The Girlfriend Experience 4 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

We were driving through Wyoming on a pink summer night when we stopped for a passenger plane, silver and beached, to glide across a blacktop road. It traveled by train, in pieces, chained to a parade of rusted flat beds, with skeins of white plastic flying up from under its parceled belly and wings.

Stalled there on the access road in our car, waiting for the train to pass so that we could drive on, my husband Ben and I were making our second cross-country move in less than two years of marriage. I remembered this highway turn-off from our previous trek, for its circle of teepees and tattered Native nation flags, for a white church and a strip mall and the sad sense that the little town was a child dressed up and waiting for whatever visitors it could coax off the interstate.

Now I knew I would remember it for the plane trundling past, its oval windows papered and taped shut, looking as if it had been etherized against the ignominy of its journey. Even now, I think of the windows as vulnerable, half-human eyes, especially the two wide and well-taped panes around its slim nose.

Waiting beside the train that evening, I remarked on all this with real emotion in my voice—to which Ben replied, with equal parts kindness and incredulity: “It’s just a plane.”

I’ve thought about that plane for years. The truth of Ben’s reply notwithstanding, it is as if I have had to look away from the memory, draw my eyes back before I dwell too deeply on it. For a long time, I have not understood why it affected me. I think I understand now.

I’ve seen The Girlfriend Experience twice: once, under the guise of professional development for my anti-human trafficking day-job, and again, because I was eager to show Ben something that I thought had real worth in the larger conversation about the economy of sex.

Walking out of the dark theater—Ben in his hospital scrubs, me, giddy and talkative and tripping over an armload of dry-cleaning—his reaction was similar to the one he had had that evening by the highway in Wyoming. This time, though, his voice was less incredulous and more sober.

“I don’t understand,” he said, “why you like it so much.”

We walked silently down the brightly carpeted hallway of the theater. I waited for him to say something more. I started prattling about beauty and truth; I may have quoted Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I could not stop myself.

“The last scene,” I said, “I love it. It completely dramatizes the link between pornography and prostitution.”

“It’s about a lonely guy who wants to have sex.”

“But they don’t actually have sex.”

“But he pays her to do what he wants her to do.”

By the time we made it to the sidewalk, we were pitching for a quarrel. I remembered how much Ben hates to fight in public; The Girlfriend Experience wasn’t worth it. He unlocked his bike and we walked silently up to Chinatown, trying to let the tension between us dissipate into the damp evening air.

The beauty I wanted to tell him about was the look in Sasha Grey’s eyes. The New York Times, The Village Voice and others have debated whether or not the 21-year-old hardcore porn star carries or cools Steven Soderbergh’s film, which follows Chelsea, a high-end Manhattan call girl, her boyfriend, and her clients in the last, tense, market-crash days of the 2008 Presidential election.

A.O. Scott says no; by his take, the film, having “made much of [Chelsea’s] gift for persuasive artifice, cannot manage the complication of her vulnerability or chart the terrain of her inner life.” J. Hoberman asks, “Are we watching an authentic sacred monster playing the part of a cute little chippie—or is it vice versa?”

I read these reviews a few days after seeing the film; they were tabbed across a computer screen that also played Sasha Grey’s 2007 turn on “The Tyra Banks Show.” Her screen name taken, in part, in macabre homage to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Sasha’s interview is a surreal scene.

As the hostess presides in Oprah-esque judgment, the 18-year-old guest barely flinches. Sasha’s nonchalant defense of sadomasochism is nothing new. The fact that she is, to quote Larry Flynt, “barely legal” and touting her exclusive creative rights to “lick a toilet seat” on film—a porn leitmotif that she credits herself with creating—is where everything gets terrible.

Circular references to The Girlfriend Experience start sooner than the surreal toilet seat argument. They begin—around the time the camera pans to Sasha’s sweet-faced thirty-one-year-old boyfriend and then-manager Mark Spiegler, who bears more than a fleeting resemblance to the film’s villain, the crude Erotic Connoisseur.

What Sasha does not discuss with Tyra—and what The Girlfriend Experience leaves out regarding its own main character—is how and why a young woman chooses such a profession. Sasha’s story comes complete in a well-done Los Angeles Magazine feature; its main omission is its reticence regarding the fact that any seventeen-year-old involved in a sexual relationship with a twenty-five-year-old steak house line cook is a victim of statutory rape.

“In bed—smacked, slapped, yanked, and sodomized—she felt whole,” the Los Angeles Magazine reports. “Viewing porn with the cook, she could sense a future assembling, a mission….”

Beauty is truth; truth is beauty. That’s all I could think about as I watched Sasha’s dim, tamped eyes barely move on the screen. A.O. Scott doesn’t think that her “cool, tentative acting can quite sustain the level of emotional complication necessary,” but it strikes me that his comment says less about Sasha’s acting skills and more about his own intuition regarding human experience and behavior.

The eyes of the plane that summer night, the etherized eyes of the girls and women I’ve known who still believe, like Sasha, that being punched in the stomach during sex is “a really euphoric feeling”—these are captured in the knowing, empty gaze of Chelsea’s eyes.

When the john for whom she has left her boyfriend stands her up, the eyes jar, the voice breaks. For a moment, perhaps, Sasha Grey registers the full range of emotion bound up in a real human relationship. Otherwise, her body is money and art imitates life.