A Film Canon

American Gigolo rediscovers Marx's definition of commodity fetishism as a cinematographic manifesto, poising the 'cinematic' at that moment between the audience's awareness of "the objective form of something outside the eye" and their prescience of "the subjective excitation of the optic nerve." Paul Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey frame high-end gigolo Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) with an almost impossible touchscape, transforming sex into just another iteration of a pervasive, velvety caress between surfaces and other surfaces. As the one object that can't ever be an object of spectatorship, the spectator's eye becomes the privileged surface upon which this imaginary relation is played out, implicating the cinematic experience itself in a pleasure so unbearable that it has been largely disavowed by criticism, awash with accusations of 'self-indulgent' or 'irresponsible' aestheticism. Equally unsettling is the way in which this positions Kaye as object of the audience's desire, our affective response to him as another subject disarmed by our optic response to him as pure celluloid, until the act of looking segues into the elusive requirements of his clientele. Despite Kaye's insistence that bringing older, sophisticated women to the point of orgasm is the very apex of his craftsmanship, it feels as if his services ultimately lie in the crystalline hush that his soft stare leaves in its wake, and the transcendent austerity that it casts over Schrader's baroque palette. It's a wonderful, haunting effort to aestheticise a relation that is both "perceptible and imperceptible", through the unspeakable, pursuant gaze that drives Schrader's ceaseless pans, while just preventing them from synthesizing into an orienting or stabilising pattern of tracking-shots.