Soderbergh’s Great Celebration of Perverse Cinema

These days Steven Soderbergh is a reliable mainstream director who works most often on heists and slickly-constructed thrillers, as on 2025’s immaculate John Le Carré exercise, Black Bag. It’s hard to remember that 35 years ago when he burst onto the scene, it was as an indie auteur, celebrated for his quirky personal vision, the antithesis of Hollywood genre product. I sometimes think that Soderbergh’s career didn’t deliver on his early promise. Be that as it may, 1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape remains a gloriously odd, perfect little film.

Part of its greatness is in the performances Soderbergh gets from his actors. Andie MacDowell never again captured the nuance or the intensity she displays as Ann Bishop Mullany, the self-conscious, determinedly repressed housewife who haltingly finds her own sensuality and rage. Laura San Giacomo as Ann’s sister Cynthia is screen-meltingly sexy as she figures out that maybe the most important thing to her isn’t sex. Peter Gallagher is a spectacularly oleaginous villain as John, Ann’s lying lawyer husband. And James Spader’s nervous performance as wounded, too honest hippie beta male Graham Dalton is both perversely open and openly perverse. The breathless quickness with which he admits that he records women talking about sex to get off, as if he’s afraid that he won’t tell the truth if he gives himself the chance to lie, is one of the indelible moments of 1980s cinema.

The obsession with film is so blatantly self-referential it feels like Soderbergh stripping himself as naked as the character. Graham’s impotent; he can only achieve orgasm by talking to women about their sex lives—porn is insufficiently interactive. He records the women’s responses for later masturbatory use.

This means that Graham’s a filmmaker, like Soderbergh. He’s also a compulsive liar, which is why he always tells the truth—though telling the truth is also a powerful seduction technique. The dialogue in which his honesty leads him to reveal his video obsession to Ann is a masterpiece of startling inevitability. The craft Soderbergh would later bring to his thrillers is here deployed to much more individual effect.

Soderbergh is implying (or outright stating) that filmmakers are sexual deviants, and that their specific sexual deviance is an honesty born out of a fascination with lies. The forthright artist/pervert is arguably messed up and pitiful—but he looks pretty good compared to John, who cheats on one sister with another, and who’s incessant lies destroy his marriage and his career. Graham’s art—which is also his sexual hangup—helps both Ann and Cynthia to break up with liar John and build a more honest relationship with each other. And it’s Ann turning the camera on Graham which helps him get past his own self-loathing and dishonesty. Perverse artists solve other people’s problems, but then they need another perverse artist to solve theirs.

Soderbergh’s not very buried suggestion that the solution to hollow soul-deadening capitalism is sexy film is a bit tongue in cheek, maybe, but it also seems sincere. And you could argue that he’s stayed true to this scuzzy, honest vision throughout his career. While he’s gotten more mainstream, he’s never stopped putting a lot of sex in his movies, from The Girlfriend Experience to Magic Mike. Black Box includes a scene of a man interrogating a woman about her masturbation habits—either a deliberate nod to Soderbergh’s debut or an indication that his fantasies remain even decades later. And sex or no sex, Soderbergh has never stopped making movies. Graham may have broken his camera, but Soderbergh didn’t put his down.

Graham destroys his camera after John breaks into his house, knocks Graham unconscious, and then watches Ann’s tape. Graham promised all the women he recorded that no one else would ever see their videos; John’s made him a liar, and Graham loathes liars. The only way he can be honest, the only way he can keep his promise to the women he recorded, is to smash all his tapes. If he wants an honest relationship, he’ll have to find a different way—perhaps, the film suggests, with Ann.

The film ends with Graham’s impotence and perversion cured. He may even have gotten a job. He’s not the liar John is, but the movie’s happy ending does, somewhat incongruously, depend on him becoming more like his rival.

Maybe Soderbergh had to move on, too. Once you have a big hit, you’re not exactly an indie filmmaker, and perhaps the honest thing to do at that point is make non-indie films. His career has been more normal and John-like than his deliberately warped debut. That doesn’t make him a lawyer or a liar. Watching the marvelous Sex, Lies, and Videotape again though, it’s a little disappointing.