11/6/2017 The Girlfriend Experience Is Not an Experience | The New Yorker

Richard Brody

The Girlfriend Experience Is Not an

Experience
By Richard Brody April 13, 2016

I was eagerly anticipating the new show The Girlfriend Experience, which
premired on Starz last Sunday, because its thirteen twenty-five-minute episodes
are co-written by the filmmakers Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, who also divided
up the direction of the episodes. I consider Seimetz one of the best independent
filmmakers of the day (on the basis of her one feature, Sun Dont Shine); Kerrigan,
though not one of the best filmmakers of the time, is certainly distinctive and
ambitious. The series, as is well known, is about Christine Reade, a law student in
Chicago who becomes a prostitute and, at the same time, begins a potentially career-
making internship at a major law firm. Ive watched all thirteen episodes and am sorry
to report that the format of the series gets the betterof both filmmakers and
submerges their originality in the relentless and impersonal norms of serial television.

Heres an example: early in the first episode (directed by Seimetz), Christine (Riley
Keough) goes out for a drink with her law-school classmate Avery (Kate Lyn Sheil).
In the bar, Christine sees a young man from afar and approaches him, telling him, I
want to fuck you. Cut to his apartment, with Christine on top of him. What was their
introductory conversation? How did they get to his apartment? What did they discuss
en route? All of the uncomfortable practicalities of undressing, the likelihood of some
foreplayall of the time-unfolding elements of the action are eliminated in the
interest of dispensing a bit of information: they have sex, whoever they arethe man
is anonymous to viewers but doubtless not to Christine. In another bit that follows,
Christine withdraws from the mans clinches to masturbate while the man watches
and masturbates, too. Cut to Christine waking up in the morning and virtually fleeing
the mans apartment.

Already, less than ten minutes into the first episode, the series seems to be an artistic as
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Already, less than ten minutes into the first episode, the series seems to be an artistic as
well as an epistemological disaster. The sequence tacks information to the screen and
suppresses the time in which the events unfold. There is no time for the characters
and the actorsto do nothing, to speak casually and to be merely present. These ten
minutes advance the story and establish a set of traits for Christine that act like index
cards that will govern and define her actions and the story throughout the series. Over
the course of all thirteen episodes, information is delivered, but the actors and the
action never exist. There are questions left unanswered, but no existential mysteries.
The images have a cinematographic character, but they themselves have no
independent identity: theyre unified in tone, dcor, and mood, as if by a look book.
Theres no spontaneity whatsoever to be found anywhere in the six hours of the show.
The Girlfriend Experience is itself not an experience at all.

The unity of tone maintained throughout the series provides viewers with the illusion
that theyre watching the work of two movie-authors when, in fact, theyre watching
the work of serial form itself, of the format to which Kerrigan and Seimetzs art has
been subordinated. The directors, in turn, get the experience of working on a
prominent stage, with an ample crew and a substantial budget, andof coursethey
make some money. They deserve it. The diculty of finding money for independent
features is only increasing, and its a cause for celebration when filmmakers of the
calibre of Seimetz and Kerrigan get hired for high-profile work, even on television. If
this is what it takes for such filmmakers to advance their careers, Im grateful that
theyve gotten the opportunity. But what Seimetz and Kerrigan havent done here is
advance their artistry.

Seimetz and Kerrigan are skillful and inspired artists, but in The Girlfriend
Experience the rigid format of serial television dominates their artistry. The very
essence of the format of serial television is information masquerading as art; its actual
competition isnt movies or museums or even novels but nonfiction, journalism, radio
discussions, and podcasts. The slippage of The Girlfriend Experience into the narrow
conventions of the format is all the more unfortunate, because Seimetz and Kerrigan
ingeniously reconceptualize the premise of the series. Its title could, with a nod to
Richard Linklater, be Everybody Wants Something. In Seimetz and Kerrigans view,
the shows actual subject is the intensity and diversity of sexual desire, the craving for
particular experiences and sensations, the diculty of getting them, and the great and

reckless eorts that people (even and especially the protagonist) are willing to make in
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reckless eorts that people (even and especially the protagonist) are willing to make in
order to get them. Its an extraordinary premise, an insightful and imaginative idea
its even a vision of the world that few filmmakers manage to convey. But,
unfortunately, The Girlfriend Experience takes six hours to suggest an idea that it
never develops or realizes.

The relentlessly externalized quasi-objectivity with which The Girlfriend Experience

is filmed sparks a calculated ambiguity thats the antithesis of true indeterminacy, of
existential mystery, of imaginative psychology. The confines of its realism mask
narrative sleight of hand. Theres a vast amount that Christine knows and that the
filmmakers dont let onthey conceal her knowledge as if they were pseudo-
documentarians following her, highly selectively, in her daily and nightly rounds. Yet,
from time to time, things are shown that she doesnt knowthe filmmakers
omniscience extends to things that Christine doesnt know, but not to what she does
know. They render the story less of a speculation and more of a puzzle, a perfect fit for
the narrow interpretive oscillations of recap culture.

Seimetz proved a mastery of subjectivity and time, of the incarnation of the inner life,
in Sun Dont Shine. She took a familiar genre and story and turned it radically
contemporary. Television isnt inimical to such daring artistrybut its extremely
resistant to it. The best TV Ive seen has been made by filmmakers who treat it not as a
medium but as an appliance. They take on projects financed by television and premire
them on television but realize them as if they were making the movies theyd
otherwise be making for theatrical release. One recent example is Bruno Dumonts
Lil Quinquin, from 2014, which was broadcast as four fifty-minute episodes for
French television but was screened theatrically as one consecutive three-hour-and-
twenty-minute feature. This, Dumont has said, is exactly how he conceived it.

What remains to be realizedas far as I knowis for filmmakers whose very

conception of story is drastically idiosyncratic, personal, and original to take on the
challenge of serial form. If David Lynchs Twin Peaks is the founding act of director-
driven serial television, its lessons have largely been lost. Lynchs idiosyncrasies are far
more than stylistic; he is a latter-day surrealist who does things with stories that other
filmmakers couldn't even (or could only) dream. But filmmakers who have made the
move to television have settled comfortably into the familiar modes of storytelling that

Lynch tried to expand. It isnt Lynchs surrealism that marks his importance but his
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Lynch tried to expand. It isnt Lynchs surrealism that marks his importance but his
audacity and his subjectivityand these can be pursued in mainly naturalistic styles as
well. There are American independent filmmakers today whose very idea of what
constitutes a story and how stories emerge from life would be likely to innovate
decisively in the format. This isnt the mere tautology that the most daring filmmakers
will also be the most daring television-makers but, more specifically, the idea that
television is far more resistant to innovation than movies are, and, therefore, only the
most aggressively, conceptually original filmmakers will even make a dent in its rigid
formats.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles
about the directors Franois Truaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about
movies in his blog for newyorker.com. He is the author of Everything Is Cinema: The
Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. Read more

Video

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11/6/2017 The Girlfriend Experience Is Not an Experience | The New Yorker

Sun Dont Shine

Richard Brody on Amy Seimetzs Sun Dont Shine, from 2012.

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