Soderbergh’s directorial and screenwriting debut opens with Graham’s arrival in Baton Rouge, where he plans to stay with an old college friend, John (Peter Gallagher), and his wife, Ann (Andie MacDowell), until he finds an apartment. John is a callous, wealthy lawyer carrying on an affair with Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), his sister-in-law. Ann, meanwhile, is a housewife who applies her pent-up mental energy to neurotic guilt about the world’s ills. She finds in the sensitive, soft-spoken Graham a welcome alternative to her domineering husband and a glimpse of life outside of her stifling bourgeois household.
But Ann, who—by her own admission—only tolerates sex and has never had an orgasm, is disturbed when she discovers what Graham describes as his “personal project.” He records women, consensually, talking in depth about their sexual histories and desires. These tapes, which Graham readily admits to using as masturbatory fodder, comprise the entirety of his sexual expression. “I can’t get an erection in the presence of another person,” he tells Ann over lunch on his second day in town, “so, for all practical purposes, I’m impotent.”
I’m usually hesitant to describe anyone cisgender and heterosexual—be they a real person or a fictional character—as queer. I think it weakens the word, stripping away its history and stretching it into meaninglessness. But there are challenges to sexual and cultural normativity, in fictional stories as well as in real lives, that can only be described as queer, even when they don’t involve gay or trans identity. Graham, a disruptor of heterosexual stasis and a benign pervert, poses such a challenge.
"Graham’s role, the one he shares with Manic Pixies and other bringers of catalyst, was particularly welcome in the swath of ’80s cinema concerned with toppling yuppie supremacy."
Graham’s role, the one he shares with Manic Pixies and other bringers of catalyst, was particularly welcome in the swath of ’80s cinema concerned with toppling yuppie supremacy. Like the title character (Madonna) in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Lulu (Melanie Griffith) in Something Wild (1986), and the bizarre women (Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr) populating Lower Manhattan in After Hours (1985), Graham’s duty is to breeze into a yuppie’s comfortable life and turn it inside out, revealing its essential emptiness. “How do you like being married?” Graham asks Ann soon after settling into a taupe armchair in her tidy living room. “What about it do you like?” he asks, gently pushing her lukewarm positive answer. Her response is as devoid of passion as the room’s muted palette. “We own this house,” she tells him, “and John was just made junior partner.” While Ann gratefully accepts the frigid stability her wealthy husband offers her, Graham embraces precarity. “Right now I have one key,” he explains, discussing his housing plans. “Everything I own is in the car. I like that. If I get an apartment, that’s two keys.”
A male drifter with voyeuristic tendencies, Graham has the potential to come across as a creep or a threat, but the film never casts Graham’s gentleness into doubt. Indeed, Ann’s unease at discovering his project is fueled entirely by her own troubled relationship to sex. When her sororal foil Cynthia—an unabashed pursuer of sexual pleasure—learns about the videotapes, she gleefully agrees to Graham’s offer to film her. Neither is ashamed of the tape, or of its purpose. Graham answers with a simple, unequivocal “yes” when Cynthia asks him, “Is this how you get off or something? Taping women talking about their sexual experiences?” Though his video proclivities are a substitute for the physical contact he can’t achieve, Graham isn’t depicted as any more troubled in his erotic life than any of the other protagonists. “I see John and Cynthia and you,” he tells Ann during the film’s climax, “and I feel comparatively healthy.”
"Spader, as Graham, is lithe and doe-eyed, his features soft and his hair cascading in dirty blond waves."
I must admit that for all of Graham’s fundamental challenges to the normativity and bourgeois aspirations of the other protagonists’ world, the queerness of his character also comes down to something both simpler and more ineffable than anything Soderbergh could work into the script or his direction. It’s the epicene beauty that Spader possessed during his heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. Spader, as Graham, is lithe and doe-eyed, his features soft and his hair cascading in dirty blond waves. His quiet voice and tentative line delivery carry that understated androgyny further. Spader and his character are a testament to the work that casting alone can perform. In the body of a different actor—at least another cis man—Graham would lack the requisite femininity so vital to his character.
The disruptive misfit sometimes known as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is often, perhaps even inherently, queer-coded. After all, to be queer—whether one looks at the term from an academic or a personal perspective—is to be a perpetual outsider, alternately rejecting heteronormative structures and striving to fit into them. Graham does both; though he unsettles Ann and John’s assumptions about the security and comfort of their lifestyles, he remains guarded about his own personal life. His roving, itinerant path leaves him little space for strong bonds to form, and he is reluctant to allow them. His interactions are measured, careful, like those of someone practiced in the art of keeping secrets. This, too, Graham shares with queers. Like us, he is constantly constructing himself, even as he deconstructs everyone around him.
Soderbergh’s directorial and screenwriting debut opens with Graham’s arrival in Baton Rouge, where he plans to stay with an old college friend, John (Peter Gallagher), and his wife, Ann (Andie MacDowell), until he finds an apartment. John is a callous, wealthy lawyer carrying on an affair with Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), his sister-in-law. Ann, meanwhile, is a housewife who applies her pent-up mental energy to neurotic guilt about the world’s ills. She finds in the sensitive, soft-spoken Graham a welcome alternative to her domineering husband and a glimpse of life outside of her stifling bourgeois household.
But Ann, who—by her own admission—only tolerates sex and has never had an orgasm, is disturbed when she discovers what Graham describes as his “personal project.” He records women, consensually, talking in depth about their sexual histories and desires. These tapes, which Graham readily admits to using as masturbatory fodder, comprise the entirety of his sexual expression. “I can’t get an erection in the presence of another person,” he tells Ann over lunch on his second day in town, “so, for all practical purposes, I’m impotent.”
I’m usually hesitant to describe anyone cisgender and heterosexual—be they a real person or a fictional character—as queer. I think it weakens the word, stripping away its history and stretching it into meaninglessness. But there are challenges to sexual and cultural normativity, in fictional stories as well as in real lives, that can only be described as queer, even when they don’t involve gay or trans identity. Graham, a disruptor of heterosexual stasis and a benign pervert, poses such a challenge.
"Graham’s role, the one he shares with Manic Pixies and other bringers of catalyst, was particularly welcome in the swath of ’80s cinema concerned with toppling yuppie supremacy."
Graham’s role, the one he shares with Manic Pixies and other bringers of catalyst, was particularly welcome in the swath of ’80s cinema concerned with toppling yuppie supremacy. Like the title character (Madonna) in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Lulu (Melanie Griffith) in Something Wild (1986), and the bizarre women (Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr) populating Lower Manhattan in After Hours (1985), Graham’s duty is to breeze into a yuppie’s comfortable life and turn it inside out, revealing its essential emptiness. “How do you like being married?” Graham asks Ann soon after settling into a taupe armchair in her tidy living room. “What about it do you like?” he asks, gently pushing her lukewarm positive answer. Her response is as devoid of passion as the room’s muted palette. “We own this house,” she tells him, “and John was just made junior partner.” While Ann gratefully accepts the frigid stability her wealthy husband offers her, Graham embraces precarity. “Right now I have one key,” he explains, discussing his housing plans. “Everything I own is in the car. I like that. If I get an apartment, that’s two keys.”
A male drifter with voyeuristic tendencies, Graham has the potential to come across as a creep or a threat, but the film never casts Graham’s gentleness into doubt. Indeed, Ann’s unease at discovering his project is fueled entirely by her own troubled relationship to sex. When her sororal foil Cynthia—an unabashed pursuer of sexual pleasure—learns about the videotapes, she gleefully agrees to Graham’s offer to film her. Neither is ashamed of the tape, or of its purpose. Graham answers with a simple, unequivocal “yes” when Cynthia asks him, “Is this how you get off or something? Taping women talking about their sexual experiences?” Though his video proclivities are a substitute for the physical contact he can’t achieve, Graham isn’t depicted as any more troubled in his erotic life than any of the other protagonists. “I see John and Cynthia and you,” he tells Ann during the film’s climax, “and I feel comparatively healthy.”
"Spader, as Graham, is lithe and doe-eyed, his features soft and his hair cascading in dirty blond waves."
I must admit that for all of Graham’s fundamental challenges to the normativity and bourgeois aspirations of the other protagonists’ world, the queerness of his character also comes down to something both simpler and more ineffable than anything Soderbergh could work into the script or his direction. It’s the epicene beauty that Spader possessed during his heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. Spader, as Graham, is lithe and doe-eyed, his features soft and his hair cascading in dirty blond waves. His quiet voice and tentative line delivery carry that understated androgyny further. Spader and his character are a testament to the work that casting alone can perform. In the body of a different actor—at least another cis man—Graham would lack the requisite femininity so vital to his character.
The disruptive misfit sometimes known as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is often, perhaps even inherently, queer-coded. After all, to be queer—whether one looks at the term from an academic or a personal perspective—is to be a perpetual outsider, alternately rejecting heteronormative structures and striving to fit into them. Graham does both; though he unsettles Ann and John’s assumptions about the security and comfort of their lifestyles, he remains guarded about his own personal life. His roving, itinerant path leaves him little space for strong bonds to form, and he is reluctant to allow them. His interactions are measured, careful, like those of someone practiced in the art of keeping secrets. This, too, Graham shares with queers. Like us, he is constantly constructing himself, even as he deconstructs everyone around him.