HUSTLERS
A non-movie-review review, from a person who has not experienced sex work first hand
- Note that the movie was panned or given coy reviews by most major white male critics.
- If you want to read an actual review of this very lively and heartfelt film I would suggest this one from the Independent by Clarisse Loughrey or this one by Olivia Funderberg at the Atticus Review.
Hustlers rocketed me into the sick battle that sexiness can be and the great joy that comes with being empowered in the company of other women to be truly sexy, whatever that means to you. I think of all the countless ways women have been pitted against each other for men, or simply in a competition amongst themselves for superiority. It makes me deeply sad. This film shows women working in a very difficult job environment, who challenge one another and ban together to make the best of their circumstances. Even Cardi B (who plays the most territorial and competitive of the main cohort of dancers) will ride or die for the ladies she strips alongside (including Lizzo, Mette Towley, Lili Reinhart, Keke Palmer, and Mercedes Ruehl as Mother).
In Hustlers, the good people are bad people who make victims of the worst people. It’s a timeless archetype that feels so right here, never stale. Desperation creates flaws in a long term scheme (concocted and championed by J. Lo) to max out the corporate cards of the men who selfishly destroyed the American economy in 2008. The conceit of the film complicates wrongdoing and confounds the black and white morality of America that can be used to further suppress those who are living less than the middle class picket fence life.
While some men were throwing themselves out of office buildings after the crash, others took advantage of this crisis. In a scene representing this absolute low point, Constance Wu returns to her job at the downtown club of her big money days only to find all of her co workers have left replaced by new girls, almost all thin, blonde Russian immigrants willing to give blow jobs in the newly camera free private room for three hundred dollars. Accepting this as the new norm, Constance Wu is coerced into this arrangement by a low life millionaire, who drops three bills on the ground. We discover later that the three bills he dropped were not hundred dollar bills, but twenties. And so perpetuates the system, a small group of elite white men swindle everyone, setting rules that only they can break. We sit with these women in the endless degradation of being told our worth and value by people who don’t know us, people who don’t give a shit about whether we live or die.
Anger and filth are always caked around the glitter and sly smiles of the receding glamour post 2008, one of the many textural reasons that Hustlers is a knockout. The movie wields the unreal reality, the under-produced production that is always present in the work environment of exotic dancers. There was not a single mention of diets or the struggle to have it all. The few girls remaining behind ring leader J. Lo commit to finding money when it has supposedly all dried up. They decide simultaneously that enough is enough and enough is never enough in a true internalization of the capitalist system that eventually leads to them getting busted by the NYPD (who admit to having been to a strip club at one point or another). At several moments in the movie I wanted to cry (tears of joy, tears of anguish) the most intense for me being when Constance Wu opens a gift from J. Lo on Christmas 2009. It is so clear that this one gift is nicer than anything she ever imagined she would own, and this exchange is so so moving. It is one of the few times I’ve felt a material thing can really represent a friendship, the shared experience of the crazy shit life throws and knowing you aren’t alone. That is the greatest gift of all, even when the show is over and the glam is gone.
Sophia Valera Heinecke is not a movie critic. She is a playwright, banjo enthusiast, and occasional poet. Her debut chapbook, Smoke Show, was published by Sleep Hazzard Press last winter.
