While others have likely said more insightful, relevant, or interesting things about The Girlfriend Experience, I want to narrow in on two points for further examinations. These two items, as I see them, are really convergences of the same thing, a continual use of inversions to develop our contemporary self understandings.
The picture above is one of the best images I was able to find where the characters appear as negatives, shadows, anime-even, to be placed over the illuminated backdrops, these modernized glowing interiors composed of surface. Likewise throughout the film the characters are equally flat and impenetrable (pardon the pun), despite occasional oscillations of affect. Michael Joshua Rowin say's it differently:
Soderbergh shoots his characters from far off, implements shallow focus to sharpen looming decor, composes frames so that the backs of heads and surrounding objects carefully block them out, lights rooms so softly and pristinely that images which might have mimicked the cool, slick surface glow of Out of Sight, The Limey, and Solaris are instead properly alien and numb.
This then moves us to Ad's post about the infra-interesting, a concept he lays out in his review [linked above]. And while he's interested in that, and rightly so, I'm still working through the flatness of the film in its entirety, specifically that informed by the idea as the character as a negative of the real while still seeking to represent the real explicitly(documentary style of the film, etc). It seems that the meta-ness of this film is directed at the gap of our focus on the star as subject. That Grey, whom all agree is well cast, performs a service void of substance in real life, in the storyline, and also for the film as a whole, moves us to an objectification of star character as thing. [Which I know isn't really news.] This then echoes our interchangeability for star(let) quality. Our centerpiece, the draw to the film (and this is less so for fans of Soderbergh, I'm sure) becomes our disinterestedness in the focus of our gaze: Marylin Monroe come Scarlett Johansson, either way we come to enjoy the insignificance of either, the triviality of their being, their inherent inter-star-mobility.
Lastly this idea of inversion as it informs the flow of money and occupation then directly informs the greater cycling shape of the internet-age as a whole(reminiscent of this post). Focusing in on this(again from MJR):
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.
In this way we are reminded of blogs and virtual forms which wouldn't have substance without the development of standardized/institutionalized media. Yet this lack of significant surplus value, exemplified in the gradual downsizing of our newspapers, etc., is also directly related to the "circulatory movement of drive"(much greater insight here). In this way, just as TGFX, cycles through secondary characters and their economical-concerns and similarities, so too is this the shape of our information-era, the mash-up of continual movement. Or to rephrase MJR, Web 2.0 would never exist without standard media, but these days standard media wouldn't exist without Web 2.0. [Which again, I suppose, is entirely known already.]
