It took two goes with American Hustle for me to finally understand what the little thread that ran through it was that just kept tickling, yet eluding.
I remember reading an article about the movie before I saw it, with the writer making the case that the movie, like David O. Russell's other movies, just has stuff happen but none of it really goes anywhere, or something to that effect.
The writer wasn't knocking the work entirely; most of the article was praise. But I think this characterization was misguided and a bit unfair. It might be superficially true, but things don't necessarily have to happen a certain way for something profound to be expressed in them.
American Hustle was very good, and that little thread within it was something very subversive - well maybe not today - which gave the movie its honesty. It was something that 19th century writers were very concerned about, something they called "decadence."
Of course decadence isn't some evil thing that happens which should be fought with all force, as 19th century moralists thought they were doing, and eventually the Nazis when they sought to destroy what they called "decadent art." It is something that happens all the time. Although, some terrible things do go on in such a process and if you are affected by it, naturally you must react to it. More matter-of-factly, it is the end of an era, when an old guiding mythology begins to show its fault lines, beginning its disintegration. More simply, it is something that happens.
See the thing about American Hustle - and really this isn't something peculiar to American Hustle; avant garde film has been doing this since at least the 60's, or really, probably the beginning of fine film - is that it doesn't just muddy the waters of good and evil, it completely scrambles them.
This is a film with all of its characters constantly manipulating each other and the world around them, arranging language, clothes, resources, and affections in order to generate the means for projecting their egos into the world, for surviving. Even the cops do it. The lead FBI agent goes behind people's backs and spins elaborate lies, engaging in crimes against humanity to ostensibly prevent the crimes against society, or more accurately, against symbol.
This is a tale that distills the American essence into caricature, and it does it very well.
So then we find ourselves rooting for the conman and the conwoman, and feel somewhat warm and fuzzy as everything falls together. The mean 'ol FBI agent loses (though we are still inclined to feel sorry for him) and the mafia guy fills the vacuum in the ex-wife's heart with his love. A strange state of affairs no? But not that strange.
FBI agents entrap and destroy the lives of relatively innocent people all the time. Prosecutors ruin often innocent people's lives to get big busts. Cops frame, hurt, and kill often innocent people (often people of color) in the name of protecting society. Business leaders raze forests and flatten communities to bring people products and resources. And then conversely criminals sometimes act real and genuine to their communities when they aren't trying to survive and so on.
It is something that has always been going on, only today the contradictions are so glaring and so frequent that we can't help but notice them. The cracks forming throughout community and throughout society rise up into the mythology itself, and we begin to wake up. Black and white becomes grey, as it always was.
Suddenly we begin to realize that our own perceptions of the essence, the vitality, the love and power of life we've always been chasing by projecting our ego - and this is what each character is after in the movie if you look closely - has slowly been shifted away from their true location: life and experience itself, and over to the structures we've erected to reach them: in wealth, or money, beauty, any object really, which should be products of, or means to get to the essence of things, but which have become transformed into ends themselves, and the further we seek to extract this essence from the structure, the means, the further it degrades. Instead of expanding, a society feeds on itself.
But then, as the movie shows, this is survival, it is something that happens. Some see it; many more simply play the game to its logical end. But you do see the lead characters in the movie struggling to reconnect with that essence, that vitality, becoming confused and exhausted along the way, but ultimately reconnecting with it through each other.
Here you could stop me and say, well look here, this was based on a true story so how is the movie reflecting our cultural zeitgeist? Well, a movie like this takes a lot of time and resources to make. The director gets one shot every year or so if he or she is especially productive, and these are the lucky ones. So he had to choose the story. Secondly, the facts had to be arranged and embellished in accordance with a central vision to be entertaining, and so...this is what we get.
And then, we all read into art what we want to. It is what makes art so wonderful. I'm taking a piece from it too, taking it and doing something else with it. This too is something that happens all the time.
