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Schizopolis: Steven Soderbergh, an American independent

By David Walsh
2 December 1996

Steven Soderbergh has shown the ability in his films to look critically at social life, as well as individual desires and failings, including his own. The filmmaker was born in Georgia in 1963 and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Schizopolis is his fifth feature film and it represents something of a departure.

In sex, lies and videotape (1989), Soderbergh's only moneymaking film, the visit of a college friend affects the lives of a successful, selfish lawyer, his unhappy wife and her sister. The film, although a little abstract and cautious, hinted at some of the realities of America in the 1980s.

His second film, Kafka (1991), featured Jeremy Irons as a fictional character named Kafka doing soul-destroying clerical work for an insurance firm in Prague in 1919, who falls in with a band of anarchists and uncovers a plot to lobotomize the human race.

King of the Hill (1993), based on the memoirs of writer A.E. Hotchner, recounted the experiences of a 12-year-old boy living in a transient hotel in St. Louis during the Depression. The youth, whose mother is tubercular and father unreliable, must survive by his wits in a battle with poverty, hunger and loneliness.

In 1995 Soderbergh remade Robert Siodmak's 1948 film Criss Cross, a story of armed robbery and double-dealing, as The Underneath, set in the 1990s. It was during the shooting of this last film that Soderbergh, as he explains below, became unhappy with what he was doing and decided to make Schizopolis. Accordingly he assembled a small crew and shot the latter film in Baton Rouge from March to December 1995 on a budget minuscule by studio standards. Soderbergh performs two of the leading roles.

Schizopolis is an absurdist work. One of its plot strands concerns a quasireligious cult (suggestive of Scientology), which advertises on television, called Eventualism. The group is headed by one T. Azimuth Schwitters, who spouts banalities. Munson (Soderbergh) works as a functionary for Eventualism. Soderbergh plays Dr. Korchak as well, a dentist who is having an affair with Munson's wife. The film also follows the activities and ultimate psychic breakdown of Elmo Oxygen, an orange-suited exterminator in goggles who ends up attempting to assassinate Schwitters.

Some of the film's conceits and gags are more successful than others. His tyrannical employer has ordered the desperate Munson to produce a speech on short notice. Each time the increasingly enraged boss yells for him, Munson shouts out the name of some computer operation to explain the delay. "Saving!" "Spell-checking!" "Printing!"

Many of the film's strongest moments center on the relations between Munson and his wife, whose marriage has reached a dead end. So little do they have left to say to each other that they are reduced to speaking, literally, in verbal templates. When the wife arrives home, for example, the two acknowledge each other with, "Generic greeting." Before leaving she declares, "Imminent departure." At one point in the film Munson appears to be speaking in Japanese and, at another, in Italian.

In its portrait of disintegrating psyches, dissolving marriages, downsizing corporations and disoriented "believers," Schizopolis captures something of the current state of mind of the American middle class and lower middle class. The kind of unconscious and alienated behavior Soderbergh presents could only take place at a time when so many people are in the dark as to the forces operating in their lives.

In the film's final sequence Munson sits unmoving in a whirlwind of humanity as he outlines his future in a voice-over: in three years such and such will happen, in five years such and such, and, finally, in eight years' time he explains that he will be discovered frozen in Alaska and "successfully thawed. Until then I wait."

In a conversation, I asked Soderbergh whether Schizopolis had been the result of an immediate impulse or something that had cried out to be made for a long time.

He replied, "A little of both. I kept the side of me that could make Schizopolis sort of tied up and gagged in a corner for a long time. But it had reached the point when I was making The Underneath that I didn't like the film I was making, and I began to wonder whether or not I wanted to make films at all anymore, because I wasn't enjoying the process.

"I didn't feel I was making things that really reflected what was going on around me and around all of us, what I felt was happening to all of us emotionally as a result of the way American culture is, and I wanted to do something about that, that had something of that in it."

I suggested that he had succeeded in doing that. Soderbergh went on, "I feel that the result of where our society is--how it is destroying our language and using it to obscure instead of to illuminate, how we're bombarded by images and our sense of connection to a community and to other people is being torn apart--is that you end up with a guy [Munson] making faces in the mirror and masturbating in the bathroom of his office. I think that's sad, and horrible."

I said, "I'm curious as to what it was you found so difficult, or unbearable when you were making The Underneath."

He explained, "It was not ambitious, it was ideologically lazy. I just thought, if this is as ambitious as I'm going to be in making films, which is to basically do a slight variation on a genre film, then I've either got to quit or I've got to do something else with my filmmaking. This just isn't good enough. I expect more from other people and I have to expect more from myself."

I commented that it must be difficult to resist the pressures of the film industry at times.

"It isn't for me," Soderbergh responded. "I'm not interested in money, I'm not interested in amassing power, I'm not interested in courting acclaim, and I'm not interested in being a celebrity. So immediately that just puts me in another category. That's not better or worse, it just means that I'm immediately separated from most of the people in the film business.

"I still believe that this is an art form. We keep having these centennials for film. And every time I see something about that, I feel like saying: this is all we've done in a hundred years, this is as far as we've pushed it?"

I said, "I think there is more of a hunger for something interesting than people suspect."

"I think so too," he agreed. "When you talk to people, people around you in the town where you live, the first thing out of their mouths is--why are movies so bad? Why isn't anybody making anything interesting? All I can do is not contribute to that, at the end of the day.

"We've had varied responses to Schizopolis. When you make a movie like that you can't expect everybody to follow. You're the artist, you're supposed to be ahead of the curve, that's your job, to be out there excavating and bringing things back. You can't expect everybody to love it, so I don't.

"I split my time between Baton Rouge and a small town in Virginia. This is what I sense around me. It's very tense. The boiling point just keeps dropping. You end up with people like Elmo Oxygen who to me is the combination of a walking id and an Arthur Brenner, whose psychosis has become so externalized that I think he's hallucinating a lot of this. When he reaches the breaking point his thing is to make a connection to someone like Schwitters whom he feels is the center of the universe, when he realizes that he isn't. It's kind of scary."

I mentioned the obvious satirical reference in the film to Scientology.

"I don't find Scientology any stranger than I find any other religion," Soderbergh commented. "They happen to be--along with the Mormons, I think--the only religion that advertises on television. If you're going to have one of those guys, you've got to use that imagery, because we all know it.

"I'm fascinated by people like the Schwitters character who I think have influence only because people are so unhappy in their lives that they're reaching for anything. Here's a guy who clearly is just spouting sophistry. But it sure sounds like something. I swear to God, if we put a mock-up Eventualism book on a shelf we could sell it.

"The level of discourse in the country is so absurdly low. I've just been in Europe for a month. Everybody likes to talk about movies everywhere, but there's not the obsession with sports over there that there is here. It doesn't dominate the culture. So as a result people talk a lot more about politics, or what's going on. The United States seems so strange from a distance."

"You've obviously been courted by the film industry. What conclusions did you draw about that world?" I asked. "That Hollywood isn't a place that interests me very much," he remarked. "And that I've been very fortunate to have only made things that I've wanted to make. My first film was successful enough to buy me the opportunity to make the films I've made.

"The perception of my integrity is still a currency in Hollywood which is lucky for me. None of the films I've made since sex, lies have made any money for the people who financed them or for me. Being a cult failure is actually a great thing because nobody cares what you're doing. There's a lot of freedom in it. If you always know you're working below a certain level, way below the radar, there's a lot of freedom."

"By using the name Schwitters," I asked Soderbergh, "did you mean to draw attention to Kurt Schwitters [Dadaist poet of the 1920s]?"

"Absolutely," he said. "When I was writing the script I read through all of the material that I had on the Dada and the Surrealist movements, which I think are fascinating and fun. A great combination of farce and politics, both politics in the ordinary sense of the word and sexual politics, just anarchy.

Because Schizopolis was at the same time my impression of five years of marriage in which I watched and participated in the destruction of communication and language, which is a really terrible thing to go through. It's unfortunate that, at the end of the movie, they've just gone too far, you know, they've killed the language and they can't get it back. And that's too bad. I've seen it happen."

Soderbergh made a final point: "Another thing we've lost track of is that art is a process. I remember reading Todd McCarthy's review of Schizopolis in Variety. It was disappointing. Essentially his point was: why would the maker of sex, lies and King of the Hill feel compelled to make this? And I thought, how can you be that clueless about the artistic process.

"The freedom to experiment and fail is being taken away. I was lucky because I had the success first and then I've had the freedom to fail. These other people, if they fail out of the gate, forget it. John Ford made 20 movies before he made one that we know. We don't have that luxury any more. It's a shame, because there's such incredible drama out there. Not the TV movie drama, but complicated and passionate people going through a difficult and weird time, a really weird time."