Recently our headlines have been dominated by young female scammers: scammers whose exploits are spoken of with breathless fascination. Their hyperaware self-stylisation holds secrets that must be unlocked; underlying their business projects is an authenticity waiting to be mined; their personal triumphs and failures are tied up in a world-historical battle with the patriarchy (the more dangerous ones believe this themselves).i It’s worth mentioning that the majority of these scammers are white and privileged and because of this a lust for money takes on a romantic, complicated sheen. The women in Lorene Scafaria’s latest film don’t live in a world where their desire for nice things has the luxury of being considered interesting. They are called Hustlers, and are singularly uninterested in mystifying their wants. Destiny, an Asian-American single mother trying to make ends meet in New York and the film’s protagonist, states her ambitions plainly: “I want to be independent,” she tells her one and only friend, Ramona: “I just want to take care of my grandma… do some shopping from time to time.”
Destiny (Constance Wu) and Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) are two former strippers at a club in lower Manhattan trying to cope with the aftermath of the financial crash. The two met back in 2007: Destiny was the new girl at work and Ramona the fearsomely charismatic leader of the pack. Back then, when money was good, Ramona took Destiny under her wing and gave her clinical, unsentimental lessons on who to avoid and who was willing to shell out the most cash. Now in 2013, this business takes on a sharper edge. The financial crisis has emptied out the club. As artful subjects of Wall Street, Ramona and Destiny get entrepreneurial. Fishing – the art of picking up men in bars, and luring them into strip clubs then taking a pre-negotiated cut of their spending – is one solution, and they do this successfully with their new accomplices, Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart). But capitalism always asks that you innovate, grow faster. In this case, a mix of ketamine and MDMA slipped in a mark’s drink speeds up the efficiency of the entire operation; it’s easier to max out a credit card, after all, if the owner in question is too far gone to see you swipe it. Roselyn Keo, the woman Wu’s Destiny is based on, told journalist Jessica Pressler at The Cut in 2015: “It sounds so bad to say that we were, like, drugging people… But it was, like, normal.”
Scafaria was inspired to write Hustlers after reading about Keo’s story in The Cut, a publication which has recently put out so many compulsively readable stories of women as late capitalism’s most chaotically talented disciples that I’m beginning to suspect it’s a covert accelerationist project. Scafaria’s on-screen interpretation of Pressler’s no-holds-barred feature is warmer, with more heart. The scam, ostensibly the engine of the script, is incidental to a rich, generous story about friendship between women who have very little else in the world. One particularly devastating scene suggests that Destiny participated in the racket not because she wanted money but because she was lonely and wanted friends. Scafaria is not interested in litigating whether such actions are right or wrong, but rather in depicting the realities – both good and bad – of their day-to-day lives. Some of the best scenes depict the breezy water-cooler chatter between strippers getting ready backstage; complaints about needy, anxious boyfriends who think you’ll fall for the men on the floor; Cardi B as the confident Diamond, pulling out a vibrator from her bag – “the perfect boyfriend” – and Lizzo in a cameo as an Usher-loving flautist-dancer. Then there is a four-minute scene of Jennifer Lopez as Ramona, lit up in disco-pink on a dark club night, who is not so much dancing on the pole as she is bending it to her magnificent, gigantic will (Scafaraia described her approach to filming the scene as taking on “50 Foot Woman gaze”). It is a nuanced, generous depiction of sidelined workplaces and the lives of the women who work in them; after watching the film, Cardi B was brought to tears, remembering her own days working at a strip club in New York.
Which means, of course, that Hustlers almost didn’t get made – a phrase I feel I use too often when I write about independent films made by a woman. Conceived as a ‘financial crash film’ in the vein of Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, it was first offered to these two men. They turned it down, although McKay came on as a producer. Scafaria, who had written the script, then fought for the chance to direct it. Producer Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas describes the experience of pitching studio executives as “…dancing for a group of men and explaining to them, ‘Yes, the women do drug the guys, and no, they’re [the men] not all bad guys, and yes, they [the women] do bad things.’” The need to convince potential backers that women protagonists can do bad things but also be worthy of a story, she notes, probably wasn’t there when it came to greenlighting The Wolf of Wall Street. Even after Hustlers’ successful release, the film is still let down by a genteel sort of sexism. Reviewers have commented on what they see to be Scafaria’s uncritical celebration of consumerism, which allegedly undermines the film’s anti-capitalist stance. Destiny, Ramona, Mercedes and Annabelle walk through high-end department stores, race their fingers over fur coats, monogrammed Coach bags, and don black velour Juicy Couture sweatpants (Hustlers is set in the very early 2010s). But I remember The Wolf of Wall Street receiving more nuanced critical readings despite its depiction of unfettered yachty excess. The depiction of things as they are, after all, is not necessarily an indulgence of the system’s empty logic. The excess in Hustlers is more interesting, anyway: performing womanhood under capitalism is a constant negotiation of how the objects you are supposed to want are also those that deplete you. In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes: “When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like.” Roselyn Keo, reminiscing to Pressler, says: “You make money, but then you’re depressed, so you end up shopping or going on vacation, and the money depletes, so you go back [to the club]… American culture is a little fucked up, you know?”
It’s worth asking what sorts of major motion pictures have yet to emerge given Hollywood’s painfully slow learning curve when it comes to depicting women fully. Scafaria’s rendering of the story is full of joy and compassion, and the film is fiercely protective towards its characters in a way that is amazing to watch. The friendship between Ramona and Destiny takes centre stage, and the film lays out the specific financial and familial concerns of the characters that lead them to drugging their clientele. But I also wonder whether the other story in Pressler’s article could emerge one day, supported by major studio backing. It is one in which Ramona and Destiny aren’t so much friends who eventually go into business on the strength of their relationship, but rather, as Keo relates, pragmatic, unsentimental business partners from the outset. One in which the reason these women do what they do isn’t tethered to a specific, morally unimpeachable need to care for their families or each other but rather simply because they want to: “I would say to myself, ‘Okay, I’m going to make 100 grand and leave’” Keo reminisced to Pressler; “Then I’d make 100 grand. Then, I’m going to make another hundred grand. I’m going to get to half a million and leave. No, now I want to make a million and leave. It was just never enough.’” In a more recent interview for Vulture, she described herself as a female Jordan Belfort – “the she-wolf of Wall Street.” It seems to me that to make this version of the film today would involve infusing the story of Woman-Belfort with a sort of cosmic goodness – her ambition is likeable, actually, because she’s sticking it to men – that might not exist in her own world view. A women’s ambition, when read by others, always seems to be yoked to something outside of herself. For a hungry young woman looking to make her mark on the world, it is best to hide in plain sight. Whatever pious human-interest narrative lacking from your own life will by readily filled in by the world, so enthralled by the sight of a beautiful young woman being exactly where she shouldn’t that it turns ordinary egocentric ambitions into extraordinary world-shaking ones.
As women have been increasingly absorbed into the heart of capitalism as agents capable of building, owning, and running their own businesses, there has been a concurrent explosion of a discursive sphere dedicated to obscuring, mystifying, and rendering this respectable. You are not just a garden variety business leader; you are a girlboss. Or a lifestyle guru who peddles wisdom over products; an Instagram influencer for whom sponcon is an afterthought against the broader, unmonetisable project of living one’s truth; an anti-capitalist culture writer who remains Fun, Quirky and Cute for an online audience. Who do these mystifications serve? These archetypes give women the extremely confused message that to be truly independent, ambitious, and empowered – and dare we say, feminist – is to perform well in the marketplace of the likeable self. It also gives capitalism, which is superficially unfashionable, a second life: its mercenary logic can take on a socially conscientious sheen. The result is a life lived in bad faith, where everyone knows you’re lying about what you want. We do it anyway because professional advancement is more palatable when seen this way. As Hustlers shows, some ambitions are interesting enough to warrant a long read in The Cut. It would be better, though, if we were all honest about what we were talking about.
1 Writer Natalie Beach on Caroline Calloway; “Caroline claimed her failure to write the manuscript was an intentional stand against the patriarchy and a publishing industry that insisted her life story be defined by the men she dated.” Film producer Erin Edeiken on Elizabeth Holmes: “”She told me point blank that men are allowed to fail time and time again in Silicon Valley but she was not — she’s held to a different level of scrutiny and not allowed to fail because she was a woman. It was personal.”
Rebecca Liu is a staff writer at Another Gaze.
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