Soderbergh on the set of "Che" (2008)
By R. Barton Palmer and Steven M. Sanders
Not Orson Welles Redivivus
Orson Welles was 26 when, having given himself a crash course in filmmaking, he directed and starred in Citizen Kane (1941), which, if its peculiar artistry and penetrating dissection of American culture went underappreciated at the time, has long since been recognized as one of the masterpieces of the national cinema. Steven Soderbergh was the same age when his initial directorial effort, sex, lies, and videotape, for which he also wrote the script, received, among other accolades, the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989.
Even at 20 years remove, Soderbergh’s first film arguably remains the most influential independent film ever made. Because it is in many ways a minimalist production, however, it seems unlikely to rival Citizen Kane in the pantheon of greatest American movies.
But, much as Citizen Kane did for Welles, slv established Soderbergh as a wunderkind whose writing and directing talents were already fully formed. He too seemed in no need of a lengthy apprenticeship in the business. Both directors instead began their careers at the top, a mixed blessing that in each case created expectations that, as subsequent events have proved, were difficult to fulfill.
But there the comparison between Welles and Soderbergh, made by many during the heyday of slv’s popularity, begins to break down. Unlike Citizen Kane, slv aroused no controversy within the industry; its politics were interpersonal, not national, and its stylizations were subtle, not ostentatious, suiting a limited budget form of cinema more dependent on talk than spectacle.
Following the commercial/independent (or, in the now popular expression, Indiewood) model established earlier in the decade by filmmakers such as the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch, slv combines an intelligible, essentially melodramatic narrative with art-house themes. The film is especially marked by a deeply probing approach to complex character that uncovers at least partly unfathomable motivations, the result, in large part, of Soderbergh’s enthusiasm for the international art cinema of the postwar era in general and for French New Wave director Jean-Pierre Melville in particular.
The film’s critical and commercial success, moreover, meant that Soderbergh was no enfant terrible who would bear watching and close handling. He was instead established as a major player in the expanding commercial/independent sector of American filmmaking (slv was not, as is commonly thought, a true independent film since it received preproduction financing from Point 406, the home video and independent production unit of Columbia Pictures).
Perhaps more important, the release of slv inaugurated a distinct and enduring phase in New Hollywood filmmaking. Its distribution by then fledgling Miramax established that company as a force to be reckoned with, while Soderbergh, it quickly became apparent, was the advance scout for an emerging second wave of independent-minded filmmakers, who, it was widely (and, as it turns out, correctly) thought by many industry executives, could exploit the huge box-office potential exposed by the theatrical exhibition of slv (more than $100-million by the mid-1990s).
These writer/directors include such now famous and established Hollywood insiders as Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, and Spike Jonze, all of whom have eagerly pushed the accepted limits of Hollywood production during the last two decades.
These directors (and there are a number of others with similar credentials) constitute an informal movement that can justly be termed, in the phrase of Sharon Waxman, the “rebels on the backlot,” a group that firmly secured the profitability of the commercial/independent sector pioneered by earlier arrivals on the scene, especially the Coens, Jarmusch, and, more distantly, John Sayles and John Cassavetes. It is certainly true, as Waxman observes, that by “2001 a true community of young film artists had emerged from the final decade of the twentieth century.”
And chief among them was Soderbergh, who in the last decade has established himself even more strongly as an insider who, in Waxman’s only slightly hyperbolic phrase, has managed to “bend the risk-averse studio structure” to his will, a reshaping of the industry in which Tarantino and company have likewise played significant roles. These filmmakers, however, have not found themselves in a self-destructive struggle with the studio system that, for Welles, eventually meant marginalization and exile.
Instead, despite occasional forays into artistically driven detours from commercially successful models (detours of which Soderbergh has made more than his unprofitable share, sometimes putting his commercial viability in jeopardy), they have found ways to remain central players.
The now-hallowed directors of the Hollywood Renaissance in the 1970s like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were largely, if not exclusively, the products of then recently established film schools. In contrast, the so-called backlot rebels are largely throwbacks to an earlier career model, gaining a position within the industry by following a number of different paths, especially screenwriting.
Soderbergh’s passion for films developed in early childhood, inflamed by his college professor father, a cinema buff who taught at Louisiana State University. Soderbergh spent his youth screening as many classic films as he could get his hands on—and learning to make his own with borrowed or well-worn 8mm and 16mm equipment.
Unlike the Coens, he found himself drawn less to Hollywood and much more strongly to the international art cinema. He was especially fascinated by the art cinema’s “approach to character,” which made such filmmaking “more rigorous and interesting.” With its roots in his own experience with a failed romantic relationship, slv succeeded because of the screenwriter/director’s talent for the rapid, convincing establishment of character, as well as his ability to write dialogue that offered a cast of then largely untested actors (Peter Gallagher, Andie McDowell, James Spader, and Laura San Giacomo) the opportunity to create compelling “talk cinema.”
In his subsequent career, Soderbergh at first rejected following the Indiewood model he had exploited so successfully in slv. His next film, Kafka, could hardly have offered a more striking contrast. With its dark visuals reminiscent of German Expressionism, its postmodernist anti-biography approach to producing a biography of sorts for the famed Eastern European writer, and its pervasive European sensibility, Kafka did not attract much of an audience, and in fact deeply disappointed many of the enthusiasts of slv who expected more of the same.
Only in Full Frontal and Bubble has Soderbergh again offered anything like the character-intensive melodrama of slv. But these films did not make for an easy liking, featuring respectively deep undecidability (including a questioning of the boundaries between story and frame) and an aleatory approach to plot (with the dialogue all reportedly improvised as actors were coached to work from a rough outline).
One of the most salient features of Soderbergh’s career, in fact, has been its consistently predictable unpredictability. With the commercial failures of Kafka, King of the Hill (a nostalgic biopic based on writer A.E. Hotchner’s memoirs), The Underneath (a neo-noir reshaped as art cinema), Schizopolis (an idiosyncratic comedy that offers something like a Joycean meditation on language), and Gray’s Anatomy (essentially a filmed monologue), Soderbergh was able to rescue his career with the comic neo-noir Out of Sight, a film in which experiments with nonlinear narrative were married to a star-driven adventure story (the engaging performances of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez certainly did not hurt the box office, which was impressive).
Soderbergh’s return to “bankability” was ratified by the critical and popular success of Traffic (an impressive, often melodramatic, but craftily stylized meditation on the war on drugs that raised difficult, uncomfortable moral issues) and Erin Brockovich (an even more conventional message picture, featuring a star turn by Julia Roberts).
His recent films have oscillated from the very experimental (the aforementioned Bubble and Full Frontal) to the astute cultivation of a commercial “franchise” with a difference (the Oceans films). In the last year or so, Soderbergh has enjoyed critical success with two small-budget art films that were obviously not intended for wide release: The Girlfriend Experience, a dispassionate, even flat study of a high-priced call girl (here the model is more Ingmar Bergman than Alain Resnais), featuring “adult film” star Sasha Grey; and And Everything is Going Fine, a documentary about monologist Spalding Gray. His more mainstream recent project, The Informant, a dark political comedy in the vein of the recent Coen brothers film Burn After Reading, starred the very bankable Matt Damon in a wry riff on the Erving Goffman perception that life is all about the “presentation of self.”
A Philosophical Cinema
Like the Coens and David Lynch, among others, Soderbergh furthered the development of an American art cinema with European characteristics like a privileging of character over narrative, self-conscious stylistic display and visual exuberance, and a deep, often disturbing engagement with the problematic aspects of the human condition.
In the postmodernist manner, his films take a variety of cinematic forms and consistently challenge viewers in their engagement with the difficulty of obtaining secure knowledge, the perhaps pointless quest for frameworks of understanding, the role of memory in determining consciousness, the false optimism of therapeutic culture, the often fruitless attempt to distinguish appearance from reality, and the constant search for justification and redemption.
To take but one example, Soderbergh’s cinema in general connects interestingly and complexly to what theorist Gilles Deleuze identifies as the most significant movement within postwar international cinema, the shift to time-imaging away from emphasis on plot movement. In other words, Soderbergh plays with the deployment of the editing process to achieve layering effects that emphasize contrasts between subjective and objective reality, either probing the innerness of characters, or poeticizing, and hence revealing, the occulted meanings of a world that the action-image presents as simple surface.
In films like The Underneath, Out of Sight, and, especially, The Limey, Soderbergh, like his acknowledged model French director Alain Resnais, turns time-imaging in two quite distinct, but potentially complementary directions: not only evoking modern views of mentalité itself, but also making viewers aware of the made nature of the filmic artifact by foregrounding the filmmaker’s decisions to intercalate images in unexpected ways, drawing attention to the dissociation of chronology and perspective.
Modernist films of this variety are thus metafictional or illusion-breaking in the sense that they call attention to the fictionalizing process that has produced them. But, somewhat paradoxically, they are also deeply realist in their representation of a consciousness not otherwise accessible to the conventional exterior methods of commercial filmmaking. For instance, Soderbergh’s enthusiasm for a kind of “Bergsonism,” his interest in the flow of consciousness, lies behind the presentation of the main character in The Underneath, as he revealed in an interview with Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret:
“Every time something happens to us, we think about a similar experience in the past and we imagine the consequences in the future. There is a constant back and forth. Our minds are totally nonlinear.”
In the film, this concern with the retrospective and prospective aspects of consciousness finds a stylistic reflex in the distinct color design of the narrative’s several periods: the present as well as the immediate and more distant pasts. In a fashion typical for Soderbergh, here is a film that speaks meaningfully about the human experience even as it self-consciously, perhaps even ostentatiously, reflects on cinematic art as both personal and institutional practice.
That doubleness also obviously suits the doubleness of successful Indiewood productions, in which a somewhat obtrusive artiness (especially the invoking of other films as a frame of reference) must enhance rather than obscure an engaging narrative committed to a deep, unconventional portrayal of character in the modernist vein.
Such involvement with problems of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics leads one to speak quite naturally of Soderbergh’s philosophical cinema, which is the focus of our recent edited collection: The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh, a volume in the University of Kentucky Press’s series “Philosophy and Popular Culture,” whose general editor is Mark Conard, an associate professor of philosophy at Marymount Manhattan College. The distinguished film and philosophy scholars who have contributed to this volume subject Soderbergh’s oeuvre, from his brilliant debut through his recent films, to reflection and analysis.
In addition to introducing general readers and intelligent nonspecialists to Soderbergh’s story lines, approach to filmmaking, and philosophically salient themes, these essays provide readers with the first systematic investigation of Soderbergh’s philosophical cinema. Topics include truth, knowledge, and sexual ethics in sex, lies, and videotape; the heritage of Enlightenment thought in Schizopolis; time, identity, and redemption in The Limey, The Underneath, and Soderbergh’s other neo-noir films; altruism in Erin Brockovich; memory in Solaris; personal identity and problems of the self in Kafka; appearance and reality in K Street; and Kantian ethics and agency in the Ocean’s films and Traffic. Further information about the volume is available at the publisher’s Web site.
The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh, however, promises to be only the first in a series of volumes dedicated to this exciting filmmaker. Two of the contributors to the volume, Andrew DeWaard and R. Colin Tait will soon publish the first full-length scholarly monograph devoted to Soderbergh: The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh (Wallflower).
R. Barton Palmer is a professor of literature at Clemson University, where he also directs the film-studies program. Steven M. Sanders is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Bridgewater State University.
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