Steven Soderbergh on Airports, Alcoholics Anonymous, Karaoke and Assholes
In July, Neil Young moderated a talk with Steven Soderbergh at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The video version of the talk was not available online at the time, but it was written about in IndieWire, and I wrote a short post about it, sharing my favourite quote from that report:
“Movies that are designed to entertain you are as legitimate and necessary as movies that are designed to illuminate you or activate you. And my only demand from a movie that is strictly trying to entertain me is that it be intelligent, and that it not feel like single-use plastic.”
On September 18, the audio version of the talk was uploaded on KVIFF.TV, so I finally got to listen to the entire session which is 90 minutes long. Neil Young is one of the best film moderators out there, so the questions were well researched and smart, and Soderbergh’s answers were thoughtful and informative.
But the part that stood out for me the most is Soderbergh’s reply to Neil Young’s questions (starting at the 64th minute of the talk) about what is happening in America, concerns over the upcoming US election and the increased state of people’s apathy.
Soderbergh’s reply reflected on human nature, existing spaces that function because humans cooperate and follow the rules (airports and Alcoholic Anonymous), and spaces where people can connect immediately with one another (karaoke), and “a certain percentage of people on this planet that are just assholes” who are “disproportionately disruptive”.
Steven Soderbergh is good people.
I transcribed that part of the talk which you can read below, and you can listen to the entire talk here.
Neil Young: Two last questions before we throw it up into the audience. One is kind of a big one, which is basically what is happening with America at the moment? We have July the 4th coming up, we've just had the debate last week, which seemed to trigger a kind of earthquake around the world. I think your films are political. Another myth is that Steven Soderbergh doesn't make political films is obviously absurd. K Street, your TV show is about Washington lobbyists. You've done directly political films, I would say Bubble is a political film. It's about what it's like to live in America and to be a worker in America.
Another thing that you said was, how do you stop people falling into apathy, it's just so horrible, we can't do anything, it's overwhelming. Do you feel at the moment that it's harder than ever to have optimism about America, about the project of America, because it could be heading for a very dark episode come later this year.
Steven Soderbergh: I guess I'm not thinking so much specifically about what is happening in America as I am thinking about what is it in human beings that have led us to the situations that we're witnessing all over the world right now. It's clear we are very clever, but I'm wondering if we're actually smart.
We're living in a moment in which, in the aggregate and as a percentage, there are more displaced people in the world right now than there's ever been before. Why is this? Part of it is, I think we're convinced that the solution is a new piece of technology to our problems. There's going to be this new piece of technology and that's going to solve things, it's going to solve us. That's never been true, and it never I think will be true.
It's clear that when we develop the ability to speak and write, when language developed, when our brains evolved to be able to create language, as soon, as that happened all of this is inevitable. And so the question is, is there another iteration of Homo sapiens in which we can push past the threat assessment mechanism that we have that's still on the savannas of Africa, because that's how we're behaving. Ultimately, we're still dealing with in group, out group, tribal issues. We're the only creatures on this planet that will kill over the idea of something, as opposed to a physical threat that could kill us in the moment.
I just wonder what is it going to take to get us out of this cycle? I was just having a conversation with some people this morning. My solution is to try and analyse large scale human endeavour in which cooperation is necessary and it works. What can we extract from those examples to apply to a sort of sociopolitical context. For instance, airports. Why do airports work? They're incredibly complex. You have people from all over the world that speak all kinds of languages, and they basically work. They get you from here to there, for the most part, without you dying in a fireball. So why is everybody willing to submit to what the airport wants? Why do we all buy in to the airport? I'm not sure.
The other thing is, Alcoholics Anonymous. This is completely decentralised, it's not even an organisation. There's no money involved, there's no titles, and of the people that I've run into in my life who are confronting those kinds of issues, it's the thing that works. Why? What is it about that that enables it to be all over the world, and the rules are understood and adhered to by everybody who participates? What can we learn from just those two things that we can apply in another context?
So that's what I'm trying to focus on. Is not a specific situation that I know I can't solve, but could I come up with a piece of art or a way of talking or looking at things that could sort of unlock a feeling or an idea in somebody's mind that could push things forward. I'll tell you the other thing I've seen that connects people faster than any other experience I can think of, karaoke.
There's some sort of empathy hack that happens in a karaoke space that I think is totally unique and totally legitimate. Part of it has to do with the power of music. Music lights up your brain in a way that nothing else lights up your brain. It goes to all the sections of your brain. So we clearly have a very primal connection to music.
I've watched when we were doing Contagion, we had the wrap party in Hong Kong, and it took place at a karaoke bar. So you had 100 people who'd come from the States, you had about 150 people who were local, so there was a pretty significant language barrier. In 2 songs, that whole room was fused together, and I think it's because if you're the person up there performing song, you can feel coming at you the support of people, because they know what it's like to be up there and so they're giving…the love is coming from the room, and it makes you feel good, and it makes you happy.
If I were to coordinate the G7 Summit, I'd go, each one of these leaders at some point during this summit has to get up in a karaoke context and sing something. The vulnerability of it is what connects the room. You know what I mean. And so…I look at that, how do we use that? How do we take that and use it as a way of connecting people.
Honestly, I thought I was completely talking out of my shorts when I was positing this theory…about karaoke, and then I read this article about this Japanese scientist who's the world's expert on the Medusa jellyfish, which is immortal and doesn't die…The scientist at a certain point in the article talks about the fact that he goes at least 2 times a week to do karaoke, and it keeps him in this sort of positive mental space, and helps him in his work and in his life. And I thought, okay, well, that guy is legit, and he's witnessed what I've witnessed, and is sort of put a name to it.
So the idea of of utilising that, I had a project that I was developing that I called the Brain Project, that never got made, but part of the research was talking to people in the cognition field, neurosciences, talking about how the brain works. How do we make decisions? Why do we make such irrational decisions? Why do we feel the pain of a loss more than the good feelings of success? Where does that come from? What are the roots of that? One of the other questions that I asked every one of them was, in what state of mind, what state of being is a person most likely to alter a deeply held belief? All of them said when they're laughing, that there's something about humour that opens people up and they're receptive in a way that they're not in any other state of mind.
So again, how do, how do we harness that and turn that into something more than just entertainment? It's fun to laugh, obviously. I feel like we have the seeds of these. It's like the equivalent of like herbal medicine that people for a long time thought it was bullshit, and then it turns out over the last few decades they've been able to technically show what certain herbs actually have positive effects.
Humour, music, karaoke, airports, AA, what connection that we can analyse and put out there? I don't know.
NY: Could you do all of those in one film - airports, karaoke, AA?
SS: I'm thinking about. But the other component, it also starts with an A strangely, and it sort of circles back to what we were discuss discussing at the beginning, which is the problem of assholes.
There's a certain percentage of people on this planet that are just assholes, and they are disproportionately disruptive. We don't have a mechanism to really deal with them unless they're literally law breakers. But a lot of them aren't. They just make your life miserable, and there's no hack for that. There seems to be no solve. It's another aspect of this idea that I'm trying to put together of what, how do we deal with this? You can be throwing the best party that's ever existed, 50 of your closest friends and family. It's all going great. One asshole shows up, and the cops are there.
There's no other situation that's analogous to this. There's no positive situation that's analogous to this. So I really haven't figured that one out. Here's an open question, is it fair to discriminate against assholes? I'm just asking…yellow cards? Do we give them yellow cards? I wish I knew.
NY: The problem is not that they're law breakers. It's when they're lawmakers, because we do have a lot of assholes making laws at the moment. Which is the big problem.