Steven Soderbergh, getting back to his independent film roots, is creating a series of six films shot entirely using high definition technology and releasing them simultaneously on DVD, television and in theaters.
The goal of the experiment is to prove a point in the film industry. In order to increase profits, Soderbergh is showing that the most money can be made by giving consumers the option of how they want to view the film. In reality, it is causing film teachers across the nation to roll their eyes at Soderberg for undermining the common theory that people must be in a dark room to experience a film adequately. Otherwise, film students might not have to attend so many five-hour classes.
“Bubble” is the first in a series that tells the story of three people, working in a doll factory in the Ohio River Valley, whose lives are disrupted by a murder. The cast is composed completely of real people, not actors, proving that Soderbergh went to film school and studied the early Russian film theory of Sergei Eisenstein. He believes that real actors come with baggage and in order to get reality, one needs to eliminate audiences’ expectations.
Blurring the line between reality and fiction even more, writer Coleman Hughes incorporated stories from the actors’ lives into the screenplay. The main character, Martha, played by Debbie Doebereiner, is a lonely middle-aged woman whose only true human connection is with Kyle (Dustin James Ashley), a young anti-social teenager who also works in the factory. Life at the factory is fine between Martha and Kyle until the arrival of a new worker, Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins).
The high definition (HD) technique gives the film the feel of a low-budget documentary. “Bubble” rides on the coattails of the reality television craze that became the addiction of many Americans. In a society in which we have become increasingly isolated by technology, the feel of human reality in television and film has become essential to provide the human contact we all crave. The characters in “Bubble” really capture this isolation, as they all spend their days working with machines. When the characters have human contact, it is only surface level, as no one expresses the frustration of their solitude.
Despite the slow pace of the film, it is mesmerizing. It puts you in a trance of vicarious living that makes the time spent watching it, which is only 73 minutes, seem like five. Although, the dolls do not play a vital role in the film, you cannot escape correlating the hollowness of the dolls with the hollowness of people making them. In one scene, Martha pushes the doll’s head in and it inflates again, showing that like the world the characters inhabit, nothing will change. Even though the murder takes place and temporarily pops the bubble the characters live in, they soon return to the state of mundane normality.
One of the more important things the film demonstrates is the reality of the American dream for many Americans. Instead of depicting a story about those who rise above minimum wage jobs they have no passion for, it shows the reality that a job is a means for survival and often lacks upward mobility. The characters have been drained by the capitalist system and are the drones of the industrial world where even the smallest joys do not seem to make up for their boring, repetitive days.
The message “Bubble” conveys is the need to reprioritize our society and move away from material gain and success toward the understanding that it is our relationships with others that should be valued above all else.
In our current cold society in which everyone has a wall of technology surrounding them and many people provide the menial labor for the capitalist society, “Bubble” proves that it is time to tear down the walls we have built and begin to connect again, human to human, before the bubble becomes permanent.
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