Sex,Lies,and Videotape: Through the looking Glass

I had never seen Steven Soderbergh’s sensuous voyeuristic masterpiece “Sex Lies and Videotape" before. I was 14 when it was released and it was neither on my radar nor something I was allowed to view, but in retrospect maybe that was for the better. My young hormones might've crashed and never rebooted having seen something this teaming with the most profound and visceral representations of sex. All without much visual representation of you know - sex. Even now it has taken me days to process my feelings for this movie and the people in it. The feelings are many and varied, but I spent the most time thinking about Spader and his character Graham Dalton. For as long as I can remember I’ve never been very into my “self”. I didn't pay “me” much attention. “Me” was a collection of reactions, responses, and revelations to varying stimuli around me, but I didn't spend much time pondering self, and so while a keen observer of others I became startlingly blind to myself. There is quite a bit in Spader’s Graham in both the way that he plays him and the way that Graham is written that I could see in myself and it shook me to my core, but there was also a strange attraction there. Something that when I put it together spoke of a self desire that I would’ve never thought existed within someone like myself who has had therapy for the exact purpose of working on self acceptance and love. I have always avoided looking at myself but maybe that avoidance hides a deep affection, a self obsession with my self. This obsession seemed embodied in the repeating thought that Spader reminds me very much of myself and that through this particular voyeuristic experience it became clear I like watching myself…or at least in this avatar. Right from his opening scene there is a walking, living, unease to Graham which is really how I’d characterize Spader as an actor. There’s always been something immensely off putting about Spader, but it’s exactly that same feeling of unease, that tension between comfort and repulsion that makes him incredibly attractive and I mean that in the most classic sense of the word. Being drawn, pulled towards, magnetically attracted to somebody. Sex, Lies, and Videotape propels us into his charm and weirdness, and makes use of Spader in the peak of his powers. Right from his opening scene there is this pensive awkwardness that just sits there staring without blinking, while biting its lip. It wants you to move, you wanna move, but you also really really want to stay. Spader's long silences, abrupt pauses, penetrating eyes, it’s like a mood, and it’s one I’m always in. I don’t look like Spader, I don’t move like him, or talk like him, but I am awkward, and many times in that place where I am most off putting even to myself, others have found me attractive, but I don’t get to share in that, here I get to see it and maybe get a snippet of the sensations others get from me and that for me is and was immensely satisfying.

Besides his awkwardness Spaders Graham is also extremely observational. When you’re the type that can shut up for a minute in the presence of people - you can observe, and through looking, watching paying attention you can learn, and do it enough over a certain amount of years you don't even need a lot of time to read people. On days where my mother would go shopping leaving just me and my father in the car to wait (because shopping for even just one thing with my mother could easily take three hours) me and pops would just people watch, it was my favorite thing to do. I think it’s why I love the movies and why I love actors it’s just people watching, and watch is definitely what Graham does. When he first meets Ann Mullany (Andy MacDowell) he mostly just observes. There are intermittent answers to her questions, but they are simple concise, mysterious. He’s mostly interested in her, you don't see anything going on in his mind, there is a clarity of focus, like he doesn’t really think of the next thing to say until he says it. Later, at the dinner table it appears again when he keeps a singular eye and ear on Ann, almost forgetting her husband John ( Peter Gallagher) is even there whom is supposed to be the reason he is there. Whenever John speaks he’s only barely listening, but to everything Ann says he is so acutely attentive it feels and looks as if he is under a spell. A spell he can’t wait to fall back under every time John interrupts with some banal, empty taking point meant to verify his own self importance.

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When Graham meets Ann's sister Cynthia Bishop ( A brilliant Laura San Giacomo) it’s the same. Spader has a certain vulnerability present here that makes itself subtly known. Spader for his part gives it off in small releases of push back on intrusions. Looking down or away, or in his body how he sits (his most vulnerable times he tends to be in a funny position like when he is on the couch with Ann) or lies down. Story wise it is in his observations, in his attention, it is a distraction from himself, something to do while he’s been running from himself, or to look at when he simply cant bear to look at himself. Ann recognizes this, it’s what leads to her own keen observation of Graham which brings the movie full circle. “You think they're yours, but they're not. Everybody that walks in that door becomes part of your problem. Anybody that comes into contact with you” Ann replies to Spader when he admits he has issues. Her words cut right through me, there is a certain kind of hiding men do. We think its victimless, we think it’s goes unseen, we go unseen, but none of these things are true you go through life trying not to be hurt chances are you hurt. You try not to be seen, the opposite happens, because its a lie anyway. You want to be seen but you're just scared or maybe I’m just seeing so much of myself in Graham I’m projecting. Thing is Cynthia appreciates it, Ann begins to love it and as they begin to like it, the vulnerability, the awkwardness, the attention, why they like it, so too do I. They like seeing themselves through someone else, watching yourself through the eyes of someone else has alot to do with the enjoymentof sex, alot to with intimacy, and alot to do with power. As they love it so do I, and maybe so do we. Im happy being alone in this because even though it is slightly discomforting, it is also freeing to watch from the view of another to see yourself in another, and that is the appeal for me in this movie. The movie that may be the most about our voyeuristic relationship with the movies since Michael Powell's “Peeping Tom". To sit there and watch these people, and specifically in my case Spader act as a sort of surrogate for my own lack of attention to myself that allows me to want to look to want to fawn over, admire who I can be to others is a kind of intimacy, a sex, a thimble of therapy only the movies can supply, and it was hot, and I felt hot, and I enjoyed looking, and for at least these few days after I feel like looking at myself got a little easier.