Sunday Essay: Hustle

Sunday Essay Cartoon by John Gilbert Manantan
Sunday Essay Cartoon by John Gilbert Manantan

HALFWAY through the movie, I realized I’d fallen into a trap: I was cheering for characters who made their choices and actions look so entertaining that I briefly forgot these were also wrong.

“Hustlers” tells the story of a group of former exotic dancers in New York who figured out how to make money after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. One gets the sense that the title refers not only to the women but also the men, mostly Wall Street types, whose credit cards they wreaked havoc on.

As the group’s ring leaders Destiny and Ramona, the actresses Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez sell the idea of sisterhood and female empowerment like it’s nobody’s business. Wu plays the ingenue who gets taken under an older and smarter woman’s wing (or in this case, fur coat). Lopez is, by turns, nurturing and scheming. She has a number early in the movie that just might fill up pole dancing fitness classes. It was all the women could talk about in the post-movie restroom stop.

Yet there’s plenty of other points to talk about, too.

For one, I’d urge you to look up the December 2015 story by Jessica Pressler (“The Hustlers at Scores,” New York magazine) that inspired the movie. Here’s one of Pressler’s points that the movie may have glossed over: “This was back in the early aughts, when the (exotic dancing) industry was enjoying a cultural moment. Improbably, the values of third-wave feminism had aligned with those of Howard Stern, ushering in an era in which taking off one’s clothes in front of an audience was no longer degrading but sexually liberating and financially empowering.”

If the real women who inspired the characters of Destiny and Ramona are upset by the movie and the publicity it has generated, they’re not showing it. One is now a stay-at-home “PTA mom” while the other is an entrepreneur. Both have landed book deals, and one of them peddles the subtitle “When the Alpha Female Takes on Wall Street.”

Except they didn’t take on Wall Street. What they did (spoiler alert) was figure out a way to distract some men in bars, drug them, bring them to a strip club where they’d arranged for a cut of what he spent, then charge thousands on their personal and corporate cards. Part of what made the scam run as long as it did was that nearly all of the men were too embarrassed afterwards to press charges. Too afraid their wives would find out what they’d been up to.

The movie, written and directed by Lorene Scafaria and produced, among others, by Lopez, does point out some of the harm that the women did. Some men lost their jobs. At least one risked losing his home. But for the most part, with its shopping spree montage, terrific music, and warm and fuzzy holiday scene, the movie presents the women as empowered and glamorous figures. They make assault look like a learning exercise in taking control, and grand larceny like a power move.

I am Gen X and joined the workforce in the Nineties, about the same time third-wave feminism taught us to assert ourselves and our ambitions. So, it is with some discomfort that I admit I found this movie disturbing. Yes, we are supposed to be less judgmental now. More supportive of each individual’s efforts to rise above the limits placed on them by their class, gender, and race.

A few days before I watched the movie, Michelle Williams received an Emmy for her role in “Fosse/Verdon” and used the opportunity to push again for equal pay. She thanked the studios for supporting her and paying her equally, “because they understood that when you put value into a person, it empowers that person to get in touch with their own inherent value, and then where do they put that value? They put it into their work.”

What kind of work that happens to be, matters. Knowingly harming someone else, no matter how much we think they deserve it, isn’t empowering. If it’s illegal or immoral, or both, we can’t dress it up and make it seem like a just reward. I am officially old and clutching my pearls here, but this, as the movie says so in the beginning, is a story about control.

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