[In the following essay, Semeiks compares Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape to the work of D. H. Lawrence in regard to humankind's relationship with technology.]

Though the mad scientist is a stock figure of science fiction and horror films, as a whole Hollywood movies have reflected a more positive attitude towards technology than that expressed by the generality of novelists, poets and essayists. Beginning with the Romantic Age—shortly after, that is, industrialism began to alter the face and substance of the western world—many writers have regarded science and the technology it spawns with dismay and distrust. There are a number of reasons for this antipathy, including some very grave and deep reservations about the kind of material and philosophical alterations science has produced in our world. Perhaps a minor reason, however, is that the creation of a literary work has traditionally depended on no more technology than is embodied in the manufacture of pencils and typewriters. The wariness with which many authors continue to regard the word processor, a device which is the greatest boon to writing since the invention of the ballpoint pen, reflects the deep-seated distrust of technology characteristic of the literary world. Movies, on the other hand, are an inherently technological form dependent on advances in science and engineering. As the century moves to a close, this dependence deepens. One has only to think of the big blockbuster films of the past fifteen years with their ubiquitous special effects: the Indiana Jones series, the Star Wars sagas, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and so on.

Every now and then (though not often enough to satisfy that portion of the movie-going audience who complain that Hollywood's products are formulaic concoctions aimed at adolescents and dominated by special effects), a “small” movie appears which eschews intergalactic warfare, vigilante androids, and extraterrestrial creatures, whether benign or malevolent. Such movies are likely to be less expensive to make, to require no stunt men or special effects, and to be primarily interested in the examination of character and dramatic conflict. Steven Soderbergh's movie sex, lies, and videotape, winner of the Best Picture award at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, would seem to be such a film. Essentially employing only four actors and serving up only a few sparsely furnished sets, it explores such themes as sexual dysfunction and dishonesty, emotional betrayal and alienation.

But, as its title suggests, technology is at the heart of this film, too. In fact, Soderbergh's movie offers insight into our shifting cultural relationship to technology. It dramatizes the extent to which high tech—so often represented in dystopian fantasy as a dehumanizing force antithetical to the needs and interests of our “natural” selves—has become intertwined with our lives, so that even our most intimate activities are inseparable from it. To appreciate how radical a shift this represents, one need only compare Soderbergh's movie to the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, who was a bitter enemy of a machine-driven age and of much of the “progress” that science and technological innovation bestow. The central situation of much of Lawrence's fiction—a heroine trapped in a relationship devoid of sexual or emotional fulfillment—is present in Soderbergh's film as well. Yet the means by which Lawrence effected his heroines' rescues reveals the striking difference between the two artists' visions.

Lawrence believed, essentially, that machines destroy nature, and not just in the narrow, obvious sense that they ravage the environment, as Lawrence himself had witnessed, having grown up in a coal-mining town whose industrial plant was steadily encroaching on agricultural lands and forests. In a broader sense, Lawrence was convinced that the products, organization and values of modern industrialized and technologized society, where they do not actually destroy human life, create sexual dysfunction and prohibit intimacy and emotional wholeness.¹

A glance at Lawrence's novels shows that those characters most allied with machines suffer one or another of the fates I have described above—the disintegrating Gerald Crich, for instance, of Women in Love, who successfully turns even his workers into machines; the corrupt Tom Brangwen of The Rainbow; and the cold Sir Clifford Chatterley of Lady Chatterley's Lover, whom Lawrence, in “A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover,’” calls “a pure product of our civilization” (513). But because our age is technological—an age in which, as Lawrence puts it, “the machine is the Godhead” (Women in Love, 218)—nearly everyone is a victim of its values, however unconscious they are of their victimization. Thus Lawrence's fiction, like Soderbergh's film, is replete with unhappy, alienated, unfulfilled characters. Those who are most implicated in the values and functioning of the industrial machine cannot be saved. Others, seeing no way out, suffer blindly and dumbly, or, alternatively, try to deny that “Ours is essentially a tragic age” (Lady Chatterley's Lover, 5).

Lawrence's heroes and heroines, on the other hand, are set on the road to a cure through some epiphanic encounter with nature. Constance Chatterley, for instance, is made fully aware of the barrenness of her life (and her body) when she holds some newly-hatched pheasants in her hands. The married protagonist of the 1925 novella St. Mawr, Lou Witt, whose life is aimless, meaningless and sexless—a mere round of “unreal” social activities—is aroused to consciousness of her plight by a horse. Seeing him for the first time, it is

as if that mysterious fire of the horse's body had split some rock in her, … It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her own world had suddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of which the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question. …

… She could not bear the triviality and superficiality of her human relationships.

(14)

In The Fox, Nellie March's encounter with the titular animal—savage, clever, deeply mysterious—impels her to see how barren and unnatural her relationship with her friend Jill Banford is and leads her, in Lawrence's view, to embrace a richer, more natural relationship with a young man. In The Lost Girl, the vehicle of vision, the lens through which the protagonist is at last able to see her life and society clearly, is a man, not an animal: an inarticulate peasant from Italy, an actor who, impersonating an Indian, performs half-naked. But he is a man so relatively close to nature, so primitive, that he has more in common with a fox or a stallion than he does with a Clifford Chatterley.

It is not just females in Lawrence's novels who are sleepwalking through their quietly desperate lives. Some of Lawrence's men need to be awakened, roused to consciousness, too: Rupert Birkin of Women in Love; Oliver Mellors of Lady Chatterley's Lover; the physician Jack Ferguson of “The Horse-Dealer's Daughter.” Man or woman, single or married, all these characters inhabit the same sexual and emotional wasteland. All of them, by the end of the works in which they appear, are on their way to repairing what is broken in their lives and in themselves (though sometimes Lawrence fails to be fully convincing in this regard). This reparation of self and circumstance is connected to a sympathetic, intuitive, entirely involuntary response to nature. Rupert Birkin's naked and instinctive plunge into the wild vegetation (an act that is eroticized by Lawrence) in an effort to cleanse himself of a perverse and destructive “love” affair with a woman is the most celebrated example.

The capacity to have the same sort of response to another human being that one has to nature, Lawrence believed, is essential to sexual wholeness and fulfillment. Sexual and emotional intimacy in his fiction always depends more on “blood consciousness”—on, that is, a warm, natural, instinctive and unconscious tenderness and sense of relatedness—than on mental contact or “mind consciousness.” Perhaps because Lawrence believed the modern mind was “imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts” (Women in Love, 34)—concepts largely shaped by the machine age—Lawrence distrusted it, and particularly distrusted it as a mediator between the self and the other. He trusted deeper, more instinctive sources of knowledge and judgment, awareness and connection. Here, for instance, is Birkin, the protagonist of Women in Love, trying to articulate what is nearly inexpressible to Ursula Brangwen:

‘But do you really want sensuality?’ [Ursula] asked, puzzled.

Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfillment—the great dark knowledge you can't have in your head—the dark, involuntary being. It is death to one's self—but it is the coming into being of another.’

‘But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head?’ she asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases.

‘In the blood,’ he answered; …

(36)

But it is precisely this fundamental kind of consciousness which the conditions of modern life, Lawrence insists, have destroyed. “The deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the diseased, atrophied condition of the intuitive faculties,” faculties he links in the essay “Sex versus Loveliness” with sex and beauty (528). What Lawrence hoped we might “restore into life,” he writes in “The State of Funk,” was

the natural warm flow of common sympathy between man and man, man and woman. … If there is one thing I insist on it is that sex is a delicate, vulnerable, vital thing that you mustn't fool with. If there is one thing I deplore it is heartless sex. Sex must be a real flow, a real flow of sympathy, generous and warm, and not a trick thing, or a moment's excitation, or a mere bit of bullying.

(569)

Sex in the modern world, however, tends not to issue, Lawrence insists, from “the natural warm flow of common sympathy”—from blood consciousness, that is—but rather from the mind. The mind comes to dominate sexual desire and sexual responsiveness as it dominates all of nature and the body is robbed of its natural fulfillment and its ancient joy. Sex is, in short, displaced from body to mind.²

One of the forms this took, he believed, was pornography, and not simply the kind of pornography produced for commercial purposes. When one of the characters in Women in Love disparages knowing—disparages mental consciousness, that is—because it interferes with living, with one's ability to experience life directly, Birkin protests against the hypocrisy of her disparagement:

‘You are merely making words … ; knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them … what you want is pornography—looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’

(35–6)

It's important to emphasize that consciousness itself, according to Lawrence, is not the disease that plagues us. The kind of consciousness that we possess (and that dominates our age) is, because it is too shallow and too limited to allow us a vital, living connection to nature or to others—or, indeed, to our deeper selves. What we get instead are superficial, one-sided, perverse, or sterile connections, relationships that are “mechanical” and life-denying, rather than “organic” and life-affirming.

Lawrence's work, taken as a whole, presents and dissects the “tragic age” he insists ours is; but it does more, too. It suggests a means to heal the broken selves and repair the damaged, perverse relationships that have characterized the Western world, Lawrence believed, since machines have come to dominate it. The way to salvation begins with an altered consciousness, itself made possible by a heightened receptiveness to something in the natural world.

For Steven Soderbergh, though, salvation begins with a machine. Sex, lies, and videotape is a long paean to the video camera—tribute that comes easily enough, of course, to a filmmaker. In Soderbergh's work, we see that technology works a compelling magic. Ceasing to be a mere recorder of action and conflict, the video camera becomes an actor in the drama, as reviewer Caryn James in The New York Times has pointed out. It creates erotic desire, it alleviates and even cures sexual dysfunction, it heals a divided self, it creates honesty and intimacy and reforms human relationships. In short, though a mere machine, the camera is a sexually and emotionally liberating device, capable of generating powerful erotic experiences and emotional responses. None of the human actors in the film has anything like its talismanic power.

Each of the four main characters in sex, lies, and videotape inhabits an emotional desert. At the beginning of the film, the beautiful, rather old-fashioned Ann (Andie McDowell) is seated on a couch, talking with her therapist about her perennial topic—garbage disposal. She seems disinclined to discuss her personal life, except for its superficial details: a brief mention of a house-guest she and her husband are expecting soon, and whom she'd rather not entertain. Still young (she appears to be about 30), she has no children, no friends, no employment other than the vigorous scrubbing and polishing of her large, already immaculate house—she's like a speeded-up machine in these scenes—and no genuine connection to her husband. (When the house-guest Graham asks her what she likes about marriage, she replies, “This house.”) In addition, her relationship with her only sibling, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), is an antagonistic one. Yet she tells her therapist that everything in her life and marriage is “fine.” While she avoids the truth and the personal, Soderbergh's magical camera takes us where her words will not: into the house of her sister, who is locked in a passionate, fierce embrace with Ann's husband, John (Peter Gallagher).

If Ann is fruitlessly rooted in her cool, rather antiseptic house, Graham (James Spader) is rooted nowhere. A drifter with no possessions, other than his video-camera and home-made “erotic” cassettes, and no work, he avoids responsibility for anything by avoiding connections with everything. His past is somewhat murky—Soderbergh's “explanation” of how Graham came to be what he is doesn't make much sense—but it's clear at any rate that for years he has been emotionally and physically disengaged from other human beings: his sexual impotence is an outward sign of his emotional distance. He has dropped out of therapy—therapists can do nothing for him—explaining that he doesn't believe one should trust anyone one hasn't been physically intimate with. But of course he is physically intimate with no one.

Though all of the principal characters in the film lie, tacitly or openly, only one—Ann's husband John—seems to thrive on dishonesty. He's content with his spoils—a beautiful, undemanding (if cool) wife, an orderly, expensive house and, ironically, more sexual access to single women than he had before he married. (It is not just Cynthia who finds his marital status an erotic attraction. Soderbergh may be suggesting that many modern young women share Graham's—and John's—aversion to or fear of emotional connection.)

Cynthia's primary emotion is anger, and specifically sexual anger. Always provocatively dressed, she works as a bartender doling out alcohol and sexual rejection to drunken patrons. It's clear that a substantial part of John's appeal for Cynthia is the pleasure she receives in betraying Ann, for whom she expresses nothing but hostility and contempt. (Early in the film Cynthia tells John angrily that she wants to inform the world that “the beautiful, the perfect Ann … is a lousy lay.”) Hers and John's entire relationship consists of their periodic sexual encounters; excluding any possibility of natural growth, it is, for all its heat, mechanical, something undertaken coldly, on purpose, to prove a point.

And what of the other sex in the film? Remarkably, it's all in the head. A number of critics and reviewers have commented on the emphasis the film places on talking and specifically on talking about sex. New York Times reviewer Caryn James argues that “Soderbergh's camera, like Graham's, is more concerned with talk than sex, and he allows dialogue to carry the film's erotic charge.” Richard Corliss concurs (“Talk is the sex of the 80s”) and suggests a reason: our fear of all the sexually-transmitted diseases (65).

The amount of screen time given over to talk about sex is considerable; Graham's videotapes, which concentrate the topic obsessively, serve as an emblem for what's going on in the larger film. Most of the movie's characters think about sex, share confidences about sex, express their fears about sex, occasionally recall an act of sex, voice fantasies about sex. For all the conversational intimacy with one another this implies, however, they don't have sex; they don't touch. Their bodies are quite left out of the picture. This is more than metaphorically true; much of Soderbergh's film, and all of Graham's videotapes (all that we see, at any rate) consist of head shots. The characters become talking heads, talking about sex. Camera and conversation both work towards a distancing of erotic experience, a cooling of emotional ties. Sex is experienced by the actors and communicated to the audience not tactually or sensuously, but mentally.

In a sense, the mind comes to contain (and constrain) sex. Sex has no existence outside the mind. It therefore doesn't do any of the life-giving things we normally expect it to; it doesn't connect, it doesn't bring people “in touch”; it isolates. It is perhaps significant in this regard that when sexual activity is depicted, suggested or discussed in the film (again with the exception of the three or four scenes devoted to Cynthia and John's “love”-making), the form that activity takes is masturbation.

Ann practices no sexual activity of any kind. She tells Graham that she has “never been that much into sex,” that sex doesn't matter as much to women as it does to men. She admits to her therapist that “I don't want [John] to touch me”; when he asks whether she ever masturbates, she covers her face with her hands in a little girl's gesture and protests “No, no, no, no” in confusion and embarrassment. Graham's life is only slightly more vital, more pleasurable. At least he masturbates; at least he's not alienated from his own body or averse to pleasuring it. Except for that activity, however, and except for his video collection, this pallid, unoccupied young man, isolated and voluntarily confined to his bleak, featureless, underfurnished apartment, lives like a monk in an ascetic cell. He, too, like Anna and Cynthia, needs to be released, needs to enter a larger, richer world, needs to be healed.

Graham's camera plays this saving role. Initially its function in Soderbergh's film is purely sexual. Graham's machine allows him to become sexually aroused, something he cannot do in the presence of another human being. The camera also arouses the many women he has interviewed and preserved on tape, to be watched again and again. When the camera is aimed at them and turned on, they too get “turned on.” They open up to reveal sexual intimacies they will perhaps never confide to therapists, lovers, or husbands (e.g., one woman's half-embarrassed, half-delighted recollection of a time she masturbated on a jet-liner, surrounded by unsuspecting fellow-passengers). Sometimes, while they are being taped, Graham explains, these women “do things,” but not to him. There is no touch, no shared erotic contact. Instead, they perform for the camera, which thus assumes the lover's conventional role. Cynthia, for example, though she has literally just met Graham, has just been introduced to his camera, removes her skirt and masturbates for it.

One wonders at the motivation of the women Graham films. They perform neither for money (unlike the stars of pornography) nor for educational or scientific purposes (though Graham likes to pretend he's engaged in something that sounds high-minded—a “research project”). Presumably there is something in the machine itself—in its cool, disengaged eye, in the narcissistic indulgence it affords—which arouses them instantly.

Even chaste, repressed Ann is not inured to its appeal. When she rushes to Graham's house after discovering the truth about her sister and her husband, she wants not Graham's arms, but the machine's witnessing eye. At first, Graham refuses to film her. But soon enough, the tape is rolling, and all of Ann's defenses are down, all her unhappiness and hunger admitted. She says she doesn't know what “satisfying sex” means, adding she's not sure whether she's ever had an orgasm (clearly she hasn't). Then a crucial exchange follows. Pleading with him to touch her, she says, “I'd like to know what I'd look like having an orgasm”—an unusual first desire of a woman who has never been sexually awakened, but one perfectly consonant with the rest of Soderbergh's film and with the place that machines are coming to occupy in our intimate lives.³

Ann's request is also perfectly consonant with Lawrence's theory that sexual pleasure and sexual desire in the modern age are mental constructs, not physical sensations. One thinks, in connection with this idea, of the women in Graham's videotapes, performing not for mirrors (as in Women in Love) but for that other recorder of two-dimensional images, the camera; of Graham, listening to them talk, while masturbating; of Graham, again, refusing to touch Ann as she requests, thus requiring that she make do with the camera and with his watching eyes; of the thrill Cynthia clearly takes in knowing that Graham will be watching her image masturbate; of the extraordinary fact that, in what are some of life's most intimate moments, none of these characters need suffer the touch of another human being. With the exception of the three or four scenes devoted to the coupling of Cynthia and John, then, human sexual activity in the film is reduced to masturbation, and its pleasures in Soderbergh's work are explicitly mental and narcissistic.

While Lawrence's ideas on masturbation no doubt strike many modern readers as puritanical or philosophically or physiologically unsound, one of his insights is valid. “The great danger of masturbation,” he writes in “Pornography and Obscenity,”

lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs. Something quite new is added as the old surcharge is removed. And this is so in all sexual intercourse, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. …

(179)

For Lawrence, masturbation involved a kind of death: “the body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of [masturbation]. There is no change, only deadening. This is what we call dead loss” (179).

Lawrence was increasingly concerned with the tendency of life in the modern world to be organized, directed, not by the organic principle but rather by the inorganic or mechanical principle. The particular kind of death he is talking about when he condemns masturbation is treating the body like a machine—the transformation of the living organism into dead mechanism. The act of masturbation, to Lawrence, is equivalent to oiling a rusty machine so that it will continue to function.

To achieve even the solitary and minimal pleasures of onanism, however, Soderbergh's Graham requires a machine, requires technology. But technology—Graham's ever-ready video-camera—has power to spare, other miracles to work, in the lives of most of the film's characters. By the end of the film, Cynthia's encounter with the camera has led to a moral revolution: she abandons John and is forging an honest and affectionate relationship with her sister. Ann renounces John, too, and a new Graham takes his place, a Graham who is able to admit that he has responsibilities to others, that his life touches theirs. The video camera, which Ann has aimed at him, as a rite of purification and discovery, puts him literally in touch with Ann. When her hands meet his face, the film achieves its most intense and intimate moment. Seconds later, Graham turns his video camera off and Soderbergh's camera retreats, too. We assume that Ann and Graham make love, and that the miracle-working camera is unnecessary now. They are healed, restored to human life, capable of emotional and sexual connection.

Technology, then, saves the characters from an existence that is merely mechanical—a matter of routine and habit—from lives robbed of what Lawrence calls “vital significance.” In its ability to transform, to heal, to arouse, to render men and women whole and sexually potent, the machine is assigned the role nature plays in Lawrence's work. In that writer's work, nature is eroticized; sex, and sexual symbolism, are everywhere in his natural landscapes. I have said that Lawrence's heroes and heroines are distinguished by their capacity for a sympathetic, intuitive response to nature. Part of that response stems from an unconscious awareness that human beings are linked to nature by sex and that, further, healthy sex depends upon a deep and vital connection to nature. Machines—technology—lie outside this essential sexual matrix; machines are wholly other; their power (and it is considerable) is entirely destructive. Fulfilling Lawrence's worst fears, but confirming his vision, sex, lies, and videotape shows us that sex—which Lawrence hoped would save us all from becoming mere machines for producing and consuming—has become technologized and technology, eroticized.

Notes

1. Lawrence's father, Arthur Lawrence, was a coal miner—a cog in the industrial machine—whose embittered, combative marriage and whose strained relations with his children Lawrence may partly have attributed to his work.

2. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, this modern tendency is pushed to its inevitable issue: the guests in Sir Clifford's drawing room, who talk about sex a great deal instead of having it, speak longingly of the day when procreation and gestation can take place in a scientist's vial and when the human body, a source of unhappiness, might be gotten rid of altogether (69).

3. A recent issue of Newsweek magazine reports that middle-class couples in America are turning to the video camera to record—and presumably enhance—their sexual activities. Couples even repeatedly interrupt sexual intercourse to reposition their bodies, and the camera, for maximum erotic effect.

Works Cited

Corliss, Richard. “When Humor Meets Heartbreak.” Review of Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape. Time 31 July 1989: 65.

James, Caryn. “A Dance of Sex and Love, Through a Lens Darkly.” Review of Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape. The New York Times 4 Aug. 1989: C12.

Lawrence, D. H. “A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover.” Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking Compass, 1970.

———. Lady Chatterley's Lover. New York: New American Library, Signet Classic Edition, 1959.

———. “Pornography and Obscenity.” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward McDonald. New York: Viking Compass, 1972.

———. St. Mawr from “St. Mawr” and “The Man Who Died.” New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

———. “Sex versus Loveliness.” Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking Compass, 1970.

———. “The State of Funk.” Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking Compass, 1970.

———. Women in Love. New York: Viking Penguin, 1983.