Review: The Girlfriend Experience: Season One

The series dares to locate Steven Soderbergh’s capitalist themes between the sheets.

The Girlfriend Experience: Season One
Photo: Starz

Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience is set in the habitats of the fabulously wealthy, in penthouses, posh restaurants, and corporate offices, primarily in Chicago, with a brief excursion to Toronto. Creators Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz, who wrote every episode together, alternating directing duties, riff on Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film of the same name, borrowing its scenario and a variation of its visual scheme, particularly the film’s preoccupation with the color and geometric dimensions of luxury spaces. The settings are enviably comfortable and privileged, yet oppressively perfect. When characters are, say, having a hundred-dollar drink in a bar, one’s primed to notice the sensually chilly blue and green hues of the cinematography, as well as the symmetrical precision of the way the liquor bottles are lined up on the shelves.

Kerrigan and Seimetz often allow the settings to dwarf the characters, favoring long shots in which people navigate labyrinths of glass, steel, and rich wood. Blurry shots intensify this sense of anonymity, as characters are blotted out, assumed into a larger visual fabric. The program’s chic, streamlined aesthetic cumulatively boasts an impression of metallic coldness that’s both frightening and intensely attractive. The imagery is gorgeous yet curt and pared down, with jagged editing complementing the declaratory dialogue and Shane Carruth’s spare score. The characters are living what we assume is the American dream of unchecked success, yet they seem trapped and alienated.

Like Soderbergh’s film, the series follows a high-priced escort as she services her clients. Unlike the film, we’re given bits and pieces of this woman’s backstory, as well as the origin of her initiation into the profession. The escort’s real name is Christine (Riley Keough), a second-year student at Chicago-Burnham Law School who nets a coveted internship at the firm of Kirkland & Allen. Christine resembles a lot of young, intelligent people struggling to make a name for themselves in corporate society, as she’s mired in debt and resentful of the hypocritical processes inherent to self-made success, such as the interviews in which companies expect, in Christine’s words, “to hear their own words repeated back to them.”

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Christine’s drawn into escorting by an acquaintance, Avery (Kate Lyn Sheil), who casually boasts of her rich boyfriends and their baubles. Avery is an escort who provides “the girlfriend experience” for thousands of dollars per hour, which means that she’s a long-term prostitute who offers clients a greater illusion of intimacy than is normally associated with the profession, which doesn’t strictly pertain to sex. Christine, mercilessly pragmatic, doesn’t buy into society’s skittishness about the sex trade, particularly on such a lucrative level of engagement. She’s a profoundly beautiful woman, with an ambiguously hard-edged aura of sexuality that’s ahead of her age and representative of her intelligence as well as her disenchantment from her social station. Why shouldn’t she profit from the gifts and talents available to her? Isn’t that the self-actualizing promise of the American dream?

Kerrigan and Seimetz, two independent filmmakers overseeing a mainstream project for the first time in their careers, walk a tonal tightrope. They clearly don’t wish to fall into the moralizing trap of judging Christine, or pitying her, by providing a pat “explanation” for her attraction to the sex trade. Instead, they settle on an aura of erotic melancholia that plays to their own gifts for behavioral portraiture while honoring the broad tropes of the corporate sex thriller. The film was unsatisfyingly vague about sex, more interested in Soderbergh’s characteristic explorations of the varying manifestations of capitalism. It was formally impressive but self-conscious, intellectualized, and ultimately uncomfortable with its premise, while the series dives into the sex, daring to locate Soderbergh’s capitalist themes between the sheets.

Christine clearly, and correctly, sees all tendrils of society as various forms of roleplay, their differences predetermined by arbitrary cultural prejudice. Her sister, Annabelle (Seimetz), plays the role of devoted daughter and lawyer, and her parents assume the position of an old-fashioned middle-aged couple. They seem no more or less unhappy than Christine is when plying her trade, and the lawyers at Kirland & Allen routinely use sex for political and monetary gamesmanship. For Christine and her clients, attaching money to sex is about more than sex or even money, as it’s also implicatively centered on attaining a control of clarity, of ferreting out the emotional detritus that can be so intoxicating and demoralizing about regular sex. But money is yet another muddying filter, whether the context is prostitution or corporate business, which Kerrigan and Seimetz often compare and contrast, finding more similarities than differences. Christine and her clients are forever wondering what is or isn’t “real,” though the money should provide them an oxymoronic guarantee of reality: the knowledge that it’s all false.

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To her clients, Christine is Chelsea. Christine is harried and bitter, with a discomfort with people that sometimes suggests either advanced callousness or Asperger’s syndrome. Chelsea is the woman of your dreams: sexy, and with a coolness (a remnant of Christine) that allows one to project onto her body whatever personality one desires. It’s intensely sad, and a little comedic, how her clients fail to notice just how little of herself is present in their encounters. Chelsea is merely obliging, enabling her clients’ narcissism, and that’s all that many of them appear to require to feel they’re in love, which begs one to wonder if that’s all people need for love at large, whether or not money’s (overtly) involved. Of course, Christine often isn’t even obliging, regarding her sister with mocking good manners that fail to camouflage contempt.

The sex scenes are never without these various resonances. Some of the encounters are major turn-ons, particularly early in the season, when the boundaries between Christine and Chelsea are less differentiated. When Christine kisses a client for the first time, in an experimental sort of contract assignment, she keeps her eyes open, watching his face, absorbing how far she’s pushing herself against the boundaries of “polite” society. Later, after having attained a degree of experience and polish, Chelsea rides a shy man, hauntingly whispering, “Relax,” as her hands caress his chest. The high-end sex trade in this series resembles a combination of massage therapy and mental counseling—an uneasy mixture of intimacy and professionalism. The clients are shown to be working through their needs, often neurotically, particularly in the astonishing season finale, in which a client pays Chelsea to participate in what appears to be a recurring exorcism of self-loathing.

Kerrigan and Seimetz avoid sanctimony, acknowledging the thrill of so openly commodifying something that, we’re told, is supposed to be personal and associated with normative ideas of romance. The Girlfriend Experience’s sex scenes include the physical practicalities of the acts (the embarrassments and the negotiations of differently proportioned bodies), and they’re wedded to the series’s prevailing atmosphere of heightened white-collar noir, which owes as much to other Soderbergh films, like The Underneath and Side Effects, as it does to the actual source material.

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The sex depicted in the show, which grows increasingly dangerous as obsessions take control of certain characters, is driven and unified by a riddle. We know Chelsea, but who’s Christine? She wonders that herself, asking her sister if she’s a “psychopath” for her apparent lack of feeling. We’re encouraged to scour Christine’s eyes, searching for signs of vulnerability and yearning, which the attentive will discern. In a remarkably subtle and unsentimental performance, Keough gradually reveals the loneliness that drives Christine, whose ideal kind of sex tellingly appears to be masturbating to images of herself masturbating. It’s a transaction in which she’s allowed to be her own client, being fooled by no one else but herself.

Score: 
 Cast: Riley Keough, Paul Sparks, Briony Glasco, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Sugith Varughese, Michael Therriault, Sabryn Rock, Kate Hewlett, Kate Lyn Sheil  Network: Starz  Buy: Amazon

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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