[In the following review, Jaehne analyzes the themes of sexual politics and voyeurism in sex, lies, and videotape.]

Sex, lies, and videotape sound like the ingredients for a one night stand, not the culmination of a masculine quest for liberation, as debut director Steven Soderbergh would have us believe. (The title lets us know e. e. cummings has met thirtysomething.) The two most interesting characters suffer from a sexual alienation prissy enough to preempt “Thanks for the memory” with “Thanks, but no thanks.” Ann (Andie MacDowell) can't bring herself to have sex with her husband, while Graham (James Spader), confessing to Ann that he can't get an erection in another person's presence, manages well enough alone by watching videotaped interviews he's made with women about their sex lives.

sex, lies, and videotape reminds one of Cole Porter's lyrics that “Even over-educated fleas do it” in the song “Let's Fall in Love.” It is a comedy, although critics are writing very seriously in response to its unnerving clarion call for love, truth, and confessions. Perhaps it is not so much about sexual politics as it is about the negotiations of sexual politics—that is, what people say and how they move and look when they want a very specific kind of sexual dialog with another human being.

Many critics (mostly male) like to ascribe Ann's alienation to frigidity, while sympathizing with Graham as a New Sensitive Male. How could he not turn kinky in face of all those sexually voracious New Insensitive Females? They're bad girls—their videotaped confessions prove it—and guys like Graham are far too sensitive to make love to them. Masturbation is his only moral option.

The two other principals, by contrast, are sexual athletes. John (Peter Gallagher), Ann's husband, and Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), her sister, are busily engaged in a fling so hot it's a wonder they haven't thought of videotape themselves. Before you can say Peyton Place, John demonstrates the social and ethical dimensions of the New Sensitive Male, a man who has been scared into being honest with and about women, going so far as to try to be like them.

With the latest pop technology, Soderbergh wants Graham to explode the neo-conservative Eighties with video the way David Hemmings did the swinging Sixties with photography in Blowup. This recalls some popular notion left over from cinéma-vérité that psychological honesty can be had on tape. Is this an extension of the myth that ‘The camera never lies?’ Or that women are so narcissistic that only a camera can get to their true selves? The film encourages us to pose such questions, but is equally adept at avoiding answers within its own ‘text’ and context: the young auteur writes a script in eight days driving from the South to Los Angeles, films it on a minuscule budget, only to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes and be acclaimed as the new Cassavetes, capable of thrusting us like a hand into a film that fits like a glove.

Deep within this idea of confessing to Graham's camera—which both female protagonists end up doing—there lies the strategy of permitting the (male) photographer to control our perceptions of female sexuality. In short, it's as if Soderbergh read feminist structuralists and decided to goof on them from the p.o.v. of the New Sensitive Male—‘Hey girls, what if I'm a eunuch and guarantee mirror-image reflections of you all doin' the fantasizin'?’ Soderbergh is also smart enough not to attempt to provide the visual imagery of those female fantasies; he covers his tracks here with footage of talking heads.

He may not be lying, but who is he kidding? Soderbergh almost had us convinced that this video camera was a confession booth instead of a seduction ploy. This was only possible because of the empathetic flirtation, the soulful anti-materialism, the self-effacing self-obsession of Graham, who is one of those men who has invested his entire being in knowing more about himself than about anything or anyone else. This gives him sufficient security to stay laid back and let others display their neuroses so that he can then demonstrate his ‘understanding.’ Spader, as directed by Soderbergh, makes this very attractive, but there are moments when his passivity make him little more than an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. Plugged into a bourgeois environment, he sucks up any women who happen to by lying around.

Of course, Graham doesn't ask men to expose themselves to his candid camera, because he's not trying to relate to men, although the obvious possibility that he's hiding from his own homoeroticism is left unexplored. Instead, Soderbergh presents him as exploring a new relationship to women as a fragile male who, after discovering that his previous relations with women had made him a pathological liar, is convinced that the only way to stay honest is to avoid sex “if anyone else is in the room,” as he tells Ann.

The very act of telling Ann such a thing is part of his new ‘honest’ monastic code. If Graham's essential male accessory is out of bounds, will women be more honest with him? Or just turned on by the kinkiness of the ploy, as Cynthia clearly is? Does Soderbergh think men would be more honest as eunuchs? Or are we so unaccustomed to seeing men deal with the failures and disaster of their own desire that we simply prefer Graham's candor?

These are the doubts raised by Soderbergh's sincerity. He wants to show us the many ways we wound each other—and can heal each other, not through the traditional laying on of hands, but rather rigidly adhering to a hands-off policy. Graham knows Ann's lying when she tells him that what she likes about marriage is its “security.” That may be the funniest lie in any movie of the last two decades!

Ann's own brand of self-obsession can go nowhere until Graham awakens her, which is made palpable for us in an unusually touching scene. In the dead of night, Ann creeps upstairs to Graham's room to observe him sleeping, defenseless. Soderbergh has made her a lonely prefeminist housewife, devoid of seams that would connect her to any larger world, any friends. So she pays somebody to listen to her—psychiatry as the capitalist approach to friendship—until she discovers a friend in her husband's reformed fraternity brother. Graham's blank slate of Truth gets her to divulge her impression that sex is overrated, which can't help sounding like a kind of come-on, wrapped in her gentle Southern drawl. Her titillating Truth is responded to in kind: Graham tells her he's impotent. Another lie, as she will discover when she finally comes to join his video gallery—and once he turns off the damn camera.

Soderbergh is suggesting that honesty and sexuality intersect only when we stop being voyeurs. For this film is nothing if not a study in voyeurism. He's careful not to be judgmental about three of the four lives (John's an educated thug), he does weigh in with a very strong statement about responsibility, an often neglected aspect of friendship (and sexuality) in American society.

Graham may think he's an island: we may see him as Shane; but Soderbergh succeeds in developing the arc of Ann's character by having her confront Graham with his responsibility in connecting with other people. Just as Graham and Ann are about to admit that they need each other, Graham retreats into his solipsistic routine, with, “I've got a lot of problems, but they belong to me.” His jejune philosophizing and loner pose infuriates Ann. She points out that anyone walking in the door becomes a part of his life. “You've had an effect on my life,” she accuses him, implicitly challenging him to own up to his own feelings.

How often has sensitivity been used as an excuse for people to stroll in, play the nomad prophet on the eve of destruction, and wander away with “Who, me?” Graham seems like a character recalled from the pioneering days of sexual liberation, when it was considered corny to expect sex to lead to commitment. Now that sex has become a dangerous contact sport, guys like Graham may need video for their rogues' gallery, as Jack Nicholson once used slides for his in Carnal Knowledge. Carnal- has become self-knowledge, and Graham is the new ‘self-made man,’ if only from a sexual point of view—an onanistic hipster understandably alienated from his professional peers like the self-satisfied John. (It's hard to describe any of these characters without using ‘self’ in the adjectives.)

While Ann and Graham often seem to come from a Seventies time-warp, John and Cynthia are materialist Eighties' types, practicing a sexual realpolitik. Her motivation for a rendezvous with John in her sister's bed, for example, is hazily sketched out as a not unjustified exasperation with Ann's dim-witted ‘security.’ Screwing John is Cynthia's way of proving that there is no security in the world except ignorance. The film touches on Cynthia's artistic aspirations only to contrast it to John's philistine philandering, and her drudgery as a bartender points up John's laziness as a legal eagle.

In the relationship between Cynthia and Ann, Soderbergh sketches the antagonisms of sisterhood with a depressing absence of feminist consciousness. Laura San Giacomo plays Cynthia as one of those women who knows how to pour blood in men's shark pools in order to demonstrate her innate superiority. Nevertheless, Cynthia is Feminismo triumphant; she is presented as the superior woman, especially at the conclusion when Ann comes to bury the hatchet with news of her new job, her new life, and, between the lines, her thanks for flushing John out. But Soderbergh has us gasping alternately at Cynthia's perfidy and performance in bed.

One confrontation in the film promises but doesn't deliver the chemistry of the sensitized types we've been watching in what one could call ‘Alan Movies’ (Alan Alda, Alan Pakula, Woody Allen, and filmmakers feigning the New Sensitive Male schtick who are not necessarily named Alan). Cynthia as the New Tough Killer Femme drops in on Graham, whose ‘sensitivity’ has been impressed on her in tales of his displaced sexuality. Looking lethal, she prowls his empty apartment before she gets down to the Truth with his video panoply: she recounts how the first time she saw a penis she was so amazed that she forgot there was a guy attached to it. The penis is, in fact, the primary problem of every character here. If Ann's feminism is so underdeveloped that getting a job is her first gesture of independence, then Cynthia's feminism has merely got her stuck in the groove of sexual conquest. She seems not to realize that you don't have to crawl; you can walk away.

Soderbergh's characters are achingly familiar but not clichéd, because his direction is as interested in ways they don't lie—the truth of their body language—as in the goals of their relationships. They want or do not want sex with each other; a web of lies and videotape turns that desire into art. Soderbergh tries to shade in the difference between the desire to desire as we watch it in Ann and Graham, and desire to deceive as in John and Cynthia. Which brings us back to the way they negotiate the cold war between the sexes. Ann accuses John of sex with her sister and he lies. John accuses Ann of sex with Graham, and her silence however misleading, confirms it.

Graham lies to himself about celibacy in order to expose women telling the truth. And then a testimony is tucked away for his private pleasure until people like John need it for what facts it may offer. Whatever may be recorded, men are oblivious to the truth—because they “haven't the slightest idea who I am,” as Ann tells Graham when she seizes the camera to turn it on him. The video camera may be the weapon for her own liberation, as the film suggests, and she may be capable of seizing that weapon and making Graham face his own devices. But John interprets the technology of truth as “sick,” as he says after seeing his wife's tape. The health of his organism depends on self-deceit. Graham, too, is operating on the self-deceit, even if he's tipped the Richter scale of sensitivity and fallen apart at some undisclosed point before our story. But he comes to life, as he watches Ann break out of her little solipsistic, shrink-conducted symphony. In a happy ending, these Sleeping Beauties wake up and smell the coffee.

The film refuses to be abstract, while pressing upon us a sense of urgency—but about what? Dismantling the barrier of lies? Stopping video, as Soderbergh says, from “distancing us from other people?” Whether Soderbergh meant Graham to be viewed with skepticism or not, he and James Spader let him turn sex, lies, and videotape into an exploration of the phoniness and dangers of isolationism, as Men's Lib gathers steam. Is the key to liberation an escape from pathological lying about love and sex? This movie exists to ask that question. Wisely, it's too open-ended to answer it.