In Which Luck Appears So Slick As To Become Sterile

Running the Numbers

by ALICE BOLIN

Luck
creator David Milch

HBO’s new series Luck is Dustin Hoffman’s crack at the trope of the weary gangster, and he is just as punchy, tired, and insecure as you would, I guess, hope. The show begins as his character, the crooked businessman Chester “Ace” Bernstein, is released from prison after serving three years for unspecified dirty dealings. That same day, he visits a former partner at the man’s swanky nightclub, and during the course of their meeting, Ace moves with weird efficiency through the entire emotional range of the archetypal aging crook.

He is first full of self-doubt — “Sometimes I wonder if I’m still an asset,” he admits. Then in a fit of defensive anger, he leaps from his chair and rips his shirt open, shouting the delightful reproach “You got qualms?” He is instantly sheepish about the tantrum and is considerate enough to explain for the audience what has just happened. “I tore the buttons off my goddamn shirt,” he says. “I make a fool out of myself first day out.” For the rest of the scene, he is sure to remind us that he is old — I can’t think of a more crotchety remark than “My blood pressure is sky-high right now” — and prison has withered him both emotionally and physically. “I shrunk. I’ve got to get new shirts,” he says, awkwardly lying to cover the fact that his shirts are probably all missing buttons from his Incredible Hulk outbursts.

Ace exemplifies Luck’s most striking characteristic, that it is ambiguous and complex at the same time that it avoids any kind of subtlety. The first episode, directed by Heat's Michael Mann, introduces no fewer than sixteen characters, all connected in some way with horse racing at Santa Anita Park in Los Angeles. The audience must keep track of a huge volume of characters, their relationships to one another, and their many concealed interests. This is, I think, the point.

Add to that the difficulty of any story involving gambling: it will eventually require the audience to attempt to comprehend strategy, statistics, and large sums of money. This show with nothing but principal characters, many of whom have no name and only the vaguest of back stories, about the most obscure aspects of an obscure sport, egregiously also includes math.

Much of the first episode revolves around a group of gamblers’ pursuit of a huge Pick Six jackpot and their strategy for winning it, which hinges on betting on a single horse in the fourth race — apparently a pretty bold move. The discussion of “singling the fourth” is the most technical dialogue in the episode, so baffling that I was almost thankful that the characters discussing it are so obvious.

The gamblers are singularly pathetic — their ringleader is confined to a wheelchair, punctuating his conversation by huffing from an oxygen tank. They are of that special breed of loser geniuses who populate the minds of movie and television writers, convinced that smart-but-not-successful is a reliable shortcut to interesting. When one of the gamblers cheerily approaches the others and says, “Got my Social Security, 125 simoleons!” it’s clear that “fresh” isn’t necessarily what Luck is going for.

The show relies on characterizations that are easily shorthanded: The Irish Jockey, The Stuttering Agent, The Handsome Gambler. The most frequent method for this is to give a character an accent or vocal tic, making them more cartoonish while, in true Luck style, making their stories harder to follow. The writing seems aware of this — a jockey with a strong Cajun accent says of the Hispanic horse trainer Escalante, “He foreign. He a little hard to understand.” The show laughs at itself but also at its audience, who are trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. Characters often comment on how overt the characterizations are — Escalante calls The Stuttering Agent "Porky Pig", and Ace calls Escalante "Desi Arnaz". The Handsome Gambler refers to a money-lending racetrack security guard as Shylock, and it’s like, “You might be flattering yourself about your use of archetypes, Luck.”

Still, this self-awareness might be the show’s greatest hope to provide its characters with nuance. Ace has bought a racehorse covertly, holding it in the name of his driver, manservant, and main thug whom he calls “the Greek.” When the Greek visits the stables to check on the horse, Escalante flatters and fawns on him, saying “I’ll call you ‘El Natural.’” “I’ll call you ‘El Bullshitter,’” the Greek replies. Other characters also hint that Escalante might be laying it on thick — “He’s serving it up to the Gringo owners and trainers, cold,” says a racetrack official. Escalante is known not only for his talent as a trainer but his savvy; he is able to control people’s expectations of him and his horses. He and others in Luck are consciously performing, playing into their perceived roles as a way of hiding their true motivations.

The show also finds ways to acknowledge how confounding its subject matter can be. One of the gamblers’ backers (a male prostitute who wears a boater hat and brags that his clients call his penis “the Emperor,” I feel compelled to report) is bewildered by the Pick Six scheme. During the climactic eighth race, he says, “I don’t get it. We bet every horse, who do we want?” forcing them to reiterate the stakes of the scene. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” he whines as they are about to win the two million dollar jackpot. His cluelessness provides the audience with a point of connection in a world that is opaque with lingo, calculations, and specialized knowledge. When he speaks our confusion on the screen, it feels like a moment of mercy.

Luck’s other saving grace is its sophisticated visuals. It is shot beautifully and deliberately, with contrasting styles and palettes for the intersecting domains of the show. Ace exists in a silent world of glass, chrome, marble, and granite. The scenes at the racetrack, by contrast, are frenetic and colorful, and the racetrack setting brilliantly incorporates contrasting visual elements. The grimy stands open onto the vibrant scenery that frames the outdoor track: palm trees, hills, the sky and white sunlight. Nick Nolte’s character, the gentle horse trainer just called “the Old Man,” brings a bit of the pastoral with him by force of spirit. We find him in a green space behind the stables saying to his horse in a gravelly coo, “You don’t know how special you are, do you?” The bucolic scene seems distant from the rest of the track, which is shot with such intensity.

But danger lurks in Luck’s temptation toward the music video effect — the reliance on montage editing, slow motion, and loud music cues, especially in the race scenes, can be so slick as to become sterile. There is a gut-turning slow-motion shot of a horse’s leg snapping in the last race, but the scene is so stylized that it is emotionally removed. As I watched the animal being put down with a giant syringe, I wondered to myself, “Are they seriously playing Sigur Rós right now?”

The first episode of Luck abounds with agonizing dramatic irony. In the last scene, when Ace tells the Greek, “I don't trust anyone, not even myself. You, I give a pass,” we get the feeling that a little too much might be hanging on this relationship. “Alls I’m worried is you relying on me when I’m working out past my depth,” says the Greek, and he almost certainly has reason to be worried. The gamblers’ storyline ends with them discussing grand plans for what they will do with their two million dollar jackpot and ominously deciding not to come forward with the winning ticket until the next day. The Handsome Gambler sings “America the Beautiful” as he watches the final race and it’s clear no one should give these fuck-ups two million dollars. The teaser for the rest of the first season, in addition to introducing five new characters (!), promises a yacht, a bloody ashtray, lines of cocaine, and large wads of money. It’s easy to say what will become of Luck’s dozen plus protagonists: nothing good.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Martha Marcy May Marlene. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Golden Touch" - Araab Muzik (mp3)

"Free Spirit" - Araab Muzik (mp3)

"Electronic Dream" - Araab Muzik (mp3)

In Which That's The Way I Feel About You

Death of a Ladies Man

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Look, I have Reichian therapy in my background. Early on, I had problems with that most common kind of impotence, being quick, suddenness, which is actually a kind of jitter from holding on too hard and not feeling things, which is part of what we’re talking about. It’s all about actually feeling it, not in some locality but in the larger sense of the experience passing through your being. In my lifetime, from World War II on, the world got freer, just by nature. And then [AIDS] came along, now we have the Death Fuck.

- Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson is Erectile Dysfunction. He always has been, in all his films. He is the walking cinematic representation of impotence. The complete embodiment of the concept of Flawed Masculinity insofar as I've come to understand it. Did you know that an obsolete definition for the word impotent is "incapable of self-restraint"? It pleases me more than I'd like to admit watching The Hot Pole hit the brick wall known as Andropause so hard.

At a 1970 Hollywood party, a stoned Dennis Hopper turned to George Cukor - a gentleman of the old, studio school of moviemaking and the director of such classics as Adam's Rib and My Fair Lady-- and muttered, "We're going to bury you. We're gonna take over. You're finished." - from "Aging Bulls" Reason Magazine's review of Peter Biskind's book about Hollywood in the seventies.

See what I'm saying about Jack? The man IS the lack of an erection. Which is why he's so singularly obsessed with getting them onscreen. He finally got to whip out a huge black dildo in The Departed. You can sense Nicholson's glee at finally being free to be a Dirty Old Man, to turn out exactly like his buddy Marlon Brando. Since About Schmidt, he's become one of my favorite Jungian archetypes, the Man in a Flapping Open Bathrobe.

1981, when he was making The Postman Always Rings Twice, with Jessica Lange — a highly sexed-up piece that nonetheless features no nudity whatsoever. Jack, however, was dead set on making it "one of the naughtiest movies" and decided that the solution lay in showing an erection — "this kind of bulging railer" — through his 1940s pleated pants. To that end, he asked director Bob Rafelson to craft him a conventional prosthetic, but no one took him seriously, so when the day to shoot the scene arrived, he found himself empty-handed and irritated. Said Rafelson, "Well, jeez, if you’re so red-hot about this, go upstairs and see what you can do there." And so Jack did, "whipping away," he says, until he realized that some things were beyond even him.

I can only think of a few other Men In Flapping Open Bathrobes right now, Grady Tripp in Wonderboys, and Clare Quilty in Lolita, and the O.G. MIAFOBs King Lear and Job. Isn't Grady the name of the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel in The Shining? Jack's always come off like an arrogant cad, bathrobe flapping open proudly. Now he's a regretful old man in the same old frayed bathrobe, which has lost its matching belt.

Dustin Hoffman has what we call Jewish Overtalking Syndrome:

I've been doing movies since 1967. Have I been involved in movies that had scenes that made this exchange look like nothing? And did we hear stories of Jack Nicholson throwing a television set across the room trying to kill Roman Polanski in Chinatown? Did Bill Murray not pick up the producer who was running Universal and throw her into the lake on What About Bob?" The names keep coming: Gene Hackman, Mel Brooks, Robert Duvall. "We heard these things constantly. And shouldn't that happen if it has to happen? Yes.

Oh plz Dustin, stop trying to get Bill Murray in trouble just because there is not a YouTube video of Bill throwing Laura Ziskin into a lake. Even if there were a video of said incident it would probably be really funny and win him even more cool points for referencing the scene in Purple Rain where Prince makes Apollonia bathe in the rivers of "Lake Minnetonka."

A sidenote, Tom Schulman, who wrote the screenplay for What About Bob also wrote Dead Poets Society, Honey I Shrunk The Kids, and both wrote and directed 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag. Did anyone sense an artistic continuity between those four movies? I am becoming more conscious of things like this all the time.

guys let's just sit on this project till 2009 and call it the hangoverI heard a rumor that the flop Very Bad Things, a movie Comedy Central rotated in a continuous loop during the nineties with 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag, was based on a true bit of Hollywood lore. The story being that some seventies film luminaries, presumably including Polanski, Nicholson, and I think Robert Evans, had a hooker overdose or something at their place and they buried her in the desert Gram Parsons style.

Were there points in the seventies at which Roman Polanski deserved to have a television thrown at him? Certainly. Jack Nicholson still deserves to have a television or two lobbed at him for the pathetic way he treated Anjelica Huston. But everyone loves Jack, even I like him these days now that his Erectile Dysfunction has really kicked in and his palpable sadness about his impending death pours out of him in every interview.

A Pack A Day Habit Makes Jack A Sad Boy:

Having been said to have smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for most of his life, Jack Nicholson has confessed he's worried his smoking habit may have affected his health. "It is not so much that you fear that moment when somebody comes in and says, 'That's it. You're dead. You smoked too much,'" Jack tells the Los Angeles Times. "Well, that's not the real fear. The real fear is going through the process now and thinking, 'I'm dying of stupidity."

He's also desperate to fall in love again now that he's in his wintering years. His personal "bucket list" is "One last big romance." (uh, Lara Flynn Boyle's still probably free?) God Jack that's so cute I just want to squeeze your face! What a funny old man you've become. Did you not see the great film Carnal Knowledge, which you starred in?

I understand the eternal appeal of blunting your sadness with decades of drugs, drinks, smoking packs of cigarettes and whores. But you're so clearly a cool guy underneath it all who just wants to snuggle and gab. You are so dulled from overuse that you've started suffering Sexual Fantasy Block. Maybe you should scale it back a bit and see if that doesn't help.

Is anything more pathetic and poignant than bachelors going through Male Menopause? Somebody send Jack the last three seasons of The Sopranos. He's like an Irish-Catholic version of a Phillip Roth character. Not quite so stubborn, sadder and more willing to admit his mistakes, guilty as fucking fuck. The Irish are a loud, drunk, weepy, guilty, people.

Look, I remember myself as a teenager, so I know I’m not going to be the first parent that ever outsmarted a teenager, and I’m not trying. All I’m going to say is, everything they say is bad for you, pretty much it is bad for you. - Jack's advice to his teenage children.

Here's a rather nice quote from Dustin Hoffman:

One of the constants in my life is that I've never been bored, ever. Depressed, yes. I've been very depressed. I think it's a natural condition. I think we want life to be more than it is, somehow. But I don't know how you can be bored. Sometimes, you will be with someone who you feel is boring and I, as an actor, would say, 'What is the quality that makes that person boring to me?' And that's interesting, to deconstruct it.

Mike Nichols' floppedy The Fortune, starring Nicholson and Warren Beatty as con men, still isn't out on DVD. The studios banked on the stars for success and only gave Beatty the greenlight for Shampoo as part of a deal where he'd also make The Fortune.

My favorite strange but true fact about Jack Nicholson; during the publicity blitz for Chinatown, one reporter digging up Jack's background found out that the woman who had always claimed to be his sister was actually his mother, and the woman he thought was his mom was really his grandmother. Jack had been told his father was dead, but he was alive and drunk in New Jersey. But then it turned out his (grand)mother had probably been knocked up by her manager rather than her husband. Oh Irish-Catholics.

Jack Nicholson's Strange And Reprehensible/Incomprehensible View Of Women:

"These issues between men and women are not psychological. Look, remember what a gland is. Most of these are glandular issues. A gland is what allows that mother to lift that truck off a child. Whatever intelligent design is, it's not going to leave the continuation of the human species up to fashion-crazy, flitting mentalities. It's in those glands. The infatuation cycle of 18 months hasn't changed a lot since the monkeys. Look at the numbers. Eighteen months is nine months doubled. A woman's entire system is set so that when you're having that procreative act with a woman, you're dealing with a being whose actual cycle is nine months. It doesn't have to do with her brain. It has to do with her entire bodily system, which is there to overcome the brain. We don't legislate this stuff. We don't out-think it. You cannot change these fundamental things that we are as human beings--but you can adjust to it."

'Cunt is an acronym.’ ‘For what?’ ‘For can’t-understand-normal-thinking.’ Heh, heh, heh.

God that sounds like one of the grossly outdated sexist jokes from Mad Men. Bleccccch.

Jack on Catholicism:

"I've a very Catholic Irish grandmother, one of the Lynches. She is the root of the family, although my immediate family were failed Irish Catholics. So I had to haltingly investigate Catholicism by myself because nobody asked me to go to church. I was the oldest kid in my First Communion classes. In my opinion, if you're going to be theocratic, Catholicism is the most intelligent belief system. [My family was] Irish, and it manifested itself from an early age. I could always express my opinion, like everybody else, and things got talked about. I wasn't inhibited by anything."

Does anyone really mind that the old Easy Riders and Raging Bulls are being gradually replaced and restocked with Feminist Friendly Hollywood Good Boys like Will Smith and Ryan Gosling? I know I sure don't! I guess I'll be bummed out when my kids are like "Fuck you mom! We're going to the endless slumber party at the White House! President Miley Cyrus was right! Everyone over 30 should be shot point-blank in the face!"

Jack On The Dim Prospect of Finding True Love So Late In Life:

A little later on, both our composures regained, Jack lights up a cigarette, and through an occluding haze I ask him, “Do you think you’re a good guy?”

He doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah, I do. I’m pretty consistently well-intended. It’d be hard for me to recall where I’ve been underhanded.”

“Don’t you think cheating on your girls is kind of – ”

“I didn’t. I didn’t think so, no.”

“You didn’t think what?”

“That it was underhanded. I knew, for instance, when I got married, because of my libido – I was silently emanating to the above, ‘This does not mean there’s not going to be other women in my life. I’m taking certain vows here. [But] between you and me, let me be at least clear.’ There have been many times I’ve been totally sure, not having been put to the test, that it would be no problem for me to be, uh, what do you call it?”

“Monogamous?”

“Monogamous. Yeah. But many times I’ve thought, ‘This is impossible for me.’ Someone once said, ‘It’s not loving that you miss. It’s being loved.’ I don’t have that primary sense. I haven’t given up hope, but most of my friends think I’m a little goofy in that area, which is why I knew I would be singular at this point in my life.”

Awwww....Oh, Jack. Look if you're serious about romance and ready to grow up for the last few years of your life, maybe you ought to call your great friend Diane Keaton. Your scenes in Reds together are so hot that you manage to easily outsex Warren F'ing Beatty and Something's Gotta Give was clearly made just as a ploy to set you up with her again.

You genuinely respect Diane's character and intelligence. That's probably more than you can say about any of the other women in your life including your sister/mother and grand(mom). Chances are good she'd probably tolerate (and might very well be way into) your fantasies about Eleanor Roosevelt. Give it a shot. Stranger love stories have happened in Hollywood.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here.

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