Steven Soderbergh

Cinema of Outsiders: Alienation and Crime

The Films of Steven Soderbergh | 39 derbergh’s most commercial films, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven, conversely offer more optimistic endorsements of the viability of the legal system or the possibility to subvert greed and exploitation if you are smart and creative enough. Maybe their upbeat endings are the price Soderbergh has had to pay for the studio resources that allow him access to large audiences. But, consistent with the variety in his movies, Full Frontal, Bubble, Solaris, The Good German, Che, and The Girlfriend Experience retain the art-film alienation found in his early work. Even with the enormous success of Traffic, Erin Brockovich, and the Ocean’s films, Soderbergh still makes movies that fit the anti-utopian mindset he described in an interview after the release of Kafka in 1991: “By nature I am more pessimistic than optimistic, which is not a typically American attitude” (Kaufman 55). As Dyer asserts, the problem is not the utopian outcomes themselves but Hollywood’s oversimplification of how they can be achieved. Soderbergh’s most commercial films retain the complex, character-based stories about social injustice typical of almost all his movies, combined with the pleasure of overcoming inequality found in the just resolutions typical of Hollywood narratives. He therefore moves toward a synthesis of the commercial appeal of Hollywood and the more critical nature of art or independent cinema. This synthesis responds to Dyer’s assessment of what utopian cinema lacks and gains impact from the access to audiences that it makes possible. Cinema of Outsiders: Alienation and Crime Most of Soderbergh’s feature films focus on outsider characters who are alienated either by injustice they have witnessed or experienced or because they have been unsuccessful or unwilling to measure up in a world in which self-worth is determined by wealth and power. Major characters in thirteen of his movies—Kafka, King of the Hill, The Underneath, Out of Sight, The Limey, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen, Bubble, The Good German, The Girlfriend Experience, and The Informant!—act out against this alienation through crime. These narratives validate or at least explain the criminal actions of their main characters as a form of rebellion to which they are driven by the unjust or unfulfilling situations they face. The title character 40 | Steven Soderbergh in Kafka bombs the laboratory where Dr. Murnau tortures insurgents who resist the repressive government. In King of the Hill, twelve-yearold Aaron resorts to petty theft and avoiding creditors to survive the Depression. For the main characters in The Underneath, Out of Sight, The Limey, and the Ocean’s series, robbery—or, in the case of several characters in Traffic, selling illegal drugs—is preferable to what they view as a straight life of hard work with little to show for it. In Bubble, Soderbergh presents in stark, realist terms the workplace exploitation and social isolation that lead Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) to murder a coworker who takes advantage of and insults her. For Lena in The Good German, the killings she contributes to seem necessary to survive her victimization as a Jew in Berlin during and just after the Second World War. The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant! show how the pervasive idea of identity defined by consumption erodes moral choices. While locating Chelsea’s story of selling herself to pay for an expensive lifestyle in Manhattan parallels prostitution to the finance industry whose executives she services, placing The Informant! in middle America (central Illinois) allows Soderbergh to offer the lavish lifestyle paid for by Mark Whitacre’s embezzlement as an example of the moral damange to the larger society if the price fixing practiced by senior Archer Daniels Midland executives is accepted as just the cost of doing business in a competitive global economy. These films about alienated outsiders present two related motivations that Nicole Rafter describes as common in movies about crime: “[E]nvironmental causes, illustrating how criminalistic subcultures or other situational factors can drive people to crime,” and/or “aspirations for a better life (more money, more excitement, more opportunity to rise through the class structure) . . . crime over dull conformity” (63–64). Kafka, King of the Hill, Out of Sight, Bubble, The Good German, The Girlfriend Experience, and The Informant! ask us to understand the criminality of their protagonists as reactions to bad circumstances linked to larger social and economic causes. The appeal of the transgressive protagonists in the other six crime films is based less on...