Poster for Out of Sight (1998)
Alex Brannan, one of our newest regular contributors, considers how Steven Soderbergh uses genre elements to create the eroticism of Out of Sight and this year’s Black Bag.
Steven Soderbergh is a director whose long career has involved a fascinating migration across genre boundaries. From a certain angle, his career is defined by a canny ability to experiment with genre characteristics such that the familiar appears exciting. Soderbergh established himself with his 1989 debut film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a formative “indie blockbuster” that set the tone for a lucrative and rapidly shifting American independent cinema in the 1990s (Perren, 16-17).
Perhaps most well-known for his Ocean’s trilogy of heist films, Soderbergh’s films have intersected with many genres: legal drama (Erin Brockovich), science-fiction (Solaris), dark comedy farce (The Informant), sports drama (High Flying Bird), biopic (Che and Behind the Candelabra), psychological thriller (Side Effects and Unsane), horror (Presence), neo-noir (The Good German and Out of Sight), and various crime films. None of these films are as simple as these genre signifiers imply, though. To call Out of Sight a neo-noir and leave it at that puts an incorrect picture of the film in a potential viewer’s mind, and it also drastically undersells what Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Frank are doing. Genre hybridity in Hollywood film may be nothing new — Janet Staiger argues that the Hollywood film has never been “pure” in terms of genre categorization (6). But Soderbergh’s ability to fuse genres into engines of entertainment is of particular note.
The New York Times review of Elmore Leonard’s 1996 novel Out of Sight lambasted it for eschewing believable character motivation in favor of Hollywood antics. The criminal-cop love affair begins as a “bizarrely relocated movie ‘cute meet’,” and “Hollywood should be stealing pages from Elmore Leonard’s book, not the other way around.” The critic, Ralph Lombreglia, was right about at least that last point, in that the reflexive ouroboros of Soderbergh adapting Leonard’s cinema-influenced book into a film of its own resulted in an airy, imminently likeable pair of on-screen characters. (Lombreglia also may have never met a film nerd, as he finds it impossible that “two people could have a calm, increasingly tender exchange on … their mutual admiration of Faye Dunaway’s sexually charged repartee.”)
Jennifer Lopez as Karen Sisco and George Clooney as Jack Foley in Out of Sight
With Out of Sight, Soderbergh channels the hybridity of Leonard’s crime-romance novel by filming crime movie plot beats as moments of intimacy. The “cute meet” inside the trunk of a stolen vehicle is the end of a criminal plot to escape prison and the beginning of a romance plot between gentleman thief Jack Foley (George Clooney) and federal marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez). The two characters are foils, placed in opposition to each other by the nature of what side of the law they inhabit. But this cat-and-mouse dynamic is duplicated by the immediate romantic chemistry that starts brewing inside the trunk. The contradiction of this doubled relationship — the impossibility for these two to be both enemies and lovers — is the conflict of the film. Fundamentally, this is a generic conflict: the cop and the criminal of the crime film cannot also be the budding lovers of the romance film, yet they are.
The meet cute is filmed tight, both to adhere to the geographic logic of two people crammed inside of a trunk as Foley evades arrest and to depict an intimacy in the blocking of the two characters (who, effectively, are shot throughout the scene as though they are lying in bed together). It isn’t just Faye Dunaway that gets the two seeing hearts — Peter Finch in Network is just as good an aphrodisiac, apparently. And it is clear that Sisco is mainly using the casual conversation as a means of obtaining information that she can later use to put Foley and his co-conspirators back behind bars. In this sense, the tension in the scene is twofold: it is about the spark igniting between two characters, and it is also about the genres of crime fiction and romance colliding.
Sensuality as a cinematic device links the genres of Out of Sight, just as it does in Soderbergh’s most recent film, Black Bag. It’s clear enough to see if one follows the steam, figuratively and literally. Despite being headstrong in her desire to capture the criminals that got away, Sisco fantasizes about raiding Foley’s home and finding him lounging in a steamy bath (one lit candle to set the mood). In an early scene of Black Bag, Soderbergh lingers on the shot of steam filling the lenses of secret agent George Woodhouse’s (Michael Fassbender) glasses as he prepares a very special dinner, one which will propel his efforts to protect his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) from his co-workers. (If you’re questioning the primal cinematic link between cooking and sensuality, see: Tampopo). As it pertains to Black Bag, the first of two dining room scenes involves plenty of salacious conversation about various workplace canoodling.
George’s cooking is itself an act of character development. His knife is swift and exacting, precise and seemingly wielded without a second thought. The steam obscures his vision but does not deter him. And we cut from this directly to a conversation that establishes the relationship between George and Kathryn. Kathryn acts and conceals; George observes and fixes. Kathryn knows when George is watching her, but she likes being watched. It is a relationship that David Koepp’s script overtly points to as a source of not just espionage skill but also sexual chemistry: novice agent Dubose in satellite surveillance (Marisa Abela) calls it out explicitly later in the film (“That’s so hot”).
Black Bag is premised on the assumption that espionage films are built around the concept of deceit. The film does, in fact, dwell in the realm of deception as it bounces around the relationships between its ensemble of spy characters, one of whom may be a mole in the organization. But with the central relationship between George and Kathryn, the directionality of the deceit (the “who’s deceiving whom” of it all) is a red herring. At its core, the film is a romance, and the espionage is a means toward that end. It poses on multiple occasions the question of how one maintains a long-term romantic relationship when one’s job is predicated on lying. The answer is in the genre. Just as in Out of Sight, the cat-and-mouse game is both a hunt and a marriage.
The most poignant scene in Out of Sight involves the two would-be lovers meeting at a dimly lit bar and sharing a drink against the city skyline at night. Through repartee that easily qualifies as “calm, [and] increasingly tender,” the pair concoct a fake life in which they could safely meet and fall in love. No longer burdened by the responsibility of her law enforcement job, Sisco becomes a belittled sales rep. Foley is just some guy named “Gary.” Screenwriter Scott Frank’s dialogue weaves a fantasy that is tragic only because both people are smart enough to see the impossibility that lies underneath its façade.
Once again, Soderbergh shoots the conversation tight, with an intimate two-shot that puts the A-listers’ faces mere inches apart. The shot looks visually distinct, because it is flat. The over-the-shoulder reverse shots of their conversation add a level of depth that makes the two-shot look slightly unreal, as if their faces couldn’t really be that close. “How far do you want to take this [fantasy]?” Foley asks, and the illusion is dropped. The scene cuts away from the intimate two-shot. Their conversation plays out, with the camera, in closeup, getting closer to the characters over the course of the scene. But the closeness of these closeups is not intimate like the two-shot; it’s isolating each character in their own frame. Soderbergh’s camera mirrors the doubt. The characters know where the night is headed, but they also know what tomorrow will bring. The mouse must run. The cat must chase. Even as the button at the end of the film negotiates the impossibility of their relationship in an affirming manner, the dynamic will inevitably remain the same. The paradox of the genres makes it so.
Perren, Alisa. Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.
Staiger, Janet. “Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History,” Film Criticism, vol. 22, no. 1, Fall 1997, 5-20.
IU Cinema will screen Out of Sight on May 15 at 7pm as part of the Indie Auteurs series.