There’s a scene about midway through Lorene Scafaria’s 2019 black-comedy Hustlers where the politics of the movie should become perfectly clear, if you only care to look.
One-time exotic dancer Destiny (Constance Wu) has returned to her old line of work in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. She’s desperate to make ends meet, with a toddler to raise and no dad in the picture, while “respectable” work in retail or customer service remains out of reach.
Unfortunately, her former haunt – a once-glamorous club where she and her coworkers had once partied with Usher and raked in tips from big-spenders – is now a veritable wasteland, as badly hit by the financial collapse as everywhere else.
The world-weary bartender and “den mother” to the strippers (Mercedes Ruehl) informs Destiny that many of the dancers are now earning money through more explicit sex work. And sure enough, she’s soon propositioned by a client. If she’s willing to give him a handjob during a private dance, the man – a sneering, impatient finance bro – promises to pay her an instant $100 cash.
She demurs. But the client ups the ante, laying more bills on the table and promising her $200 if she’s willing to go through with it. So with a bump of cocaine to build some courage, she does… only for Destiny’s own narration to reveal that the bills the man had counted out were $20s, not $100s. She’s been ripped off.
And it’s mere minutes later, still reeling from this flagrant and personal exploitation, that we see Destiny set off on a path of economic vengeance that continues for the rest of the film, reconnecting with veteran stripper Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) and setting out to drug and rob the very same rich, powerful men. Exploiting the exploiters.
None of this is new, of course. Hustlers has been rightly acknowledged as an explicitly feminist critique of the rich and powerful – of the ways that wealthy, powerful men exploit women. But what’s been largely and puzzlingly overlooked is the way that it speaks not just to a feminist critique of capitalism, but to a more broadly socialist or anarchist critique as well.
Granted, some reviews have made the connection. Writing for The Nation, Joshunda Sanders correctly called out its explicitly anti-capitalist themes, dubbing it a “cinematic depiction of women who rebel and try to steal back what capitalism has stolen from them.” But many have focused on Hustlers largely as a paean to feminism, absent class politics.
And what’s truly surprising is the fact that the American left seems largely to have overlooked the film’s socialist (or at least socialist-friendly) politics as well – a fact that’s doubly surprising given how quickly we came to the defense of Todd Phillips’ Joker, rightly pointing out that far from a white male and/or “incel” revenge fantasy, it was better understood as a broad attack on neoliberalism.
To provide just one example of the disparity, there were no fewer than three pieces about Phillips’s film in the popular socialist publication Jacobin. Hustlers, meanwhile, received not a single mention that I can find. And the handful of mainstream reviews that did touch on the potentially leftist themes of Hustlers tended to focus on how it fit into the debate over sex work and vulnerable populations. (Another valuable angle, to be sure.)
Make no mistake: Many of the themes explored in Hustlers are explicitly and inherently feminist. Motherhood is a constant theme, with both Ramona and Destiny being powerfully motivated by their identity as single mothers. Destiny starts off wanting to provide for her elderly grandmother, while Ramona wants to improve her daughter's chances of freedom and independence from an exploitative system. And later it is Destiny's own motherhood and her partner’s unwillingness to contribute materially to child-rearing that sends her back to a line of work she had tried to leave behind.
But, again, Ramona and Destiny are not just strippers or women or mothers – they are workers, exploited for their labor by a rapacious system. And not just by their wealthy clients, but also by a club that takes a harsh percentage of their profits (until forced not to). The villains of the film are not just “rich” men but, explicitly, Wall Street bankers and financiers, whose greed and amorality are shown to extend well beyond the trading floor and into their personal and sexual lives.
Even the source of their victims’ wealth is spotlighted, with Ramona remarking that their Wall Street clients are paying for sex work with money stolen from firefighters’ pension funds. (The women also break their targets down “by account,” as it were – assigning some women to fleece men from JP Morgan, while others go after Bear Stearns.)
Later in the film, Ramona even explicitly extends the analysis from their own situation to the economy as a whole, rightly declaring, “The whole country is a strip club. You have people tossing the money and people doing the dance.” Some viewers may read this as a sort of PT Barnum-esque “sucker born every minute” line, but viewed another way this is a clear delineation of workers from capital that may as well be straight out of Marxist materialism.
Ramona's solution – personally going after the rich and taking back what is yours – is equally by-the-book when it comes to socialist theory, at least of an earlier age.
Modern socialist movements often go to great pains to emphasize that they intend to work within the boundaries of the law and electoral system. However, many past movements – especially those inspired by writers like Proudhon – had no such squeamishness, committing robbery and murder to personally avenge economic wrongs and relieve the rich of their ill-gotten gains. (Even Ramona's avowedly individualist streak wouldn't be out of place in a cadre of Stirner-inspired illegalists.)
Also relevant to the left is the way Hustlers shows that the damage of capitalism can potentially unite workers across the wealth divide (provided they are, in fact, workers).
Consider the sole scene where the ladies of Hustlers feel some sympathy for their victims: Destiny, having taken a wayward father for everything he’s worth, feels a pang of remorse when she realizes the man can’t pay his mortgage and that both he and his young son will lose their home. It pairs nicely with a scene where Ramona is verbally abused by her boss at a retail job for needing to leave early to care for her child, with the ultimate solution being to work harder and longer so that she can afford a sitter. Capitalism, the film defly points out, cares nearly as little about the children of rich workers as it does the children of poor workers.
So, why did the left not embrace Hustlers the way it embraced Joker? One likely factor is the fact that the film stars an almost exclusively female and non-white cast and so was marketed primarily to these demographics. For all the talk of intersectionality, the media often expects films to talk about race, gender, or class – but not all three simultaneously. Consider the fact Joker was similarly defined by the media as a white male revenge fantasy, ignoring the class and disability politics that transcended race and gender. Hustlers was subjected to the inverse misinterpretation, but both of these are mistakes of equal magnitude.
Suffice to say, if you liked the class politics of Joker, Hustlers covers a lot of the same territory and is well worth a watch. And as members of a movement that's so often dismissed as white, male, and upper middle class, we on the left would do well to not overlook for future opportunities to highlight the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and beyond.
After all, as long as capitalism exists, we'll all be forced to dance for the men with the money – one way or another.