Steven Soderbergh has always walked a fine line: after he made his name as an indie auteur with 1989's Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he spent a decade making experimental box-office failures before climbing out of the art house ghetto with 1998's Out of Sight.
In the years since, he's found studio and Academy Award success with Traffic and Erin Brockovich as well as box-office victory with Ocean's Eleven and its sequels, but still found time to experiment. For every movie that revolves around George Clooney's handsomeness, Soderbergh will make a small film for himself, an indie with a non-professional cast (Bubble) or a documentary about the late Spalding Gray. As a result he seems beset by criticism from all corners, be film-festival intellectuals that consider him a sell out, or armchair moviegoers that have no interest in a two-part, four-and-a-half hour biopic of Che Guevara.
Now he can't even get people to agree about how hot sneezing is.
Contagion, opening this Friday nationwide, marks his latest “studio” effort, with a cast of several major stars (Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet) and a sixty million dollar budget. The film tracks a deadly airborne virus as it threatens humanity. It all begins, as seen in the trailer above, with Gwenyth Paltrow sneezing in China (and later making a terrifying, poster-worthy face).
The internet being what it is, a Gawker post inevitably appeared last Thursday entitled “Sneeze Fetishists Divided Over Sexiness of Contagion.” Apparently there are enough people who are aroused by the act of sternutation that they have their own internet forums—although there isn't a specific term for the fetish itself as yet (“Nasaphilia,” a fetish for noses, doesn't quite apply, does it? The blanket term “paraphilia,” which just means an attraction to uncommon objects or behaviors, will have to do).
These forum users, while they of course agree on the basic appeal of sneezing, are concerned that the effect might be mollified by the subject matter. Who can concentrate on the sneezing with all of the mass death going on?
Soderbergh just can't please anybody, it seems. The sneeze-fetishists represent just another corner of niche cinema that worries that he'll compromise himself for The Man, or as one forum user puts it: “Knowing Hollywood, they will still find a way to cut all the sneezes out of this movie.”
It's no worse than George Clooney fans that don't understand why this space movie (Solaris) is so darn slow. Small wonder that Soderbergh is allegedly giving up the director's chair to become a painter.
Art critics don't second guess anything, right?
