr Fox/ Ricky
5 Les plages d'Agnes
6 Lorna's Silence
7 Hurt Locker/Tyson
8 35 Rhums
9 Two Lovers
10 tie: 36 vues du pic Saint Loup / Summer Hours
11 Tony Manero
12 A Single Man
13 Bruno
14 tie: Chelsea on the Rocks/ la frontiere de l'aube
15 Alexander the Last


hon m:
birdsong
white material
singularities de jeune fille blonde



worst:
antichrist
bad lieutenant: pocno
funny people

bizarrely inappropriate yet rewarding:
Precious: based on the novel Push by Sapphire
lovely bones
(and to a lesser extent, regarding rewards,) up

bitches' rewards

A woman's behaviour, that which is publicly witnessed, either in social groups or in office spaces, is sometimes the only political action at her disposal. In Party Girl (1995), Parker Posey plays the titular role with equal parts rude sarcasm and infectious goofiness. The girl in question, Mary, is a 23 yr old part-time party girl/ club kid, and a full-time fashionable young woman.  Mary seeks out aesthetic and experiential pleasure while abhoring the confines of rules and authority. Think Edie Sedgwick- lite in a screwball comedy; sans drug addiction. (But there are drugs. As simply part of the party.)

 The film begins amidst the chaos of stoned guests, multiple semi audible conversations, a shaky handheld, ,and what is mostly shin-view camera angle on a steep apartment staircase. Our first view of Mary is atop these stairs, affectedly (which can be read as sarcastically--but only by those outside her party going circle, those outsiders who are the status quo) waving a collection of bills and asking the crowd for admission money. One party guest pays with a joint, and Mary immediately partakes of the drug, happily oblivious of any wrongdoing. Her transgressions are certainly illegal but the rules don't apply in the world she's designed. This world is semi-real and semi-imagined, and the film itself is structured accordingly. This alternative marketplace she's working may be amateurish, yet it foreshadows her keen consumerism, profit, and the world's underestimation of young dandyfied women; while simultaneously flipping the finger to the rules she's supposed to play by. The law catches up with Mary and busts her; the credit sequence timed to the whole affair; the final shot takes Mary out of home turf and behind prison bars; where her once funky outfit now reads terribly hookerish.

There is something about the pace of Mary as an individual that speaks to her method of uniquely and politically inhabiting, or rather effecting, Space. The space she designs for herself is really just a corner in the room of the public sphere. She designs a party, one doubly aimed as a way to earn rent money by charging entrance and a veneer of exclusivity; with a fringe guest list and a particularly chaotic aural environment. Multiple conversations drown each other out and house music beats the focus from our eardrums. Mary's voice speeds up in certain moments and pronounces things with a gay man's delayed/elongated affectation the next. The unexpected inflections of her line readings sometimes undermine the literal meaning of what is said. Her friends are a community of performers; the club world is peopled with lower class individuals, diverse ethnicities and disenfranchised transgenders who "go out" to put on acts of being rich and spoiled. Mary has rushed past experiencing labor to just perform the role of hostess. She acts both bored of her role ,and glamorously incorporating it at the same time. For her, pleasure is achieved by acting rich (which she isn't)and extravagant at the exact same time that she works to make money. Her role is played out in a poor apartment building she is nearly evicted from yet her actions are rushing ahead to the life of leisure.

It is only when Mary is removed from her own self- designed world that what seemed rebelliously flippant and ingenious now plays more obnoxious, inane and out of place. Brought to jail, it's the first time she's brought into society's dominant institutions , and the first point that we second guess her charm. Whether it be in jail or the library she ends up working for, Mary is told she needs to shape up and play by the rules. She mocks authority, she doesn't act affected by things that she is expected to. The film's humour allows us to laugh at how her haughty library worker bees praise Dewey Decimal and mock Mary's lack of serviance. Parker's performance makes it clear that they consider her a spoiled bitch; it's unacceptable to be flip and free thinking like a man, especially when you look like a cute young woman. We are made aware, in absurdist touches like animal sound effects, overdramatic line readings, and rapid facial close up reaction shots echoing Mary's performance as mediating the concern over her situations, that those who live by the system--the immigrant, the cops and her godmother/boss-- are insulted or even threatened by her lack of seriousness.

When Mary's new after hours plan becomes mastering Dewey overnight, not all of her Party friends approve. Mary moves the rules of the library over to the rules of organising closets and a DJ 's record collection. This ingenuity and personal shift, to her initially disapproving friends, appears quite suddenly,somewhat masculine in its pace and implementation. She doesn't ask to learn or ask to rearrange; she just does. A man who learns quickly is a winner in the workplace where a woman is a nuisance and a bitch. It is Mary's way of being able to live and work in the public sphere. She has to add a sense of play and performance, to find a fun utility for the skills of the workplace.

Mary's quirky marketplace rebellion is complicated by the fetishized distraction of her dress and ironic mannerisms, further mimicked in the screwball color of the film's style. Her dress and attitude are an acknowledgement of the spectacle and illusion of surface beauty, but she also dedicates her life to knowingly construct the product that she mocks. The added novelty of Party Girl is it's upending of romantic expectations. The plasticity of Mary's playfulness and sarcasm ensures her romantic suitors are fellow outsiders; illegal aliens, new immigrants, young wannabe DJs. The mockery of her persona is a veiled satire recognized by men with a shared level of disenfranchisment. Mary's journey suffers no delays from romance that cause self doubt or halting neurosis. Her lovers are tangential partners who come and go. Party Girl itself is an exercise in mocking and upending the process of production. Its tone never allows the spectator to be blanketed in passive laughter. Instead, its comedy is a constantly busy melange of cartoonish literalism, screwball aspects of physical comedy, barely contained bedlam and direct to camera addresses. Such aspects often undermine or complicate straight laughter from other sources of the film's humor, resulting in the film's mixed critical reception. But the film, like Mary herself, winks at its production and refuses to allow us to passively appreciate the lifestyle and money that is usually associated with the Manhattan demimonde.

Lorna's in trouble: C.R.E.A.M. (NOTES)

The Dardenne Bros.' Lorna's Silence reflects the bleak tension and unescapable class struggle of its predecessors. Like L'Enfant, Rosetta, La Promesse, and Le Fils, we have lower class social ills illustrated with realistic individual portraits; narrative flow and montage is ultra economised; the subject matter before us is solely driven by economic survival.

Their new film both follows and diverts from Dardenne aesthetic history. Lorna, an Albanian living illegally in an urban area of Belgium, has married a Belgian citizen who also happens to be a junkie. She is poised to divorce him and marry a Russian for some legal/citizenship necessities. I think (can't be sure, i saw this un-subbed) she is also a former prostitute, and her divorce/marriage plots are being orchestrated and executed by someone who seems like he could have been her pimp. No sex is presently being sold; these marriages are business deals, rife with concerns both procedural and bureaucratic-- but of course, it is just like being a pimp (and prostitute) on another social level.

Against Lorna's noble efforts, her ?pimp? has her current husband, now in the midst of transformation from junkie to recovering addict, murdered. Lorna is directed to move on and marry a strange Russian man who will provide her with some clearer hope of the goal at hand: Lorna's dreams of economic freedom-- running her own business (a cafe.) But in these gaps of identity--from junkie's wife, to widow to new trophy wife to entrepeneur-- a rupture halts her forward motion. It seems Lorna has become pregnant.

Although we know Lorna has a Russian lover named Sokol, the most passionate and sexual scene of the film takes place immediately after the junkie, Claudy, gets clean. Lorna finds him poised to relapse, kicks out his dealer/supplier and embraces him naked. The scene is economised -- we only see them kiss and hug. But the kisses are the kind that scream. We can hear them cry when their lips meet. There is a heightened understanding and spiritual connection between Claudy and Lorna. This is the first time that we witness something fantastic ; this intense spiritual-sexual chemistry, cuts into the dire realism of their relationship. Both are true social outcasts who suffer more when they cut themselves off from the help of others.

So who is the father? Is it Sokol? Is it Claudy?

The neat linearity of her plan has suddenly radiated outward. Lorna is no longer poised to jump right into marriage.

We learn her last period was 7 weeks ago. We are not sure when she conceived, but she tells the pimp it is certainly Claudy's.

He angrily chastises her and threatens to force her to abort it-- she refuses and doubles over.
Echoes of spiritual unity:

Claudy too, was seen doubled over before from withdrawl cramps.

She is rushed to hospital where a technician tells Lorna that no pregnancy was visible in the tests.

This child is unseen. Any visible sign, i .e. baby bump, is negligible. If there was a miscarriage, which Lorna refutes, then it was a missed abortion.

The rest of the film follows this tangential plot line. Lorna escapes certain murder, and is seen alone, talking to her belly and apologizing for the death of its father.

Which abrupt death are we facing? And what and who are we left mourning?

Is it the death of Claudy? The death of Lorna's possible pregnancy? Perhaps it's the death of the Real. The only refuge our heroine finds is in the diversion of her meticulous, always bordering on coldly clinical plan of survival. This diversion is the birth of the Imaginary, and its infiltration and subsequent replacement of the Real. Could it be possible she is truly carrying Claudy's child? Of course. But it is this doubt, this mystery, that introduces the disruption of character and narrative flow. It imposes the possibility of psychology over evidence. A relational narrative has been born from Claudy's tragic life and death. His disease can be read as self inflicted, yet his tortured desire to rejoin the living is the experienced pain that Lorna truly shared. The film's final movement is motivated by reverberation. These echoes of trauma, from either Claudy's murder, or the threat of abortion, or an actual miscarriage, take over Lorna's reality and color our experience of her story. There was dignity in Lorna's clarity and commitment in overcoming her imprisonment of social status. There is transcendence in her commitment to her spiritual elevation as Mother, be it an identity that is real or imagined.

Aborting the Alien---pt. 1-notes

Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) has been studied through the lens of genre ( sci fi + horror) theory, Feminism and Semiotics. These images of female sexuality are multiplied rather than singular, and they are tellingly surrounded by issues of the working class.

Scott's vision, of both Space and space, is clearly gendered. The haunting singularity of the production design is echoed in the heterogeneity of Feminine images. Many have described the dead spacecraft/alien ship as womb like, with vaginal and phallic shapes as shapes and spaces being negotiated by the human crew. In 1993, Barbara Creed's landmark book, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis lent Scott's film a brilliant reading. Creed's perspective is unique for being the first major study of images of the Female Gender as monstrous in the Horror genre. Building upon some writings by other theorists, primarily Mulvey and Robin Wood, she traces this monstrous- feminine as coming from a series of collectively imagined nightmares, from "Archaic Mothers" to women just bearing the scar and castration threat of sexual difference. The scenes of horror in Alien clearly support this; the scene where Ash chokes Ripley plays as a violent attempt to obtain a Blow Job. Of course he is also trying to stop and to kill her, but the scene is clearly coded as a gendered crime. Ash is continually ignoring Ripley's stature and rank. The room he chokes her in is full of pornographic posters of women, and the sexual act of Blow Job is certainly the most demeaningly coded of all heterosexual sex acts. What better way to quiet the screams or ideas of a woman than to gag her with a penis. The representation of gender is clearly at war here: a reactionary view may've given us nothing but a feminine monster, but Scott's film has Ripley; sexy, self-possessed, liberated, feminine and strong. Visually at war with the stilled images of frozen passivity that are posted on the wall, Ripley is their contemporary, and her uniquely strong type of femaleness is a key sign in her struggle to survive and eventually dominate. Fears of blood ties and parasitic love , birth and infection are all female coded horrors. Subsequently, I view the chestbuster scene as a horrific delivery of someone unaware of being pregnant. Scott's film is unique for having characters fear a monster coded as Female while also having scenes of horror that appear to be nightmares of BEING Female.

Having just re-read a few chapters in MetaMorphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (ed. Vivian Sobchack), I realise that the multiple visual stages of Scott's Alien is something I can view through the concepts in Sobchack's collection. In the intro she wrote for the book she touches on the Uncanny, "....the photo-realisms of film and television, its effortless shape-shifting, its confusions of the animate and inanimate, its curiously static movement, its queerly hermetic liquidity, its homogenizing consumption of others and otherness, are uncanny -- uncanny not only in the sense of being strange and unfamiliar but also in the sense of being strangely familiar....its process and figuration seem less an illusionist practice than ...an allegory of late capitalist 'realism.'" (p. xi)
So this Alien is, like a child, both strange and foreign yet familiar and familial. Furthermore, it is politicised by its rapid change and visual alteration; culminating in a machine -like (due to metallic like head and skull) one that seems to directly compete with humanity. As Sobchack aptly notes, contemporary filmic morphing prefers alignments with imaginative evocations of Production over representations of the Fantastic. After the two initial live Alien scenes --the parasitic facial status of Kane , and Kane's subsequent live torsal birth of the baby alien, we have already seen two separate visual presentations of this creature. Denied exposition, it remains unclear if this is fully based on age or if the Alien is capable of multiple morphed identities. Does the Alien only appear increasingly familiar post torso delivery because it absorbed something from the human during it's facial hosting? Perhaps we are bearing witness to two distinct renderings of a single idea? The Alien is depicted in varying forms of nightmares. These modes are always genedered and increasingly engineered through technology.

As Sobchack points out, there is a Capitalist reflection and ethos to the digital age of mutation. Morphing is created by rapid movement towards change; in the digital age of Film it is conflated by its shared qualitites with conspicuous consumption. Visibly new technologies/products shine brightly as if production occurred seamlessly without the visible influence of its producer. The Alien can glean human attributes by trying to model itself as a better product to the humans. How can it be viewed as an enemy or as a foreign element if it suddenly manifests itself like a child? The baby alien becomes visibile as we give birth to it.
Alien has a Marxist bent on these morphing images. Countering the spectacle of techno dazzle and productionless product is the human crew that fights to kill the Alien. They are the wage- earners who are hired by a corporate enterprise to carry a mineral ore back to Earth. These blue collar regular joes speak to one another as if they were sitting at a diner counter, but as it happens they populate a spacecraft in the near future. But just how does one situate gender back into Scott's critique? We know SciFi depicts the Feminine figure as potentially monstrous. But Alien actually gives us a double identification in terms of Feminine viewpoints. We have both the feminine Alien, planting eggs and searching for hosts to breed its babies, and we have the primary human character (and antithesis) Ripley, a woman seen sans child/family, protecting her ship (Mother) and literally shooting the Alien out of it with air decompression. Creating what amounts to a massive vacuum to shoot out the Alien stands out as the single most intelligent, empowered tactic that any human has taken in the course of the film. As viewers we applaud her decision, her implementation and her humanity. How nice to watch a film where the hero aborts the baby and saves the world.

Brewster's Millions __laughing at and with commodities

I saw Oshima's Pleasures of the Flesh for the first time yesterday. I couldnt shake the thought that it was like Brewster 's Millions by way of Vertigo , which sounded pretty goofy. Hoping to clear up my mixed thoughts, I revisited Walter Hill's Brewster's Millions. Hill subverts the normal linearity of the narrative tracking poverty to wealth. Hill's images are complicated by a temporal collapse within the individual frame. Each shot is an image of a poor man coinciding with the image of a man who has accumulated an excess of wealth. A fractured temporal palate where the road to wealth implodes on the path back to poverty, or vice versa. A rather traditional mainstream comedy radical for inverting American inventiveness. Creating wealth; an idea made visible in his ingenius ruses to give wealth away. That visibility is doubled in the inanely repeated attempts to design the room he could die in.
Pryor's physical presence is eager and clever, an affability under constant threat from a pathos that can't be smiled away. Opening the film is the singlular sight of him playing minor league baseball. Closing the film, about 10 minutes before the end, there is a shot that frames his Cubs jersey hanging in an empty closet, encased in dry cleaners' plastic. Are all identities tied up in commodity fetishism? Do we purchase our societal roles ? His uniform is branded with the "Cubs ; a stigma that also indexes his societal goals. Perhaps it reveals the entire 'plot' as a conduit, a baseball play . All of this desperate machination, these "proofs" of worth that Pryor's Brewster must exhibit, are really just the inventiveness that is necessary to play the game; whether that game is baseball, American history, or the role of an African American Man, it really makes no difference. Wealth remains the goal, but now it is achieved by emptying and backtracking. All the commodities wealth can accumulate are revealed as shallow ciphers. In the world of Brewster, commodities are obtained to become poor, or rather, almost wealthy. Lacking money signifies a crisis in temporality-- a frozen moment in wealth, the moment we can pause between attaining and getting rid of material commodities.