Outsmarting himself: Steven Soderbergh's BUBBLE

 Debbie Doebereiner, Dustin Ashley, Misty Wilkins. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. 

Well I guess Steven Soderbergh is the King of Hollywood.

Kurt Loder started his Rolling Stone review of Neil Young's 1989 FREEDOM, "Well I guess Neil Young is the King of Rock'n'Roll." I've always wanted to do the same for a filmmaker. Today, Soderbergh gave me the opportunity.

Bubble tells one of the oldest stories we know: love triangle gone wrong. Jealousy, envy, insecurity, and opportunity lead to a bad end. Hollywood has told that story about a million times, in every genre, every style, and for every budget, including mega. Hollywood peopled those million with every likely and wildly unlikely actor imaginable, from grindhouse starlets to Hollywood It Girls.

Some of those pictures became classics, and some make a viewer want to hurt himself, but they're all recognizably Hollywood productions. Steven Soderbergh, following up blockbuster OCEAN'S EIGHT, took less than $2M, amateur actors cast on location in Belpre, Ohio & Parkersburg, WVa. - lead Debbie Doebereiner was cast from her job in a KFC drivethru - almost no crew, and made about as good a love triangle gone bad picture as Hollywood has made for ten times its budget. If spending some of your profits from a hit to best your employers isn't rock'n'roll, what is?

Getting to make all six proposed no-budget, bare-bones genre pieces, his original plan, rather than just BUBBLE, which grossed an underwhelming $260k vs its $1.6M budget, would be more rock'n'roll, I guess, but the one he did stands for the other five, as far as I'm concerned. BUBBLE's a honkytonkin' little movie.

I both see and don't see how BUBBLE underperformed at the box office. True, Doebereiner and Dustin Ashley and Misty Wilkins play these characters and their situation as if reenacting a recent episode of their lives. True, Soderbergh tells us all we need to know about the three of them through mundane, cliche-pocked, mostly improvised dialogue and a verite shooting style that deconstructs - genre conventions. True, it finds tension, suspense, and pathos in what looks like Herzog's STROSZEK, a bleak, tired world of simulated pine paneling and cheap furniture and fastfood leftovers in the icebox that feels unnervingly real. True, it's a terrific, experimental film that might have revolutionized Hollywood.

Unfortunately, BUBBLE is, has, and does all these things in a story of sub-Appalachian shiftworkers in a small factory who lead dead end lives in a dead end world. It's not about glamorous or even particularly attractive people. I've seen a number of H'wood actresses essay the low-rent femme fatale, but beneath the studio grime I can always tell she uses conditioner everyday. Misty Wilkins looks like she'd be thrilled if Soderbergh paid her in oxy and beer. That's not an easily faked look.

Nor is it a look moviegoers flock to the multiplex to see. We like our grime clean, safe, and unreal. We like to know that, at the end, our triangle's sides all went home to pretty houses in big fancy cars. The cast of BUBBLE look as if they hope to parlay the movie into an assistant managership at Home Depot.

Americans once flocked to see themselves on the screen. Films like GRAPES OF WRATH or ON THE WATERFRONT, BLUE COLLAR, and NORMA RAE sold tickets to blue collar workers and told their stories. Today, even in smalltown Mississippi, a night at the movies for a family of four runs close to $100. When working folks around here pony up for the multiplex they like seeing something that looks expensive starring sexy people who lead lives the audience dreams of. My working friends in Lafayette County go to MCU movies, FAST&FURIOUS movies, not movies set in the kind of apartments they just left, starring people who look like their family.

At the same time, more affluent Americans first must debate whether a picture about the poor qualifies as porn and they as tourists but, once approved, they also want more glamorous stars under a layer of despair. Movies about poverty bother the affluent. People who look poor scare them. Maybe they remind them of what their family looked like a couple generations ago. I don't think the privileged eschew a film like BUBBLE for noble reasons but because they don't want to know. 

Affluent people my age all went to college when the "Poverty Sucks!" poster, depicting a rich man standing in front of his Rolls, hung on every third wall. They took those posters for their life credo. Motion pictures starring people who not only look like but ARE the servodrones they ignore as they order McD's don't plant their butts in seats.

Which feels criminal. I suppose taste takes the hardest hit, however. If we criminalize bad taste we're all getting the chair. BUBBLE pleases me because it lights up my brain. Its stark, minimalist aesthetic makes the simple complex in a way that makes guys like me, who know their IQ and shouldn't, very happy, but these qualities do not sell tickets to medical billing techs and guys who blow grass clippings all day. 

In my experience, movies with large guns, fast cars, huge explosions, and young, genetically perfect stars do a brisk business. Likewise, my friends who drive Lexi now and get an arthouse schedule emailed every month don't want to see movies where the star looks and sounds exactly like the whiny racist bus driver they flipped off every day of middle school.

Soderbergh outsmarted himself, and made the greatest business mistake known: he underestimated Americans' appetite for junk food. There may be a world where the working poor and cinephiles unite and rally around honest, authentic, no-frills movies like BUBBLE, but I have yet to find it and so, I guess, does Steven Soderbergh. That's a damn shame.