sex, lies, and videotape, and Telling the Truth to Someone Who Can Answer

In an office in Baton Rouge, a woman is telling her therapist that she worries about garbage: about where all the world’s garbage goes. Her house is spotless. Her husband is a successful lawyer. In the same chair she has said that the thought of her husband touching her repels her, and the garbage seems easier to talk about. Her therapist observes that she worries about things she cannot control.

Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape is about four people, and none of them can say what they want to the person in front of them. Ann says what she can to a therapist, much of it by way of garbage. Her husband, John, says nothing true to her at all: he is sleeping with her younger sister, Cynthia, and tells himself that his wife’s coldness is to blame. Cynthia, the frank one, says a great deal, and little of it to the person it concerns. Then John’s old college friend Graham comes back to town after nine years away, with one key, for his car, a rule that he no longer lies and, as Ann will discover, stacks of videotapes, each labelled with a woman’s name.

The film is usually summed up, fairly, as a proposal that talking truthfully about sex can be more intimate than sex itself. This essay thinks that is nearly right, and that what the film actually finds lives in the nearly. There are two kinds of talk in it. There is talk into a camera, which feels safe because nobody on the other side will answer, and which is kept. And there is talk to a person, who can answer, and who keeps nothing. The first is being recorded. The second is being heard.

Graham’s tapes give the women who make them somewhere to speak, and the film takes that seriously, as this essay will. But the tapes keep what is said, and the man who keeps it never has to say anything back. The argument here is that a truth told about sex becomes intimacy only when two things happen: the listener answers in his turn, and what was said stops being kept by someone who might use it. The film shows both, and it shows, plainly, what can happen to a kept truth when the wrong man gets hold of it.

Soderbergh wrote, directed and edited the film, his first feature. James Spader plays Graham, Andie MacDowell plays Ann, Peter Gallagher plays John and Laura San Giacomo plays Cynthia. It was shot in Baton Rouge in August and early September 1988, photographed by Walt Lloyd, with music by Cliff Martinez. A trade paper put its cost at 1.2 million dollars.

It was first shown, unfinished, in January 1989 at the US Film Festival in Park City, Utah, soon to be renamed Sundance, where it won the audience’s prize. The critic Amy Taubin, in an essay for the Criterion Collection, writes that its success there turned that refuge from Hollywood commercialism into “a magnet for Los Angeles power brokers looking for fresh talent.” Later that year it played in competition at Cannes, and the festival’s own records list three prizes for it in 1989: the Palme d’Or, the International Critics’ Prize, and the award for best actor, to James Spader. Soderbergh was twenty-six. Looking back, the festival’s own site puts it simply: a young American filmmaker had turned Cannes upside down.

It opened in American cinemas in August 1989, released by Miramax, and in Japan that December. When the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2006, the announcement called it a landmark film that “launched the independent film renaissance of the past two decades.” That is a large claim to rest on one film, and it is the Library’s. The more cautious account is that it helped to change American independent film in the years that followed.

Two notes before going further. The film was not screened for this essay. It rests on the film’s published record and synopses and on what critics have written about it, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. And the essay discusses the whole film: what Ann says on her tape, what is done with that tape, and how the film ends. A reader who would rather meet those on screen should stop here and come back afterwards. The essay will say so once more, just before the tape.

Ann keeps a spotless house. In therapy she talks about garbage, about her marriage, about happiness, which she says is overrated, and she says that the idea of John touching her repels her. Taubin notices that she meets anything that threatens her composure with laughter. It would be easy to make her aversion into a diagnosis or a moral, and this essay will do neither. A woman does not want her husband to touch her. She has said so to a therapist, in an office, at an appointed hour. That is what is in front of us, and it is already a great deal.

John, the lawyer, brings Cynthia to the house while Ann is out and sleeps with her in the marriage bed. He moves a meeting with an important client to see her. And he tells himself that his wife’s coldness is to blame. That sentence is the lie under all the others, and its first listener is John himself. A man who has told himself that story no longer needs to look at what he is doing; the story has done the looking for him.

Cynthia, Ann’s younger sister, paints, tends bar and has never settled things with Ann. She is the frank one, and her frankness is real, but a good deal of it is aimed. Taubin reads the affair as the worst thing Cynthia could do to her sister, chosen for exactly that reason. That is one critic’s reading, and this essay does not need to settle it. What can be said is that the affair, whatever else it is, is an affair with Ann’s husband, and that the long quarrel between the sisters is in the room whenever they are.

And Graham. He was John’s friend at college; nine years on they have nothing in common, and John makes no secret of his distaste for what Graham has become. Graham and Ann get on from the first evening. While she helps him look for a flat, he tells her that he is impotent. He says it plainly, as a fact. He has come back with one key, for his car, and a rule that he no longer lies.

Four people, then, and four ways of not saying it. Ann says it to a professional, and often sideways. John says the opposite of it, to his wife and to himself. Cynthia says it loudly, often to the wrong person. And Graham, who tells the truth about himself, has arranged a life in which there is nobody in front of him to tell.

The marriage at the centre of all this is sexless and dishonest at once. Which came first is not something this essay can read from what the film shows, and it would be a trap to try. It would be convenient to read Ann’s aversion as her body knowing about the lie before she did. It would be just as convenient, for John, to read his lie as caused by her aversion, and that is exactly the story he tells himself. What the film gives us is a woman who does not want to be touched and a man who is lying, in the same house, and it lets the two facts stand side by side without making either one the other’s excuse.

Calling on Graham later, at the flat he has found, Ann sees the stacks of videotapes, each labelled with a woman’s name. He tells her plainly what they are: tapes of women talking to his camera, by their own agreement, about their sexual lives. Watching them alone is the only way he finds release. Ann leaves, disturbed, and rings Cynthia to warn her away from him.

It is worth slowing down here, because the film asks us to take the tapes seriously and it is easy not to. Consider what they offer the women who made them. Somebody asks, and the answer goes to a lens instead of a face. A lens does not flinch, or frown, or answer back. For some of the things a woman might want to say about her own sexual life, a lens may be easier to talk to than a face for exactly that reason.

Looking back at the film, the festival’s own site credits Soderbergh with creating “a mechanism of observation” by putting the video at the heart of the story. That is true, and it is not quite enough. The tapes are also a mechanism of listening. What makes them strange is not that a man looks at women; cinema is full of that. It is that the women talk, and he only listens.

But the arrangement has a shape, and the shape matters. The speaker gives. The listener keeps, and keeps literally: the tapes go back on the shelf with the names on them. And the listener is never heard in return. Graham, who has made a rule against lying, has also arranged things so that he is always the one asking. His honesty is real, and it costs him nothing, in the exact sense that a man who is never asked a question has no use for a lie.

And a tape, unlike a listener, can be played by whoever holds it. Nothing in the arrangement protects the women on that shelf from somebody else getting into the room. The film comes back to that, hard.

One of the film’s early critics, Michael Dare, writing for the Criterion Collection in 1990, saw a logic of its time in Graham: a man using video “as a prophylactic against the plague of the decade.” In the years of AIDS, talk at a distance could look like the safest intimacy left. That is a reading of its moment. The film has outlived the moment, which may mean that the distance Graham keeps was never only about a virus.

Ann’s warning has the effect it was perhaps always going to have. Cynthia goes straight round to Graham’s flat, uninvited, gets him to explain the tapes, and agrees to make one. What she says on it is hers, and this essay leaves it there. Jonah Jeng, writing in Paste, hears in her own explanation the desire that drives every sympathetic character in the film: she wanted him to see her.

Then she tells Ann, who is horrified, and John, who rages at Graham and blames him for everything. Look at what John is angry about. Graham asked her questions and filmed her answers. What John seems unable to bear is that she has been seen and heard by someone else, in a way that has nothing to do with him. Whatever he tells himself, his rage does not look like concern for her. It looks like ownership.

Cynthia sees it. Disgusted with him, she ends the affair. She deserves the credit, because the frank sister is easily cast as the careless one. She is the first person in the story to look at John clearly and act on what she sees, and it takes her one conversation about a tape.

None of this makes the affair into something it is not. This essay does not read it as a romance, and it is not the essay’s business to punish it. It is two people deceiving a third, who is one’s wife and the other’s sister, and its cost falls hardest on the one who was never asked.

Ann asks John, directly, whether he is having an affair. He denies it and talks her round, and she believes him. Then, vacuuming the bedroom, she finds her sister’s pearl earring, the one Cynthia lost.

It is a quiet discovery, and an exact one. The lie was told to her face, in words. The truth turns up on the bedroom floor, as an object, in the middle of housework. Nobody tells Ann about the affair. She finds it with the machine she uses to keep the house spotless.

She does not take it to John, not yet, or to Cynthia. She drives to Graham’s flat. It is as if, of everywhere in Baton Rouge, the one place where a true thing can be said without anyone answering back is a room with a camera in it.

From here, this essay describes what Ann says on her tape, what is done with it, and how the film ends.

She insists on making a tape, over Graham’s objections. On it she says that sex has never satisfied her, and she admits that she has thought about sleeping with him. These are her words, said to a camera because she chose a camera, and this essay reports them as the film’s published accounts do and goes no further.

Then she does the thing the arrangement was built to prevent. She turns the camera on him and makes him talk. In Taubin’s account she has come to confront him about “messing around with her life while pretending to be completely detached from relationships.” Graham’s camera, which until now has recorded only women, is pointed at the man who held it.

And he answers. He tells her that he used to be, in his own account of himself, a pathological liar, that his lies destroyed his relationship with a woman named Elizabeth, and that he came back to Baton Rouge hoping to lay that to rest. Everything about the man with one key, the rule against lying, the tapes, the distance, turns out to have been built around that confession. He had made his honesty safe by making sure that he was never the one being asked.

This is the hinge of the film, and it is worth being exact about what changes. Until now the arrangement ran one way: the women spoke, he kept, and he was never heard. Ann does not refuse the arrangement. She completes it. She says her truth into the lens, as the others did, and then she makes the listener answer. For the first time the truth on a tape runs both ways, and for the first time it costs the man behind the camera something.

Then she moves close to him. Taubin describes her taking his hand and guiding it to her face, down her cheek, toward her neck. The tape ends, and the film cuts away; Taubin reads the cut as Soderbergh “refusing to indulge our voyeurism” and reminding us “of how easy it is to fall into the same trap that Graham did.” The woman who could not bear the thought of her husband’s touch is the one who decides, here, where a hand goes. That is this essay’s reading, not something the film states, but the pieces are arranged so that it is hard to miss: touch, when it comes, comes after the truth, at her own hand, and off the record.

That night Ann asks John for a divorce, and tells him what she has done. He drives to Graham’s flat, punches him, drags him outside, locks him out of his own home and watches Ann’s tape.

This has to be named plainly, because a film can make it feel like a turn of the plot, and it is not one. It is violence: a man hits another man and throws him out of his own home. And it is a violation of Ann’s privacy. She made that tape, and said what she said on it, for her own reasons and to one listener. John has nobody’s consent to watch it. He takes it by force, in a room he has seized, from a man he has just hit. Nothing she said becomes his because he watched it, and nothing about a marriage entitles a husband to it.

The scene of John at the screen leaves a viewer in that room with him, beside the man who took her words. It is an uncomfortable place to sit, and it should be. What a viewer does there is a choice. The scene can be watched as a revelation to enjoy, or it can be watched as what it is: a woman’s words reaching a man they were never said to.

This Library’s essay “Being Seen Is Not the Same as Being Available” put the whole difference into one word. The crucial difference, it argued, is authorship: a person who is looked at keeps a say in what the looking means, while an object can be inspected from every angle and has none. Ann’s tape is as clear a case of that difference as a film could give. In Graham’s room, with a camera she chose, the words were hers, and so was what they meant. In John’s hands the same tape, the same words and the same face become something else, because the authorship has been taken from her. Nothing on the tape changed. Who held it did.

The tape stops, and John is left staring at the screen in shock. Nothing in what he has taken is any use to him. A recorded truth is also a hazard: the tapes that let these women speak were, all along, something that could be stolen, and the film has just shown a theft.

Then John goes out to the porch, where Graham has been shut out, and tells him that he slept with Elizabeth while she and Graham were together. Then he leaves.

This Library’s essay “Closer, and Confessing Everything Without Being Known” offered a test for any confession: after the truth has been told, is the person who heard it more free, or less? It watched four people in London use the truth to lighten themselves, to punish and to win. John, on the porch, does all three in a sentence. Whether or not it is true, it is not told so that Graham will know where he stands. It is told to wound, at the moment it will wound most, by a man who has just taken by force a truth that was never his.

Set Ann’s questions beside it. She, too, made Graham tell a truth he had arranged his life to avoid telling. But she asked in order to know him, and she stayed to hear the answer. John tells in order to hurt, and walks away before it has landed. By that test Graham comes out of Ann’s tape freer than he went in, and is left on the porch less free. The same man and the same past, and two entirely different uses of the truth.

When John has gone, Graham destroys the camera and every tape. This essay will not invent a reason for him. It is enough to see what the act undoes. The shelf of names is gone. What those women said is no longer kept by anyone, and no one can ever again get into the room and play it. Whatever else the gesture is, it ends a way of hearing women that never required him to be heard.

Some time later John is summoned to his boss’s office; he has been neglecting his clients for the affair. The film lets that consequence arrive quietly, and so will this essay. Nothing is gained by enjoying it.

What carries more weight is a scene between two women. Ann goes to the bar where Cynthia works, and the sisters make peace.

It is easy to underrate, because it is quiet and because it comes after the scenes people remember. But look at what it is. The affair cost both of them, a man was at the centre of it, and the sisters’ story does not end with him. It ends at Cynthia’s place of work, on her ground, with Ann as the one who came. If Taubin is right that the affair was aimed at Ann, then the peace at the bar is not only about John. It is about whatever John was standing in for between them.

It is also the film’s other truthful word, and perhaps the harder one. Ann’s tape was said once, through a lens. Whatever passes between the sisters at the bar has their whole history behind it and the rest of their lives in front of it. That is a kind of truth no camera was ever going to hold.

Then the last scene. Ann goes to Graham’s house and sits down beside him on his porch. By the account in the American Film Institute’s catalogue, it is the porch John threw him onto. There is no camera. They hold hands, the catalogue says, as a light rain falls. She says she thinks it is going to rain. He tells her it already is.

It is the film’s last exchange, and it is an answer. Not a confession, not an interview, not a verdict on anything: a small correction, from the man sitting beside her under the same sky. She speaks, and he answers, and by now they have each told the other the truth. After a film full of talk into lenses, talk to a therapist and talk used as a blow, that is what it ends on, and it is enough.

The line can be heard as a joke, and it is a light one. It can be heard as a metaphor, perhaps too neat: what she has been waiting for has already begun. But it also does exactly what the tapes never did. The tapes held what was said and gave nothing back. The porch keeps nothing, and gives an answer. That is the difference this essay has been following from its first paragraph, between being recorded and being heard. The film ends there, side by side, before anything else has been decided.

This Library’s essay “Hope Springs, and the Night She Was No Longer the Only One Asking” followed another quiet marriage, one in which the wife does all the asking: down a hall, into a counsellor’s office, again and again, until the risk of being refused finally changes hands. It argued that the asking was never the problem; being the only one who ever risked a no was. And it was exact about what a counsellor can and cannot do. He can ask a husband anything. He cannot walk down the hall on the husband’s behalf.

Ann’s marriage has gone quiet the other way. She is not asking for anything. She does not want to be touched, and she seems to have stopped expecting her marriage to be a place where anything true is said. Her therapy is this film’s counsellor’s office, and it is shown plainly: a woman in a chair, talking about garbage, about happiness, about her husband’s touch, and a therapist who listens and observes that she worries about things she cannot control. What the therapist cannot do is say any of it to John. For most of the film, neither can she.

It is worth being careful about what this essay says about her. It offers no diagnosis and no explanation. A woman who does not want her husband to touch her has a no that is hers to have. It is not a symptom to be corrected for the marriage’s sake, and touch was never owed: a wedding obliges nobody’s body. On her tape she says that sex has never satisfied her, and that is her own account of her own life, not a medical fact about anyone. What the film shows is something else: that when touch does come, it comes after she has told the truth, to someone who answered, and at her own hand.

Two quiet marriages, then: one in which a wife keeps asking alone, one in which a wife has stopped. The Hope Springs essay found that its marriage could turn only when the other person took a turn at the door. Ann’s marriage does not turn. It ends, and she is the one who ends it, on the same day she has told the truth on tape. Sometimes a truth told at last is the start of a marriage’s second life. Sometimes it is the end of a marriage that had been over for a long time. The film gives Ann the second, and does not pretend it is a tragedy.

The film reached Japanese cinemas in December 1989, distributed by Nippon Herald Films, under a title that translates the original word for word. Its page on one of Japan’s large film sites describes Graham, roughly, as a tender-hearted pervert, and says that what he proposes is a sexual dialogue by video camera. Both phrases deserve a moment.

A tender-hearted pervert is a fair summary of the double pull the film puts on its audience. It asks us to like the man with the tapes, and it never lets us forget what the tapes are; this essay has tried to keep hold of both halves. Dialogue is the word the tapes have not yet earned. An interview in which one person always asks and the other always speaks is not a dialogue. It becomes one only when the camera turns.

A reader who grew up the elder of two sisters may recognise something in Ann that is easy to say in Japanese. There is an everyday phrase said to elder daughters, onēchan nan dakara, you are the big sister, after all, and it often arrives with an instruction to give way, to put up with things, to set an example. Ann is the proper one with the spotless house; Cynthia is the one who says it out loud. Neither role is a person, and both cost something. Whatever passes between them at the bar, it is a moment in which neither has to play her part.

A language learned later in life can work a little like Graham’s lens. In a study of more than a thousand people who speak several languages, the linguist Jean-Marc Dewaele found that swearwords and taboo words were felt to carry the most emotional force in the first language and less in each language learned after it, though how well people felt they knew a language, and how often they used it, also made a difference. Anyone in Japan whose days pass partly in a language that came later may know the effect: some things about sex and the body can be easier to say in it, when the words weigh less there. The same lightness can keep a listener at a distance, so that what was hard to say lands lighter than it was meant. Ann’s tape holds both halves of that. The lens let her say it, and it kept her listener out of reach until she turned it round.

And a reader who knows an engawa, the veranda of an older Japanese house where people sit side by side, neither quite indoors nor out, may find the last scene oddly familiar. Some things may be easier to say beside someone than across from them. The film ends with two people sitting that way.

Now the case against, made as fairly as possible, because some of it is strong.

First, Graham. This essay may have taken the film’s side about him more than it should. Take away the film’s sympathy and the story runs like this: a man collects women’s accounts of their sexual lives on tape, for his own private use, and the film rewards him at the end with the most guarded of them sitting beside him. The women on his shelf agreed to be taped, and the film treats their agreement as real; so has this essay. But agreeing to be taped does not settle what the arrangement is. He chose whom to ask, he asked the questions, he kept the tapes, and he was never on them. The listener who wants nothing is an old and flattering picture of a man, and the film may be indulging it. The narrowest answer available is that the film makes him pay for it: it is Ann who turns the camera, and he who destroys the tapes. That is a narrowing, not a refutation.

Second, and close to the first: Ann’s turn is completed beside a man. She asks for the divorce on her own, and she makes peace with her sister on her own; but the last image puts her on a porch next to the man with the camera, and a reader may fairly ask whether the story of a woman finding her voice has been folded, at the last minute, into the story of a woman finding a better man. This essay’s reading leans on the fact that she chose the porch, and that what passes there is an answer, not a rescue. A reader who finds the ending too tidy is not making a mistake.

Third, the film’s own form. David Sterritt, reviewing it for the Christian Science Monitor in 1989, thought its inventiveness vanished in the last half-hour, when “the characters just sit and talk to each other while the camera just sits and photographs them in a boring shot/reverse-shot pattern.” This essay has argued that sitting and talking is the film arriving at its subject, and Taubin, nearly thirty years later, saw the same climax as playing out “extremely quietly”, the camera cutting slowly from one face to the other. But Sterritt’s objection has a sharper edge than taste. A film made for a little over a million dollars, which, as Taubin notes, has barely any nudity and edits its sex scenes elliptically, may have found its thesis in its budget: talk is cheap to film. The argument that talk is more intimate than sex would then be, in part, a constraint dressed as a meaning.

Fourth, the period. Dare’s reading, that video was Graham’s prophylactic in the years of AIDS, suggests that the distance this essay has treated as a human question was at least partly a historical one. An essay written now can make universal what was partly an artefact of 1989.

Fifth, against the distinction itself. A truth told into a camera is still told to someone, and still shaped for them. Cynthia’s tape may have been, among other things, a provocation aimed at her sister. If every telling is also a performance, the line this essay draws between being recorded and being heard is less clean than it looks. The answer it would give is narrow: the difference lies less in how pure the words are than in what happens to them afterwards, whether they are kept or answered. But the objection stands.

Not that people should confess more. The film does not say that, and neither does this essay. What it takes is a distinction, and a few plain sentences that follow from it.

Being recorded and being heard are different. A recording holds what was said, and it can be played by whoever gets hold of it. A person who hears it can answer.

A listener who risks nothing is half of an intimacy. Graham, behind his camera, was that half: real enough that women spoke to him, and never more than half, because nobody could ask him anything. The other half began when someone did.

What a woman says about her own sexual life is hers, and it stays hers after she has said it to the person she chose. Nobody else acquires it by watching, by marriage or by force.

If the truest thing you have said about your body, or about your marriage, has only ever been said to a page, or to the dark, or to nobody at all, it was no less true for having no one to hear it, and it is still yours. The film’s only claim is about what happens once a truth is said: it can be kept, or it can be answered. Whether you ever say yours to anyone, and to whom, is yours to decide.

This is a reading of a film. It is not medical, psychological or legal guidance. It diagnoses no one, the characters included, and nothing in it is a statement about any reader or advice about any marriage, any body or any therapy. Where a question about touch or desire is a question about the body, the person to ask is a doctor; it is not a question a film, or an essay about one, can answer.

It rests on the film’s published record and synopses, the festival’s own records, the American Film Institute’s catalogue and the critics named in the text. Words in quotation marks are the critics’ own, the festival’s or the Library of Congress’s. Scene details beyond the published synopses are attributed to the account that gives them; where accounts differ, as they do about who switches the camera off at the end of Ann’s tape, the essay says only what they agree on.

The one research finding mentioned, on how much force taboo words carry in a first language and in languages learned later, comes from a peer-reviewed study of people who chose to answer a questionnaire, and describes how they rated words, not how anyone lives. No figure about anyone’s marriage or sexual life appears anywhere here.

No director, performer, critic, festival, library or publication named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

Is there something you have only ever been able to say to someone, or something, that could not answer? What made that the safe place to say it?

When you have told someone a truth about yourself, what happened to it afterwards: was it kept, used, or answered?

Who in your life has ever turned the question round, and let you hear something true from them in return?

If something you said in confidence once reached a person it was never meant for, whose act was that? Have you been carrying it as yours?

Which is harder for you: to say a true thing, or to stay and hear the answer?