Wielding a movie, breaking bones

Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble is both an “experience” and an “experiment,” according to the DVD case. The cover is a picture of eight severed doll heads, all bald and smiling in a terrifying way. Someone unfamiliar with the plot (as I was) might reasonably guess the genre to be sci-fi or surrealist horror. Soderbergh, after all, made movies such as Solaris and Schizopolis, so it’s difficult to know what to expect. It is with foreboding that I inserted the disc into my laptop.


The movie opens on a sparse small-town American cemetery, a couple of flags sticking out of the grass and cars passing by on the road behind. Everything about the image is unremarkable, including the light. We fade to the face of a bloated, middle-aged woman in bed; it's morning. She struggles up and walks down the hall to the living room, where her elderly father is asleep on the futon. The dialog goes: "[indiscernible]" "Yes?" "It's time to get up, what do you think?" "It's breakfast time?" "It sure is." "[indiscernible]"

We then follow Martha (that's her name) as she leaves her unremarkable house and gets into her unremarkable car. She lives in an unremarkable little town (this we know because of a shot of the water tower, somehow a signifier for sleepy little boroughs everywhere). We see her stop in her local bakery (it has a Jesus cross mounted on the wall) for a morning doughnut and coffee. She then drives to work, carpooling with her "best friend" Kyle, a guy in his twenties who mumbles so much I wanted to slap him. It's clear that the only reason they are friends at all is that neither has found anyone remotely kindred in their town's sparse collection of souls.

We begin to understand what Soderbergh is showing us, and also, simultaneously, how he wants it to be seen. Following work is church, the third corner (home/work/church) of the working-class triangle, and here Soderbergh lines up a series of shots in which the parishioners sit absolutely still. We see them from this angle, that one, that one, but none of them move and none make a sound. An abrasive bare guitar plays, the only music used in the movie, and it is so jarring and peculiar in its isolated use that it's clear no one in the movie can hear it.

This is the first half of Bubble: it "approaches with awe and caution the rhythms of ordinary life," as Roger Ebert says. This it does very well. These do not look like actors or sets. It sounds and looks as boring and depressing and intriguing as it would if you drove to this town and met these people. And so far, the "experience" promised by the DVD cover is this: the experience of small-town, lower-class America. You may not know any people like this, or want to, but for the cost of movie admission or a DVD you can see and feel what it must be like to be them.

And here the Soderbergh "experience" takes on another, rather chilling dimension, for Soderbergh cast actual small-town lower-class Americans into these roles! "Martha," who works in a doll factory in the movie, is a bona fide 24-year employee of KFC in Parkersburg, West Virginia. They also shot the movie in Parkersburg. The actor who plays Kyle says that, as a teenager, he was "a lot like Kyle." How much of this is acting, and how much of it is using these people to be who they are?

Bahrani's Chop Shop (2004)

A few movies in recent years raise the issue of getting people - especially marginalized people - to play versions of themselves in the movies. I'm thinking of Lee Daniels's Precious (poor black people), Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (poor immigrants in NYC), and Bubble (small-town working-class white America). Each of these handles the issue in a different way. Bahrani spent a year hanging out in the repair shops that line Willets Point in Queens, and formed most of his cast that way. Daniels went the opposite route: he narrowed the field to ten contenders from over 400 for the role of Precious (I think his original casting call was like: black and over 300 pounds, apply now!), but eventually decided on Gabourey Sidibe precisely because she was not Precious:

She was as good as the rest of the girls, but Gabby is not that girl. She talks like this white girl from the valley. It's clear to me that she came from a really great background, and she had gone to college and she was not this girl. And if I had used those girls, one of those girls that made it to the final ten, I would have been exploiting them. Because they were the truth.¹

He then clarifies that Gabby was not any better than the others, but that "the difference was that Gabby was acting. These girls were not acting. They were the real thing."

So what's wrong with using a poor, damaged black girl to play a poor, damaged black girl (or a small-town Ohioan to play the same)? Won't the performance be more genuine, thus benefiting your movie, and won't your funds go to someone who actually needs the money, rather than some megastar shooting for an Oscar with an “ugly” role?

The difference, it turns out, is the story you want to tell. Precious miscalculates the line between realism and Hollywood; that is, it tries to be realistic and upfront about the horrors of Precious's life while keeping the upbeat ending of something like Save the Last Dance. This is why Precious is not a good movie, but at least it's not a criminal movie, which it would be if Daniels had cast an actually troubled girl. The first half of Precious looks like real life, but the second is simplistic wish-fulfillment, and that is a disgrace to the real struggles and small, daily victories a girl like Precious must fight for. If Daniels wanted to cast one of those other candidates in his title role, he would have to rewrite the ending and leave Precious in her world, the real world, rather than drag her into Hollywood. Chop Shop, for instance, doesn't interfere in the world or the lives of its subjects, but only observes, and that is why it is a good movie and why the casting is right.

Now back to Bubble. It would be a good movie, maybe a great one, if all it wanted to do was observe. But Bubble, as the cover promises us, turns these ordinary people playing ordinary characters into an "experience." If you watch the movie, it will be clear that the title refers to the insularity of the world, the way routine, junk food, lack of stimulation, smallness of vision can create a morally gray community in which terrible things can happen. The bubble is the way the cars drive aimlessly round and round and the people move from one couch to another, the perpetual crappy lighting, and the endless line of doll's heads at the factory where the characters work: things that have human features but are really hollow inside.

If a big-time filmmaker came up to you and pitched you the above, except it was about your life, would you agree to star in the project? How did Soderbergh get these people to work on a film that thinks so little of them? In the special features, we watch the screenwriter Coleman Hough, a breezy Californian, walk and laugh and reminisce with the actors. They seem to be birds of a feather. She asks Debbie, the actress for Martha, what she thinks "Bubble" means. "This is living in the bubble, in the Ohio valley," she replies, gesturing to the landscape. "And then something comes in ... it happened in this little town." Hough doesn't respond. The actress thinks of the movie as a story about an Other, a pernicious element that enters a safe haven, which is a common enough arc. Except nothing comes into Bubble; everything is generated within. Whatever tragedy happens in the movie is a product of the town, its people and the kind of life that is observed.

It's admirable that Soderbergh and Hough are interested in parts of the world that rarely get big screen treatment. But they are not here to uncover any truths; they are here to make a point. The point they make is from a privileged, intellectual perspective that tends to refer to “the masses” – as in, “the masses” that go to rom-coms and thrillers and live in wood-panelled houses and get pregnant when they’re young and never, ever read a book. Whatever happened to art increasing our empathy and broadening our understanding of others? Bubble is bad art because it chooses to condemn rather than understand; because it manipulates people into mocking a version of themselves, and because it considers itself superior to its subject, it is immoral art, too.