Steven Soderbergh

Music and Authorship in Ocean's Eleven and The Limey

90 | Steven Soderbergh ding class conflict within stories of individual alienation and transgression . While Che shows Guevara’s leadership of violent revolution against moneyed interests in Latin America, The Girlfriend Experience focuses on how rich clients buy intimacy, not only from escorts like Chelsea but from workers in a service sector of the economy that includes “therapists, exercise instructors [like Chelsea’s boyfriend Chris], nannies, manicurists , bartenders . . . all paid for something that can easily be mistaken for love” (Scott). As in Che, The Girlfriend Experience divides characters along class lines, although, like the three doll-factory workers at the center of Bubble, Chelsea and Chris demonstrate little understanding of how their identities are influenced by these economic forces. When not meeting clients, we see Chelsea emulating the entrepreneurial behavior her customers talk to her about, strategizing about how to build her escort business. Likewise, Chris travels to Las Vegas with a group of wealthy clients on a private jet and listens as they discuss their deals, seemingly unaware that their attraction to his youth and athleticism, presented as friendship, is as performative and self-interested as the attention he gives them at the health club. The first half of Che celebrates Guevara’s success in the Cuban Revolution as the result—like the legal victory led by Erin Brockovich—of convincing those he was fighting for of his commitment and concern for their interests. The latter half of the biopic, however, shows that Guevara ’s tragic failure to win hearts and minds in Bolivia led to his death. Conversely, in The Girlfriend Experience, characters who lack awareness of what causes and how to respond to their alienation can only attempt to exploit and profit from the similar dissatisfaction of others. Music and Authorship in Ocean’s Eleven and The Limey Soderbergh has described his combination of Hollywood genre with “‘a European film aesthetic’” as “‘pretending we’re in the late ’60s and early ’70s’” (qtd. in Biskind 23). Seen within this historical line of influence, the continuous tendencies in his career as a director all appear to come out of the New American Cinema to which he pays homage: his pursuit of a middle ground resembles the ambition of auteurs like Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Altman to change The Films of Steven Soderbergh | 91 Hollywood from within without upsetting the long-held assumptions of narrative, the star system, and profits; his interest in discontinuity and self-reflexivity recall the influence of the French New Wave on U.S. cinema during that period; and his use of allusion matches the broader knowledge of film history characteristic of the first generation of American directors to have gone to film school. To sum up my argument about the formal and thematic continuities in Soderbergh’s films, allow me to conclude with a brief analysis of the music in The Limey—a movie representative of his role in defining an independent aesthetic as well as his debt to the New American Cinema— and Ocean’s Eleven, a remake full of A-list stars and an example of his most commercially successful work. Although the nondiegetic music in these two apparently so different films is certainly not part of the realist tendency of his formal style, it demonstrates Soderbergh’s persistent concerns with expressive characterization, allusion, self-reflexivity, and discontinuity in the service of authorial commentary, all within a narrative framework. In the opening scene of The Limey, a close-up of Wilson arriving at Los Angeles International Airport from London in search of his daughter ’s killer is accompanied by the Who’s 1970 single “The Seeker.” With this juxtaposition, Soderbergh establishes the centrality and the nature of Wilson’s character. Through the aggressive tone established by Pete Townsend’s percussive guitar, the intensity of Roger Daltrey’s vocals, and the lyrics themselves—“People tend to hate me / ’Cause I never smile / As I ransack their homes / They want to shake my hand”—Soderbergh presents the alienation, violence, and criminality that are the back story for Stamp’s character. Once Wilson arrives by cab at a nondescript motel near the airport, we see several shots of him thinking—in his room, but also jumping back and forth in time, on the plane, in the taxi, and as he subsequently hears the circumstances of his daughter’s death from her friend, Eduardo, intercut with images of Jenny. As the discontinuity editing in this sequence visualizes the nonlinear patterns of Wilson...