I didn’t have any interest in The Hustler at first because I am a stupid, stupid man. Then I watched The Hustler and, although I remain a stupid, stupid man, I now have a new movie for the pantheon. I also got treated to the image of George C. Scott in a skinny tie, which is like finding out that the meanest teacher at your high-school moonlights as a drag queen, which is awesome.
One Handsome Loser – Codependent Characters in The Hustler
No need for a review – spoilers, The Hustler is a good movie. I daresay it’s wonderful, the kind of film that reminds you through the sublimity of its performances and confidence in its own storytelling how the cool detachment of moving pictures can also somehow maintain a searing sense of urgency, keep its sunglassed gaze undaunted towards the worst and most violently lonely parts of human nature. But none of this is news to you, you who are erudite and strong, whose legs still contain much youthful vigor. So we’re going full essay with this motherfucker instead. Sorry, but I just can’t watch a movie with a screenplay this good – steeped in themes without being obvious – and not write something analytical about it. I don’t even care if the analysis I’m about to provide is butt-dumb, TV Guide-levels of obvious, and everybody who has ever watched this movie, including babies – including stupid babies, who are bad at math – has figured out everything I’m about to say in the first ten seconds of viewing! I do it for me.
The Hustler, a movie ostensibly about pool and the indefatigability of Paul Newman’s chin dimple, is not actually a sports movie. It’s a character study, with emphasis on the many, many meanings of the world character – a grim investigation into the folly of thinking that you can only achieve happiness through the gratification of some false self, who by definition you must value more than your true self, who you must eventually aspire to replace your disowned true self with. Forget about booze – these people are addicted to escape from themselves (they are also addicted to booze). And in tribute to this movie’s absolutely fine-ass script, which I imagine as wearing a dress far too tight for its parents to be comfortable with, I am going to replace my usual ironic section titles with quotes from the film, because all must be awash in this movie’s wonderful writing – always, at all times, at all locations temporal and physical.
“Jeez, that old fat man. Look at the way he moves. Like a dancer… like he’s playing a violin or something.”
To prove right away that The Hustler has no interest in being a sports movie and is instead about the insipid and destructive ways in which we cling to fantasy, let us appreciate a simple but devastatingly effective structural decision in this absolute sugarplum of a movie: the flipping of the first and second meetings of our protagonist and the Guy-He-Needs-to-Beat-at-Sports-to-Complete-his-Arc. In a sports movie, like a real sports movie, the first meeting would be the quick and devastating ass-kicking dished out by The Guy that boots our protagonist into his hero’s journey, a journey that will of course, as it must, culminate in said protagonist returning for another round with The Guy, which will be an absolute slugfest, a grind in which protagonist-boy Applies What He Has Learned over the course of the film to, sure as sunshine, emerge victorious. For examples of this see every movie ever made.
But in The Hustler it’s the opening meeting that goes on forever, in which everything is laid bare and our protagonist is forced to face his inner demons. He just doesn’t fucking want to! Hell, even from a superficial, material standpoint it’s all inverted – our hero Fast Eddy is up big, and can call the game whenever he wants. You don’t start your Mighty Ducks movie with the Ducks lighting up the Team That Wears Black and Also Their Coach is a Serial Killer Because We Have to Make Sure the Audience Hates Him by a score of like 13-1, so what’s up? This is the movie showing that the outcome of the game is irrelevant, although the game itself, taking up more than twenty minutes of early-story runtime, is an essential vector by which to understand both Eddy and what this movie is really about.
In fact the much, much more interesting question, the one that delivers us into the heart of this movie, which is a treasure, is one that multiple characters attempt to answer over the course of the story: why doesn’t Fast Eddy Felson just stop playing when he’s beaten Minnesota Fats enough, made enough money to buy everyone at poolhall a majestic chin dimple? The answer is because Fast Eddy Felson, a fictional character worn by Eddy Felson with the same helplessness as David Foster Wallace wearing a bandana, has not outperformed Minnesota Fats, also a character. Because this is not a movie about a likeable scamp trying to win a match against the best in town – he does that a few minutes into the movie – it’s about a miserable, self-hating and co-dependent pretender trying to prove that his persona – Fast Eddy Felson, Womanizing Pool Shark – is more perfectly realized than Minnesota Fats’ character – The Best There Is, But Not Necessarily At Pool.
“Even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”
That Eddy Felson claims the above quote during his match with Fats is both completely nonsensical and the clearest indication of the obsequious of his character to his character’s character that you’re ever going to find. Notice how he says nothing about being the best at pool – just the best, maybe in a kind of bon vivant way, I suppose. Eddy is flatly saying that the literal outcome of their game means nothing to him, because he will still believe with religious dedication in his false self, Fast Eddy Felson, a crutch that Regular Speed Eddy Felson cannot live without. Eddy can’t fathom enjoying success as Eddy – all he can derive pleasure from is catching the reflected glory of Fast Eddy, who he views as the real winner in their relationship. Just look at what Eddy prioritizes during the match with Fats:
“The curly hair,” he says at one point to his partner Charlie, of Fats’ appearance. “And them diamond rings. And that carnation.”
Eddy is obsessing over the superficial image of Fats, because that what he’s really come to claim. Eddy is not a pool player looking to prove that he’s the best at pool – he’s an actor looking to prove that he’s the best at hiding himself inside of his character. Just look at the use of booze in this scene! Eddy gets shitfaced because his character is faltering in the late-game against Fats. How will getting drunk help him? It won’t, if his goal is to win the game. But if he’s trying to out-perform Fats, well, then he’s using bourbon to go full De Niro, to method act his way back into character! Eddie isn’t upset that he lost at pool, because he didn’t fucking lose at fucking pool. He’s upset that Minnesota Fats proved to be a more resilient and cooler character than Fast Eddy Felson.
Need more evidence? Coming right the fuck up! At the critical point of their match – hour one-million, when Fast Eddy has consumed all of the bourbon east of Pittsburg and Minnesota Fats all the ham west of it – what do the players do? They redo their fucking makeup! Minnesota goes to the bathroom, gussies himself up, and puts his jacket back on. Fast Eddy sees this, sees how cheap he looks compared to Fats, and sheepishly puts his coat on. It is a ratty coat, compared to Fats’, and all the handsome Paul Newman-ness in the world can’t hide that fact. At this point the match is over, and Fats wins, because it is now fully a matchup of their characters, and Eddy simply can’t keep up with Minnesota Fats’ style and easy self-actualization.
Alright, let’s put a few more nails in the sports movie coffin. The obligatory “hero gets a new mentor, and they set off on a journey of redemption” thing would typically happen right after the inaugural ass-kicking at the hands of the main villain. But in this film it’s an afterthought, and also the mentor is a crazed sociopath who is just using Eddy because the desperate loser represents good “action” to him. The entire Louisville sequence, aside from happening far too late in the movie for it to follow the sports film structure is also deeply insidious and depressing, when we discover just how depraved Bert Gordon, Eddy’s new “mentor,” really is. Nothing about this follows the sports-movie formula because, brother, it ain’t a sports movie.
I mean, in a sports movie Minnesota Fats would be the main villain, but in this movie he’s almost entirely an afterthought, with the protagonist’s fight against himself (and to a lesser extent, Gordon) providing the real emotional fireworks. And there are a thousand other ways this film deviates from the vile and loathsome Sports Formula, like how in a real sports movie whatever our character learned along the way would help him win, or at least lose respectfully. He finally pulls off that trick shot some paraplegic veteran showed him all those years ago, and calls out “this one’s for no-legs Mahoney!” when he does it, or whatever. But Eddy can already win, which we see in the opening match when he, uh, wins. What Eddie learns over the course of this movie has nothing to do with Rising Above and Winning the Big One – his is on a journey of discovering just how craven Fast Eddy Felson is, and how he – regular Eddy Felson – won’t be short of his desperate creation until he reaches a point where he hopes, really hopes, that his idealized self gets offed by some bookie he wronged along the way, because Eddy’s tired of being suffocated by his own miserable neediness.
And lastly: in a real sports movie the final confrontation between our hero and the ostensible antagonist wouldn’t be so joyless. The second match between Eddy and Minnesota lasts for, like, thirty seconds! And that’s the point! Fast Eddy is just Eddy now, miserable but accepting, taking no joy in either winning the match or having a cooler character than Fats, because those things are all sickening to him now! In a real sports movie Eddy would, like, take out the family pool cue that his dad gave him sometime during the film’s second act, the part where we find out that Eddy is a loner because his dad was withholding blah blah blah who cares. I am brain-vomiting over how trite that all sounds, and how it absolutely is going to be added in for the inevitable remake of this movie, which is going to star Chris Pratt, because the world is a toilet that sings out of key.
“You know, that’s real sweet music in there. You can almost smell the action and the money.”
Thrilling observation that only I, a professional haver of opinions, can make, because my game is robust, and my senses keen: this movie has a soundtrack. What, let me pretend I have a graduate degree: this movie has a soundtrack that is good. It’s all jazzy! Jazz is cool. Sometimes I pretend I’m wearing sunglasses when I listen to jazz music, although I do not actually wear sunglasses when I listen to jazz music, for I lack the confidence to pull it off. We can’t all be manspreading like George C. Scott, bold as love, acting as if our balls were Helios, responsible for both sunrise and sunset by dint of our thunderous penis-chariot.
But we’re not here to reference the soundtrack in The Hustler, nor are we here to compare George C. Scott’s man-basket to figures of antiquity (stay tuned for my Patton review!). We’re here to observe the movie’s masterful use of no soundtrack, which is like using a soundtrack, but no. Really, though: the hardest parts of The Hustler to watch are the parts where there’s no music playing. These characters are characters – they are all acting, and they want to act to a beat. During Fast Eddy’s moments of superficial accomplishment we get that chili jazz score going, but when Fast Eddy has been momentarily shut out and Eddy is forced to exist as, well, himself, that’s when the soundtrack cuts and we are left with the harrowing and wincing image of only the real self, echoing pathetically and humiliated in this cavernous nothing of the real world, stumbling in the void where affection is supposed to be, confronted with his disowned self and clearly choking on the misery of that reality. Eddy is an actor, and a desperate, mediocre one. He needs someone or something to play off of at all times – his “partner” Charlie could better be described as his costar – and when you take the music away he is left with no resource around which he can structure his performance, and he is stuck interacting with the most reviled thing in his life – himself.
“So what beat me?”
“Character.”
And if you think that Fast Eddy is the only vile concoction inside of which a miserable human hides, do I have several thousand more words for you! Everybody in this movie is a character. Some are so sublimely their character that we don’t notice or care, and they seem fine with it, too (ever find out Minnesota Fats’ real name? That would be a nooope), some use their character as a place to hide, even though they know the air supply in there is dwindling (Sarah), others are hellbent on using sheer force of will to make people believe in their character more than their reviled self (Eddy, take a bow), and some use a character as a vehicle by which to dissect and manipulate other characters, in kind of a parasitic second-order derivative of horseshit. That would be Gordon.
Bert Gordon doesn’t have a character. That’s his character. He’s the one who pretends to be outside of the whole scene (we’re introduced to him during the initial match just watching, now aren’t we) and drinking his milk while everybody else gets shitfaced and tries to bullshit each other. It’s from this privileged position of detachment that he purports to be able to comment so intelligently on the people around him, their characters and their follies. This is fuckery. Like everybody else Bert Gordon uses a character to interact with the world at large, one he is pathologically obsessed with gratifying at all times. He’s just better at it than everybody else. He makes this point explicit in Louisville when he says to Sarah, of Eddy, that the younger man simply represents “action” to him. Daddy needs his juice, and his character is how he gets it!
One Handsome Loser
But the character we really came here to see, hate, and root for the demise of is Fast Eddy Felson. And the domineering nature of this character explains so much of the self-destructive behavior of his underlying and worm-like creator. Eddy Felson wants to lose. He forces himself to lose, whenever the stakes are high enough, or low enough, or moderate enough, or he’s just bored. This is because the perpetual loser-dom of Eddy Felson will allow Fast Eddy to float, aspirational, just outside Eddy Felson’s grasp, and give the more human and therefore despised man something to forever chase in vain, something to make him feel better about how he has shuttered his vision against all of those insufferably human people around him. This is why Eddy keeps Sarah drunk; this is why he keeps going back to the pool hall. If the character of Fast Eddy is ever fully satisfied, if he can be put aside, or even integrated with Eddy and in doing so allow both of them to be satisfied, then what? Eddy lives for the character he has created, and everybody else is a resource by which to propagate and idolize that character.
All Eddy cares about is this false self. He demands that Charlie give him more money to take on Fats again (ostensibly in pool, but in reality – well, you know) and screams at Charlie to “lay down and die by yourself” when his former partner refuses. Gordon comes closest to identifying this pathology when he explains why Fast Eddy lost to Minnesota Fats that night: “He has character, and you don’t.” This is only partially true. Minnesota Fats has a better character than Fast Eddy. Yes, there’s the carnation, the nickname, the sense of style, but there’s also the perfect integration of man and image. Minnesota Fats is effortlessly Minnesota Fats (again, notice how we never get his real name?) in a way that Fast Eddy can never truly be Fast Eddy, because Eddy Felson and Fast Eddy Felson have far too antagonistic a relationship, are too predicated on never getting along to be able to compete with Minnesota Fats. Minnesota’s character moves in perfect synchronicity with whatever the fuck his real name is, but Eddy Felson can only idolize Fast Eddy Felson if the former is getting his ass handed to him constantly. Eddy Felson specializes in toxic, codependent relationships, and his most robust and psychologically complex one is with himself, because of course in being a sad-sack loser he also manages to be hilariously masturbatory about it.
All of this comes to a head when Eddy monologues about the nature of greatness. During his picnic with Sarah he ignores the wondrously expectation-free milieu she is trying to inculcate and instead talks about how much he wants to show people greatness. It’s in this monologue that he also admits that pool is just an activity – he claims even a manual laborer can achieve the kind of greatness he is talking about, a kind of greatness during which the practitioner just “just knows, just feels…” These are not the words of a dedicated athlete, they’re the words of an actor who doesn’t understand why people keep laughing at his performances. That Sarah just sits there and accepts this shows that she’s still unsure how to deal with this ragingly incomplete human, and how co-dependent her relationships with both Eddy and Fast Eddy really are.
“Why not? We already know each other’s secrets.”
Which brings us to the relationship between Eddy and Sarah, which aside from further proving my point is also one of the best-realized and most believably toxic relationships I’ve ever seen in a movie (not even Top Ten material in real life, though), specifically because it is two codependent pretenders just fucking smashing their false selves noisily and ceaselessly and helplessly against each other like two emotional kaiju. Just look at how their relationship even starts – Eddy keeps trying to buy Sarah a drink, apparently oblivious to the fact that she is obviously an alcoholic because he is in Fast Eddy mode, and needs a score, a reaffirming of his character after Fats so thoroughly defeated him on stage the night before. So here he is essentially trying to poison her during their first meeting, because the alternative would be to meet her on more egalitarian ground. But that’s not the lesson Fast Eddy learned after losing to Fats – his takeaway was that he needed to redouble the character, practice it on some stooge, and that is – tragically – where Sarah comes in. And when they meet again at the bar – at eight in the morning, with Fast Eddy’s inability to see the glug-glug obvious is nearly impressive at this point – he ends up luring her back to her place with the promise of more booze, because fuck.
And this dynamic is expressed with flawless visuals! When Sarah is limping up to Fast Eddy the day after their first meeting and each of them is too tired to keep their respective characters up, we see a fleeting moment of them being real to each other – and it is harrowing to watch. Sarah is framed waaay to the side of the shot, nearly microscopic against the vast emptiness above and around her. This is her when she’s not in character, pretending to be a novelist and a college girl and a Woman of a Discerning Eye. Just like Eddy being surrounded by silence during his most despised human moments Sarah is surrounded by empty space during hers. And in the reverse shot we get the exact same thing for Eddy. This is how they feel when showing their true self to someone, even someone who can relate, even someone they should be showing it to – instead of a warm and close framing we get their opinions on their true selves visually rendered as these pathetic, small, helpless creatures nearly invisible against the cavernous nothing taking up most of the frame. They are only framed traditionally, in the middle-third, at the very end of the scene, when Eddy has bribed Sarah with another bottle of booze (Jesus) and they leave awkwardly arm-in-arm, in a shot conspicuously devoid of romance, but just bursting at the seams with codependency.
And it continues, this lilting in and out of their characters, always timed with seeming mathematical precision to make sure they eternally miss each and every opportunity for relief and understanding. Sarah is sober and vulnerable when Eddy is yearning for the hustle, and during the brief moments when Eddy seems to be reconsidering the character he plays Sarah has reverted to being drunk and aloof. Each of them has as their primary goal the satisfaction of their false selves, with absolutely no interest in being there for each other each other, and the result is this cacophonous collision of their mismatched and completely toxic selves. A roiling, unstable sense of identity – supported by a selfishness that is never entirely sure which self it is dedicated to – is the only thing that they have in common, and it is not a good thing to have in common.
“We have a contract of depravity. All we have to do is turn the blinds down.”
And it’s Fast Eddy who’s the instigator of the most toxic elements of their relationship. When his thumbs are broken and he can’t play pool Sarah sees this as an opportunity to connect with Eddy Felson, to see him outside of his performance. She wants something different, finally. This is great! But Eddy sees this happening, too, and desperately tries to steer them back to their toxic selves, the ground on which he feels more comfortably miserable. Sarah wants to get rid of her toxic identity, and to help Eddy get rid of his, but all he wants is the character, which he loves more than her, or himself. She asks the thumb-busted Eddy if he wants “to go out for a while. To a movie?” and he immediately responds with “you want a drink?” He’s trying to keep her firmly in character, which will allow him to stay in character. He doesn’t love Sarah – he loves a sounding board by which to continue indulging in the escapist fantasy of Fast Eddy Felson. “Aren’t you gonna have one?” he says at one point, taunting her into drinking some more. “C’mere,” he says. “C’mere.” He’s trying to force her into being the chump that he needs to satisfy his need for chaos, even if it kills her.
Or how about that picnic scene! Because when a movie like this gives you a picnic scene it’s going to be like if Jeffry Dahmer invited you to dinner. Sarah, who has been working admirably towards destroying her false self and has taken advantage of Eddy’s downtime to show him a life outside of performative misery, tells him she loves him. He responds by taking her in his arms, dipping her low, and saying, “And I you, mon amour.” That is a fucking joke! He actually responds by immediately telling her that she’s going to marry someone else, but that she will write a book about him, Fast Eddy Felson. That’s all he cares about: immortalizing, lionizing Fast Eddy Felson. No one else means anything to him. When he sees Sarah passed the fuck out in their room in Louisville later on, having completely reverted to her false self and destructive ways – almost entirely because of him – he just leaves her there, and only goes back when he needs more money for his billiards game. He doesn’t check to see if she’s OK.
“To you, Eddy,” Sarah says at their final dinner before going to Louisville. Man, fuck that codependency!
“What’re you writing?”
“Oh, it’s a story. A story I’m making up.”
The lifeblood of the character is the storytelling, and this movie has it in spades. Sarah is a fucking novelist, if you didn’t notice, and the other characters like to tell stories, too. Sarah says at one point “I made you up, didn’t I, Eddy?” which shows her finally accepting the superficiality of the character she has created – and the one he’s created, too – and trying to bring them both back to a more human place. She pours out the truth at this point: the rich lover in her life that she has been claiming pays her bills in return for trysts is in actuality her father who abandoned her, and writes her weekly checks to feel better about being out of her life; she was never an actress; her limp didn’t come from a car accident, she had polio. And during this entire pouring out sequence we don’t even get a reverse angle on Fast Eddy’s response, the scene just kind of ends, because this story, unimpressively human and vulnerable as it is, does nothing for him. There’s only one story he’s interested in, and it has nothing to do with her, or anyone but himself.
And there are the monologues from other characters, too. Charlie – you know, Fast Eddy’s acting partner, who never even bothers to learn Sarah’s name – spiels at her about the gooey and emotional backstory he has with Fast Eddy, the person he cares so much about that he hesitates – like, hesitates, like the kind of gap that occurs between the moment someone you’re planning on dumping asks if you love them and the moment you say “sure?” – before calling him “like a son.” Charlie does the whole schtick of pretending to be there for Eddy, trying to manipulate Sarah by telling her that “I’ve known this boy since he was sixteen. The first time I saw him, back in Oakland, I said, ‘This is a talented boy. This is a smart boy.’” This is all horseshit, and is really Charlie just playing up his character – concerned father who is this close to remembering his son’s name – in order to get back in on the hustle. These people are scum!
There’s also a moment when Eddy is walking into a pool hall to hustle some more and the sign reads “Arthur’s Pool Hall,” and Arthur is homophonous with author. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock represents the American Dream, and man is the real monster in King Kong.
“Hey, mister.”
“The name’s Gordon. Bert Gordon.”
“Mister.”
Names are a currency in a world where everyone is a character. In the header quote to this section Eddy, who has no idea who Bert Gordon is, and doesn’t care, keeps insisting to the other man that he is simply “mister” – someone without a character to which they dedicate themselves, and therefore unimportant.
That same Bert Gordon, ironically, understands this better than most, and uses it against people. He keeps “forgetting” Sarah’s name, which seems improbable because as multiple characters point out at multiple points in the movie, he knows literally everyone. With his smiling, backchanneling, “always takes me a little while to get a name fixed in my mind” he is telling Sarah that her character means nothing to him, which means that he’s pretty much announcing to her on the way to Louisville that she won’t be coming back. And this monstrous dismissal of Sarah comes from other characters, too. When Eddy introduces Charlie to Sarah, Eddy says “that’s my girl,” to which Charlie responds, uninterested: “Hello, Eddy’s girl.” If you want to break a character – and everybody wants to break Sarah, the only person in the movie with the flickering of a soul – you deny them a name, the place from which the rest of the character springs.
When they first meet Sarah asks Fast Eddy the most important question of their relationship: “what should my name be?” She then, later on in that same conversation, tells him that her name is biblical, and asks if he knows what it means.
We never find out what it means, because Eddy never asks, because he doesn’t care.
The End
It must be a hell of an experience to hate yourself but love a version of yourself that is tantalizingly close to the person that you hate. Is it narcissism that makes you do it? A perverse but well-meaning motivational tactic, because that fake-you is technically achievable? Do you keep tweaking little details about yourself to make it work, or do you deliberately keep that other you out of reach – but so fucking close to being in reach – because you can’t think of any reason to get out of bed otherwise? Winning a pool match doesn’t seem like it could possibly put a dent in any of these questions, but unfathomable loss seems to pay some morbid dividends, which is all Fast Eddy really deserves, I suppose. Eddy Felson? I’m not so sure.