The Dance

Adapted from the New York magazine article “The Hustlers at Scores,” Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers is heavily based on the true story of a group of former exotic dancers who took to ripping of stock brokers by seducing them, spiking their drinks and then running up their credit cards at the strip club where they used to work. Jennifer Lopez’s Ramona, the group’s kingpin, first enters the screen glittering in a barely-there outfit, cast against the pitch black of the club. The little that she’s wearing makes her seem more naked than if she wore nothing at all. Audiences must fill in the blanks — it’s the power of a glimpse, a taste, a tease.

One of the first images the term “film noir” conjures is the character with their face partially obscured by the shadows. By draping some of the image in darkness, noir’s pioneers found that they could draw attention all the more effectively to what they wanted viewers to see. The pale skin of a smooth leg slipping out of a red dress. The murderous intent on the face beneath a fedora’s brim. The pearl handle of a revolver, only half-concealed.

As Ramona dances in Hustlers, the neon lights that back the stage pierce the darkness and shatter into a million points across her body. Brightness cast against blackness.

From the moment Ramona first appears, Hustlers announces itself as a new addition to the neo-noir cannon — a film about bright lights in dark places.

The primary lesson of noir is that you can’t really see the world in the daylight. The surface layer has all been too prettified. Politicians makes speeches about virtue while peddling in vice. Corporations dictate the world order from beneath a market-tested veneer of responsibility and care. Strangers hide awful intentions behind polite smiles. After the fact, their neighbours talk about how nice and quiet they seemed.

You can’t see anything real in the daylight, you have to descend into the night and the nightclubs, the backrooms and the back alleys; into the subconscious, subliminal places where the primal stuff resides, the real driving forces — all the places where the dark is thick enough for the pretences to be dropped, for real desire to come out… for our real values to make themselves known.

Hustlers is about the women who worked in one of these places; the women who saw men spent the night tearing after quick highs and the day bulldozing the world’s financial infrastructure, all with the same reckless, self-centred intent. The women of Hustlers are classic noir heroes, trapped in a situation they didn’t create.

Like all great noir heroes, they swing their full weight into the fight they can’t win. Their triumphs are small; pinpricks in the vast black abyss, all the more beautiful for the darkness around them.

The Game

“It’s all a striptease” Ramona tells Destiny (Constance Wu) her friend, protégé and business partner, “You have people tossing the money and people doing the dance.”

Each iteration of noir has emerged from the kind of large-scale crisis that shatters faith in the world’s power structures. The hard-boiled detective tales that were initially taken to the screen came largely from the Great Depression, when the bottom first fell out of America’s bold new future. The adaptations arrived in the 40s and 50s, as the Depression gave way to World War II, and the world tore itself apart for the second time in half a century. Soon after, the Cold War hung the spectre of nuclear annihilation above the world’s heads while they continued to go about their daily business, and neo-noir was born.

It’s not just the lives these events cost at the time, but the scars they left upon the public psyche. Each of these catastrophes ripped back the curtain and revealed that there was no wise man guiding the world’s progress — just frauds and conmen driven by base desires, using smoke and mirrors to lend a grandeur to their greed.

For Ramona and Destiny, it’s the 2008 financial crisis which tips them over the edge: another world event so traumatising that a sub-genre of cinema has been built to try and account for it. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street immersed itself in the mad hedonism of a booming financial sector built on something which is fundamentally “fugazi…fairy dust… not on the elemental chart… not fucking real.” Two years later, Adam McKay’s The Big Short took a clear-eyed, scalpel-clean approach to satirising the greed and ignorance of those who gleefully primed the bomb.

Years after their initial meeting, Hustlers’ Ramona and Destiny catch up in a diner and reckon with the havoc the crisis has wrought on their lives. Destiny describes a dream in which she is in the back seat of a car, moving forward with increasing speed. She thinks everything is fine until she looks towards the front seat and finds that “no one was driving the car.”

This was the realisation that rocked the world in 2008. No one was really in control. For decades, we were hurtling towards disaster with no one at the wheel. We didn’t realise it until the crash.

The 2008 crisis was always a neo-noir story waiting to be told, mostly because of how it ended. For all their cynicism, the movies of classic noir were shackled by the Production Code, which forced them to resolve their stories with virtue triumphing over vice. Unbound and free to tell its stories as it wanted to, neo-noir provided tales of unredeemed evil and unpunished crimes.

The dust from the 2008 crash cleared and no one went to jail. No one was held accountable, and nothing was done to ensure that it did not happen all over again. The lesson, broadcast out to all the world, was unignorably clear.

“The game is rigged and it does not reward people who play by the rules” says Ramona in Hustlers.

The Danger

Ramona, Destiny and their group understand the game. In the years before the crash, they make a good living dancing for Wall Street boys eager to spend other people’s money to make themselves feel important. In Ramona’s introductory routine, she offers them a domineering glamour queen, snapping them to attention with the thunderclap of her heels. She offers them a wild animal, thrashing on all fours across the floor. She reaches into their sub-conscious, draws out their desires and makes them real.

Ramona projects absolute confidence and control as she plays each customer. Lopez is no stranger to playing the femme fatale, matching the macho confidence of the men around her with a sultry stare and a knife-edged line in several of her past roles. Ramona carries that energy and makes her living by playing cat and mouse with her clients, working them into a state of near-frenzy but making sure they never cross the line.

The truth which the femme fatale tries to mask with sensuality and wit is that they are living balanced on the knifepoint of male ego. Ramona and her friends know that to make any real money, they will often have to indulge a kind of sexuality that is torn between desire and contempt: that volatile kind of male lust that hates what it craves and hates itself for craving it. It’s the kind of sexuality that can only be played out in circumstance of absolute power, that requires absolute debasement and submission from its targets to preserve its own sense of strength. In the case of their clients, it’s twinned with a sense of entitlement that always considers seizing possession to be a valid option.

Even as they create fantasy after fantasy to keep their clients content, Ramona and Destiny know that the slightest misstep — the wrong kind of smile, the slightest amount too much or too little reserve — might touch the fine hair trigger buried in his psyche and unleash a nightmare upon them. As they undress before clients clad in Armani suits and Rolex watches, the power balance couldn’t be more clear. The customers are protected by an impregnable layer of wealth, while the dancers are completely bare.

Later on in Hustlers, even as Ramona’s gang accrue enough money for penthouses and chinchilla coats, they never approach this kind of “wealth” — the kind that is more than a bank balance figure; the kind that is tied to whiteness and maleness, to an idea of respectability and legitimacy. The kind that makes you invincible.

The Point

One of the most telling, and most tragic, moments in Hustlers comes when Destiny returns to dancing after several years away. In the intervening time, the financial crisis has decimated the club. The remaining dancers are mostly those willing to cross into sex work to eke out a living.

During a private dance, a customer presses Destiny to do the same. “Three hundred dollars” he promises, arrogantly slapping three bills down beside him. Raising a daughter by herself, barely getting by, Destiny’s eyes empty. She silently, sadly calculates how much of herself she can bear to give away, like a person looking over their most prized possession to figure out what to pawn. It is only afterwards that Destiny realises he had given her three twenties.

What’s so important about this scene is the fact that the customer screws Destiny over just because he can. Circumstance has already given him everything. He gets to take what he wants at a price already hammered down by desperation. But he still has to turn the knife. He has to make it sting that little bit more, to make it just a little more degrading. Because that’s the real thrill: the cruelty, as they say, is the point.

The 2008 crisis was created by people playing with other people’s money. At the diner, Ramona furiously explains to Destiny that they drained the firefighters’ pensions and played roulette with working people’s savings. They were all rich already, but they wanted more. They created the world’s greatest scam and built a billion dollar industry in which no goods or services were provided, just imaginary numbers rolling across a screen. But no matter how much their make-believe made them, it was never enough.

“How much better can you eat?” Jack Nicholson’s PI Jake Gittes asks in 1974’s seminal neo-noir Chinatown. “What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”

The crash was created by greed on a psychotic scale, backed up by an absolute disregard for human life. It was not a strategic blunder, a miscalculation or an unpredictable market shift. It was pure economic violence. It was cruelty. It was throwing down three twenties when you agreed to pay three hundred, just because you can.

The Crew

Hustlers doesn’t paint its cast as heroes, villains or anti-heroes, bur rather just as average people doing what they can to claim a morsel of the world for themselves. In a broken system, all they have to leverage is their wits, their bodies and their sexuality. They become criminals after the market value of their skills is razed to the ground by the very people who used to shower them in bills.