Alison Bechdel is blameless in all this, but a couple of years ago, when the reductive-but-snappy litmus test for cultural sexism that bears her name was upwafting on the zeitgeist, it inspired a thought experiment of my own. Now, most of the mental quizzes I set myself when bored have mayfly lives, because after a while (and this is the problem with the Bechdel test and its subsequent dogmatization too), applying such agenda-based filters as a method of cultural critique becomes as robotic as Mr. Skin fast-forwarding through films to timestamp each instance of boob. But this one continues to rattle around, maybe because to my mind, no wholly satisfying answer ever presented itself. My “Danielle Plainview paradigm” is simply this: Who is the most qualitatively similar female version of the Daniel Day-Lewis character from Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “There Will Be Blood”?
The new 13-episode Starz show “The Girlfriend Experience” that quietly reclaims the half-hour format for drama, co-written by indie filmmakers Lodge Kerrigan (who directed seven of the episodes) and Amy Seimetz (who directed six, and also co-stars), based on executive producer Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 experimental doodle of the same name, is palpably nothing like “There Will Be Blood.” And Christine Reade, the high-class escort played by Riley Keough, is palpably nothing at all like Daniel Plainview. Even aside from the fact that the watchful, elusive Christine hardly ever raises her voice and has a much less noticeable mustache, as a sex worker, she should be excluded from consideration seeing as one of the “rules” of the Plainview paradigm is that since Plainview exhibits no discernible interest in sex, neither should his female equivalent.
But perhaps proving just how seldom has any term, while applicable, so singularly failed to capture the essence of a fictional character as “sex worker” does for Christine Reade, she might just be the closest I’ve yet seen: a repellent yet alluring young woman of colossal ego (as opposed to vanity) and monumental will whose sex work is an efficient and logical choice of side profession. The defiantly un-lazy Christine aims to be the best at it, through means ethical and otherwise, in the same way she instinctively equips herself with materials for future coercion as a law-student intern. Like Plainview, Christine is marked out by the terrifying purity of her unapologetic ambition. Like Plainview, she is not just an antihero, she’s an anti-victim: Her demons, her unexamined pathology, her spectrum sociopathy are all entirely her own. Like Plainview, she will drink your milkshake. To say she has agency is an understatement — she is nothing but agency.
In this way, “The Girlfriend Experience” sets itself head and shoulders above the Soderbergh film that inspired it. There, Sasha Grey‘s escort-on-the-make is reviled by the gross “porn critic” (played with event-horizon sleaze by film critic Glenn Kenny), for wanting to market herself as high-end when, he alleges, she’s not smart or cultured enough; TV Christine has an effortless, unaffected, surprisingly conservative aura of class. The Christines may share an unusually liberated attitude toward sex and a flexibility about breaking the law in that regard, but Movie Christine also wants companionship, intimacy and a daffy self-help-paperback idea of love. TV Christine would look at Movie Christine with pity, if she didn’t look right through her.
Even in a television age unusually blessed with complex female characters, she is something new. She’s not, for example, Alicia (Julianna Margulies) from “The Good Wife,” or Olivia (Kerry Washington) from “Scandal,” unimpeachably clever and aspirationally gorgeous heroines who may frequently make morally questionable decisions, but whom we still root for. Perhaps the less inherently likable Elizabeth (Keri Russell) in “The Americans,” or Liv Tyler‘s Meg in “The Leftovers” come closer, but neither show makes the woman’s psychology its sole focus. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is troubled to the point of tortured in “Homeland,” and has the haunted, hunted expression to prove it; Christine’s unruffled, unreadable exterior might be her key characteristic. Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in “Girls” has an edge of ironic self-awareness that Christine, despite the intensity of her self-interest, never hints at. And even the truest female antihero we’ve had on TV to date, Rachel (Shiri Appleby) in Lifetime‘s brilliant and underseen “UnREAL,” is played for spiteful, arch black comedy. By contrast, Kerrigan and Seimetz make Christine’s unknowable interiority the infinitely dense dark matter at the heart of their sleek, sharklike show, and they do their courtesan the courtesy of taking her very seriously indeed.
It’s a trait that makes the show far more complex and considered than “half-hour Starz series about call girls!” might suggest. Essentially, “The Girlfriend Experience” feels like a film noir told from the perspective of femme fatale. This approach shouldn’t work — the femme fatale is traditionally a side character because she’s there to have an effect on the men who the story is about and because too much screen time would probably rob her of allure. A deglammed Veronica Lake at home in an old T-shirt, throwing a hissy fit when she can’t get her peekaboo wave to hang right, might spoil the illusion. But somehow, without compromising on her mystery, the show is riveted to Christine, clothed or naked, alone or with others, at work or at home and even, during one transcendently casual moment, discovering while peeing that she’s got her period and putting in a tampon.
