The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh

11. Mr. Soderbergh Goes to Washington

197 MR. SODERBERGH GOES TO WASHINGTON Steven M. Sanders It’s dog eat dog. I just want the first bite. —Heist mastermind “Duke” Anderson, The Anderson Tapes (Sidney Lumet, 1971) No text in Steven Soderbergh’s still expanding body of work has been more neglected than his bold television experiment, the ten-episode HBO series K Street (2003). If a cursory search turns up a fair number of scholarly writings on Soderbergh’s film work, K Street has yet to receive the attention it deserves.1 The following interpretive commentary is aimed at filling this gap in Soderbergh criticism. Moral Complexity and the Paranoid Style. As a drama of moral complexity, K Street will be remembered for its use of political events as “backgrounds for fictive narratives.”2 The show is a meditation on power and paranoia in the capital city as seen from the perspective of a start-up Washington-based lobbying and consultancy firm, Bergstrom Lowell, whose principals include husband and wife and real-life political operatives James Carville and Mary Matalin. Numerous actual senators (Barbara Boxer, Charles Grassley, Rick Santorum, Chuck Schumer), House members (David Dreier, Steny Hoyer, Harold Ford Jr.), power brokers (Robert Bennett, Tamara Haddad, Ken Adelman), lobbyists and political consultants(PaulBegala,JoeLockhart,JackQuinn),andjournalists(Howard Kurtz, Joe Klein, Al Hunt) appear in the series, lending it a spurious realism. 198 Steven M. Sanders Although feature films such as Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962), The Candidate (Michael Ritchie, 1972), and Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) showed the conflicts and compromises implicit in the world of political influence peddling among the powerful, Amy Taubin suggests that the show’s true precursors include Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) on the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau’s Tanner ’88 (1988), on the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries, and The War Room (1993), D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s documentary on the 1992 Clinton campaign. Taubin also cites The Larry Sanders Show (1992–1998), the HBO comedy series that mixed fictional characters with celebrities and improvised dialogue. In fact, the basic idea is not new: one can go back to Norman Lear’s Fernwood 2Night (1977), starring Martin Mull and Fred Willard as a pair of bumptious talk show hosts in the fictitious town of Fernwood, Ohio (“the unfinished furniture capital of the world”) who interview both actual and pseudocelebrities and parody all too convincingly the forced banter and idle chatter of the real thing. Some of the best acting in K Street comes from the political consultants, candidate handlers, and spin doctors who surround politicians and inflect politics as we have come to know it. It is a moot point whether James Carville , for example, is really playing a character in the series or a fictionalized version of himself. In the cinematic universe of K Street, these alternatives are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. One can argue that Carville doesn’t have to act, since he is playing himself. But it can be argued just as plausibly that Carville is always acting—not in the sense that he doesn’t believe in the various candidates he represents and the causes he supports in his professional life but in the sense that his every public appearance is itself so bound up with the mechanics of spin that he is always on message. During a conversation in which Carville has just pronounced that “Schwarzenegger politically died today, August twenty-seventh” (not long before the amiable actor would be elected governor of California), Matalin tells him, “I have to keep a tally of all of the times you’re wrong and a separate list of all the times you’re spinning a spinner.” One has only to recall all the times Carville poisoned the well and made ad hominem attacks on politicians and other public figures who supported the outcry against Barack Obama’s proposed health care reforms in August 2009 (just one instance of the phenomenon, to be sure) to be convinced that he and others (not all of the same political persuasion) are submerged in, and have adapted themselves to, a world of exaggeration, innuendo, false pathos, staged drama, and string pulling. Mr. Soderbergh Goes to Washington 199 And to what end? It is not clear whether Soderbergh means to imply that the answer to this question is not a more just society but rather power and influence. But he...