The Girlfriend Experience

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therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Girlfriend Experience

#26 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon May 03, 2021 11:31 pm

The first two eps of season 3 are out and it's.. interesting. I'm keeping my expectations low after the departure of the directorial creative team of Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz, but this season theoretically works by using neuroscience's subset of behavioral psychology to double down on the show's established ethos. The Girlfriend Experience has thrived on exploring and exposing the ironic reality of the individual's sterile isolation within their social environment in western industrialist cultures, specifically via interpersonal relations that posture at intimacy but remain superficial due to the comfort born from innate and conditioned alienation. So for our heroine to utilize manipulative psychological techniques that stimulate responses based on detached, experimental behaviorist principles is bitterly unemotional in a literal sense.

I'll admit that I find our lead to be a bit too robotic and confident as she steps into the field -I can give some rope, but the nonchalant "That makes sense" to suggestions from her booking agent and she rationalizes the cerebral connotations of decision-making was irritatingly self-indulgent to the premise. While I suppose I can get behind the anthology series widening its detachment from symptoms of humanity as it ventures deeper into its run (and into the tech field this season, ugh I can already feel the cynical antisocial vibe crawling up my skin) I find myself already missing the balanced temperament of the first two series, where the leading ladies were removed from our subjective comprehension yet observably human in coping with emotional turmoil, resiliently composed with volcanic energy brewing just below the surface. Time will tell if this remains too on-the-nose and supercilious (like its lead) for the series' own good, but there's a lot of potential here, and the material channels a personal thrill for my professional interest so fingers crossed that Anja Marquardt, Soderbergh and co. are up to the challenge.

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therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Girlfriend Experience

#27 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Jun 21, 2021 9:58 pm

Finished season 3, and it was a slog to get through. Julia Goldani Telles is a terrible lead, alienating the audience rather than drawing a humane line between empathy for alienation and aloofly observant sobriety to the coldness socially constructed into our milieu, that the other seasons accomplished so well. The finale ultimately delivers an interesting idea with its twist
SpoilerShow
that Iris has been the one being studied, her own skilled and effortful research usurped by capitalist enterprises to concoct an A.I. who can size-up any male client, assess their kinks (only made possible by her human intuition) and deliver subconscious power dynamics based on said algorithm.

It's a nicely acidic revelation beyond technological specifics, if not original in the least: that actual labor has total significance for advancement to be possible, but no significance for the consumers and vendors of services when the resulting function is all that matters. I even somewhat enjoyed Iris' fatalistic decision to choose ultimate knowledge as her power, sacrificing humanity because the sterile atmospheric disconnect has already left any inclination towards 'life' devoid of romanticized or logical merit for consideration. Though her final Fuck You before opting to surrender, trying to spite the A.I. with the sage "You're not perfect because you're not flawed" insult, was pretty weak- and worse, not treated as a desperate failure.
This is reflective of the season's largest misstep- that in neutering all emotion, we can't invest as an audience in caring about the issues the season cares about; we even find tragic compassion for Iris' line, or objective despair for the mechanical final choice that we fear may reflect the future of our own psychological decision-making. The broader problem is that, regardless of the strengths of Marquardt's thematic vision, it takes so damn long to get there and is plainly dull and uninvolving. I can appreciate that this entire season was conceived around this interesting commentary, but that hardly matters when you don't know the basics of narrative to tell your story and evoke your ideas.

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