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Rumpus Book ClubThe Girlfriend Experience, Sex Work in Perspective
I’m not much of a movie reviewer, and I’m having a hard time getting my thoughts on the page regarding The Girlfriend Experience. I feel certain it’s a very good film, maybe even a great film, but the people I saw it with didn’t like it at all. And I’m trying to get at why that might be. And why their dismissive attitude toward the film wasn’t just a disagreement over aesthetics.
The premise is simple enough, a high end escort named Chelsea, played perfectly by Sasha Grey, standing at the edge of the economic collapse in New York City, 2008. Sasha, who happens to also be a pornstar (NSFW), is perfectly cast in the role. No matter what happens with this film she will be famous. The camera loves her, lingering on her mouth, the wide space between her thick eyebrows, her hands in her silky hair.
The film opens with Chelsea on a date with a good looking, charismatic client. They seem like any other young couple, out for drinks, then back in bed. In the morning they have breakfast. Only later, in the car home as she counts her money and writes in her journal, does it become obvious the transaction that has occurred.
The film is non-linear, so maybe this review should be non-linear as well. Two hours later, my friend is trying to describe why the film was so empty. He talks about the cheap metaphor. How he hates when movies about prostitutes try to make the point that all relationships are transactional. He thinks that’s bullshit. There’s an anger in his voice. He’s with his girlfriend. She doesn’t know if he’s ever been with a prostitute, and neither do I. But if I was a gambler, and I am, I would bet he has. Surveys say twenty-percent of all men have paid for sex, and one in three single American men over thirty. I bet those numbers are low. And I think the metaphor is valid. We all want to be loved for who we really are, but that’s always been a lie. We are our money, our looks, our possessions, the things we can and can’t do for each other, our humor, our apartment, our ethnicity, our fetishes, our habits, where we are going, where we’ve been, our ability to give and receive affection. It’s all us. There’s no bad reason to love someone, or to be loved. I think of Daniel Bergner saying, “For all of us, lust is part of love.” There is always a transaction. Maybe your family loves you unconditionally, if you’re lucky, and maybe your romantic love grows, through time and habit, into something harder to define, it’s own unique web of interconnectedness. But in the meantime, I’ll stand by the easy platitude that we’re all whores. And that only sounds bad if “whore” is a pejorative term, which it isn’t.
Part of what is so compelling about this film is the realism. This didn’t always work for Steven Soderbergh in Che, but The Girlfriend Experience has more in common with his earlier films like Sex, Lies, and Videotape or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. Chelsea is restless; she wants more. She doesn’t even know what she wants. And one of the difficulties of sex work, as Sasha surely knows, is the decreasing return. As sex workers age they have to work harder and do more for less pay. Strippers, hookers, porn performers, often start at the top of their game. It’s downhill from there. And that’s the most depressing thing about sex work, that you’ll likely make less at thirty than you do at twenty. Careers aren’t supposed to work that way. Of course, bartending and waiting tables offer similar trajectories. And if it’s a choice between making a porn film and stocking clothes at a Wal-mart, porn offers significantly more upside. As Lorelei Lee points out, when her father expressed concern that she would do something she didn’t want to do for money, that’s what a job is.
But Chelsea has a delusion shared by so many sex workers. Or maybe it’s not a delusion, just a wish, often unfulfilled. There is this belief that a client is going to come along, that magical client who will take you onto something better, that will open a door for you, break the glass ceiling and let you into their club. And that is often the scam, the birth of disappointed hopes. I was a stripper for a year a long time ago, and I’ve done nude fetish modeling and I’ve been in adult films. I remember the men at the clubs I was stripping at in Chicago: The Lucky Horseshoe, Berlin, The Manhole. If you were a writer they were an agent; if you wanted to act they knew a director. They were so full of all the things they could do for you. I remember a man arriving at my show in a limo, his chauffeur waiting by the open door. He had big ideas for the things we would do together, but he didn’t tip enough for me to believe him.
And isn’t that like everything? Haven’t most of us been tricked by our own dreams? That’s not unique to sex work at all. If anything, it’s a parable for the entire publishing industry.
The drama, the narrative of the film as much as there is one, exists between Chelsea and Chris, her boyfriend, and the question is if their relationship can survive. But it’s not the sex work that strains their relationship as much as Chelsea’s ambition, her willingness to believe her clients promises and all the things her clients can do for her.
There are moments when audience members laugh at Chris and Chelsea, as if they can’t believe a sex worker could have a meaningful relationship; and other times as if they don’t believe a sex worker can love a client. And they definitely don’t believe a client can love a sex worker. They don’t believe that love can be strong and temporary. You can almost hear it under their breath, Not my husband. But that connection, between a sex worker and a client, is not that rare. There are sex workers who despise their clients. In my early twenties I was one of those. But my experience is they are the minority. I know many sex workers, have dated many sex workers, probably because we share that common knowledge. It is a fact that many, perhaps most, sex workers end up dating a client, at least once. There is intimacy between clients and sex workers, at least some of the time.
How is this a movie review? I can’t begin to tell you. I can only respond to art as it acts on me and illuminates. But there are other points to this movie, other points The Girlfriend Experience has to make. Chelsea’s clients chatter throughout about the economic collapse. The money is going away, an era is coming to an end. But they refuse to see the absurdity of their luxury spending, the price of their condo views, $500 dinners, twenty-five year-old Scotch. The movie is a passionate argument against the accumulation of wealth. The money has made these people empty as well as blind. Their sickness is outlined in champagne markers and private jets. It’s easy to see the value in their time with Chelsea, especially when so much of their lives lack any meaning at all. What is the cost of a human connection? How do we place a price on that?
The economic collapse surrounds us now. A recent New Yorker article talked about the preponderance of corner offices. What’s surprising, the author wrote, is how many there are. They’re everywhere.
This is not a movie with easy answers. The characters are complex, their motives unknown even to them. The arc is subtle, what’s at stake is both obvious and then hard to define. The photography is beautiful. And there is enough tension to keep the film interesting. When two strangers meet you never know what’s going to happen.
To enjoy The Girlfriend Experience you have to acknowledge what you pay for, what you strive toward. Because if you insist on the fairy tale love, that your lover wants nothing from you and you want nothing from them, then the movie’s not going to make very much sense.
**
image of Sasha Grey by Zak Smith
May 26th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Really great essay, Stephen. I saw The Girlfriend Experience at the Landmark yesterday, and it’s been gnawing at me since. This piece helped illuminate some parts of the film that got under my skin.
What did you think about the film’s final image? So arresting, disturbing, lonely…I think I started laughing out of terror.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:36 am
The people I was with hated that. But I really liked it.
May 26th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Great essay, Steve, and such beautiful line about our dreams tricking us. The film just doesn’t quite deserve your thoughtfulness.
The key problem with this tedious film is that the characters weren’t complex at all, nor were they interesting caricatures. Doesn’t matter if they’re sex workers or cosmonauts, Give your people some depth or don’t bother.
These people were flat as roadkill.
May 26th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
The review alone makes me want to see the film. Beautiful. No wonder you get all the sex workers!
May 26th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments at the end, or for that matter, the way you stated it near the beginning, that we are all getting and giving, and making choices (in relationships, work, and everywhere else) as to whether it is worth it to stay involved with a given situation based on commerce-type motives. Put simply, we all are getting as much as we can for as little as possible. And when the return on our investments, so to speak, begin to run dry we often cut and run. This is very human behavior. I haven’t seen the film, but appreciate your thoughtful take on animals dating and mating. Whore is not pejorative. So fucking true!
May 26th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
I love you Louie!!!
May 27th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Just read Andrew Altschul’s review, now yours. I have not seen GFE yet, and honestly don’t know if I will, but that does not diminish my appreciation of these two pieces of writing. Reviews ought to stand on their own, apart from the work they’re reviewing, and these do. Bravo, Rumpus. You should do all movie reviews in pairs!
May 27th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Great review. I think people dislike the movie because it is too true for too many. Perhaps it isn’t just sex workers who operate under the delusion. Maybe, many clients have that delusion that they are going to meet the hooker with the heart of gold, who they are going to change and live with happily ever after. Its all a delusion. Pure unvarnished truth is painful.
May 27th, 2009 at 10:42 am
I agree with Nick Taylor about the paired reviews. Yours without Andrew’s wouldn’t have been half as illuminating. I’ve heard it said that vehement disagreement about the merits of an artistic work is a potential sign of the work’s greatness. How can I not see this movie after your praise and Andrew’s indictment? Maybe GFE is one of those litmus test movies you can’t ever forget, whether you loved or hated it. Thanks, Rumpus.
May 27th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Also, as a male sex worker, I saw TGE yesterday afternoon. It seems a movie that’s filtered, more than most, through subjectivity: what people bring into the theater … past / current lives as sex workers, customers of sex workers, and vast terrain of body image and economic status masquerading as self-worth inbetween. And a theater – dark, images flickering on the wall/cave – what a place to cathartically live out one’s life.
Many – many – people have comment on Sasha’s “flat” affect (in fact, that’s one of the diss’ lobbed at her by the awful website reviewer). But her voice, drained of inflection, noncommittal in the extreme, seemed the most accurate element of her hooking skills. Her voice presented her as hooker-as-therapist: a tabula rosa upon which customers wrote their desires, etc. She listened and, when she did respond, her monosyllabia was exactly what the set-up called / calls for.
Photography is the most reductive rendering whore/sex workers ie., what you see is what you get (I disagree.) What the movie crucially left out is the tactile experience which, in my experience at least, is the essentially aural nature of sex work (you are what you say – or don’t – as much or more than how you look). The journalist character articulated it best one of the restaurant interview scenes (towards the end) when he ran down Chelsea’s calculated – and appealing – presentation: the hair, the look, the everything she is just by being.
What I found more difficult (impossible) to buy was her willingness to walk through the back office door of the self-styled website reviewer: anyone with her book would have taken one look at the furniture store, turned and left. She was too seasoned a girl to ever buy into that b.s. And if she did, the website dude was way too much of a buffoon. She – maybe this is just me – would never have let him onto the field, much less played.
Also, the movie – and this is my subjectivity coming through- seemed more gay, notionally, than anything else. Heterosexual relationships wither and die when one partner inevitably becomes mommy. I think this is why gay relationships are so infuriating to so many because an agreement, like the one between Sasha (cut off the long hair and she’s looks more like a transgirl than a woman ie., slim hipped, the extremely self-conscious poses in the last scene) and her pretty boy boyfriend (who looks like a great trainer). Gay relationships, at least the ones I’ve been in and observed, generally allow one (or both) to step out, fuck around, whatever.
The movie – as I read it – was retro in its contrarian take on the sort of enforced monogamy put forth by Gabriel Rotello in the late 90′s (and now writ as Prop 8, etc.) and which currently has so much currency in the gay community. Still, through the character’s lives, I saw the value of companionship and in the impossibility of monogamy.
A nuanced, evocative film. That would be the review of this **Natural Born Hooker***
May 27th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
From a very experienced john’s point of view:
The movie was surprisingly well versed on the trade, at least at that high level. We see Chelsea shopping for shoes, and outside is her ‘rival’ girl with one of her guys. Sure, what we see is that flicker of jealousy, but what I saw was a guy with a girl on the street looking at shoes. Who imagines the joy a guy gets from being with a girl in other places than bed? The scene in which Chelsea is confused about the behavior of her client was also well done–girls are always a bit worried about small changes in behavior.
The other pretty ‘inside’ thing was the website reviewer douchebag. He nails her in the review, but who in the audience even understood what was going on? The film was pretty smart in that portion, because a negative review kills a girl’s pysche, even if it’s a place nobody visits. It also struck me because I’m a very active reviewer of girls. The quid pro quo of a reviewer doing positive reviews for freebies has actually happened to me, but not intentionally, and not overtly. From my experience, I had to smile at the notion that anyone would use the phrase ‘flat affect’ and the rest of that purple prose to describe a girl. Even among the high-paying customers, semi-literacy is rampant. What you really get is subjectless sentences: ‘Saw Chelsea, she’s not as hot as you’d think. I pay a lot, expect a lot,’ etc.
But what bugged me about the film was the guys. Yes, most guys are just as cardboard as the film depicts. But the girlfriend experience, for a guy, is MUCH more than anything the character of Chelsea gets to explore. Judging by the fellow johns I’ve talked to, about 10% of men legitimately fall in love, revers the sequence of innocent attraction>sex so that it goes sex>innocent attraction. For them (I should say ‘us’ because I’m one, the lasting scene is not the obsessive, kvetching, grasping, bragging guys who populate most of the film, but the rival girl on the street with Chelsea’s former client, who’s enjoying the exceptional fun of the illusion of love with a beautiful woman, in public, doing mundane things.
June 8th, 2009 at 12:20 am
I loved the film and think Chelsea was the perfect somber art piece in a bleak world. I thought her character was elusive, bright and realistic. Her immaturity made her more endearing, especially when the new girl (who looked just like her but more bubbly) showed up with her client. My only problem with the movie was her love interest, Chris, the obviously gay personal trainer who was a fraud from the get. The film showed vulnerability by showing the opposite. Sex workers fall prey to the fantasy too and Chelsea was that girl.
Too young to be sophisticated, she played at being sophisticated while falling for the fantasy with her numbers.
August 10th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Hello everyone. Great review.
I agree with many things you’ve said.
I liked the movie. I will say it’s really slow paced and seeing the movie I felt terribly sad for Sasha.
I know she wants to do porn, but I see some potential on that girl. Why doesn’t she just do something else with her life? But back to the movie. She is pretty good. She seems cold and controlling, which I have a feeling she also is in real life.
P.S: Was the personal trainer gay? Did he play gay? I was thrown off because through the entire movie he seemed gay and he was supposed to be with Chelsea. 8(