The text below relates to a Criterion Channel Collection that was available from around November 2023 – January 2024. Unlike the protagonists of the collection, my timings fail me consistently.
The con artist has been cast as one of the leading figures in an age characterized by some as that of ‘grift capitalism’. At its most capacious, grift encompasses instances of brazen fraud – think Theranos – as well as the everyday incongruence between bullish stock market valuations and underlying economic performance – Uber, for example. The manipulation of fantasy as a stimulant for private and commercial investment is not in itself a novel phenomenon. Herman Melville’s satire of speculation and swindle, The Confidence Man, cycles through a series of encounters in which stories are converted into money, written reports exchanged for bank notes, and share certificates issued off the strength of personal anecdotes. Literature, in Melville’s novel, is a machine for making money. For its proponents, the ‘shift to grift’ has become a dominant economic and cultural tendency more recently, a process accelerated by the jobless recoveries that followed the 2008 financial crisis. A key driver, in this regard, is the extension of platform applications, both in their pretension to have staked a claim on the future – on its habits, behaviors, and social forms – but also for their transformation of workers into the micro-entrepreneurs of the gig economy, the personal brands that compete for scarce resources and attention. Surplus capital on side and precarious labor on the other, prove conducive for the hustler, whose schemes attract buy-in from across the class spectrum.
Set against a backdrop of predatory misinformation and malicious engagement, The Criterion Channel’s recent ‘Con Games’ collection offers a somewhat different take on the grifter. Spanning from pre-code films like Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise to Ridley Scott’s millennial Matchstick Men, ‘Con Games’ registers the transformation of the image, comportment, and economy of the con artist in US cinema (with the lone exception of Fabián Bielinsky’s Nine Queens). In a preview of the collection, Terrence Rafferty draws attention to a disjunction between the romantic qualities of the con artist, as repeatedly dramatized by Hollywood, and the popular revulsion felt towards their non-cinematic counterparts in the present – whose ranks include high profile celebrity fraudsters, as well as the anonymous authors of phishing emails. Rafferty speculates that this affective and symbolic divergence can be attributed to an affinity filmmakers feel for fellow manipulators, for virtuosos who know their marks most intimate desires and can transform that knowledge into a profit – or box office success.
Part of the enduring allure of such films can perhaps also be related to their ambiguous portrayal of work, the imaginary, and literary production. The con artist is simultaneously engaged in a seductive refusal of work, as formally recognized employment, and passionately attached to an idea of labor as imaginative play. Refusal, in that the con artist does not take orders from a boss, pays no fealty to a master: their activities are freely determined, unbound from the routine pressures of the office, factory, or household. They are artists who exist relatively autonomous from the wage form and whose practices give shape to fantasies of life beyond the constraints, norms, and standardization imposed by abstract labor. As the story of characters who have declined their assigned class position, the con movie could be said to adapt Chantal Jaquet’s concept of ‘social non-reproduction’ for cinema.
Yet if con artists are not on the clock, neither are they figures of idleness. In contrast to the ‘contrepreneurs’ of social media, they do not seek to draw a passive income from intellectual property, land, or cryptocurrencies. The con artist is instead a producer of signs, a producer whose material is language, communication, and affect. Whilst their preferred milieus are the hotel bar, the casino, the soirée, these are situations not of leisure but work, arenas where cons are set up and pulled off. Understandably, the boundary between work and life, private existence and performance, collapses for many of the con artists featured in ‘Con Games’. The con, with its painstakingly researched back story, bodily mannerisms, and poetics is both their livelihood and indissoluble from their being: they cannot break character without risking the entire enterprise. In this sense, once on a job, there are no breaks, sick days, or annual leave: commitment to the bit is absolute, regardless of its psychic disorientation.
The Argentinian novelist and critic Ricardo Piglia once noted that by making money, the counterfeiter, forger, and alchemist become metaphors for the productive power of workers otherwise dissimulated by capitalist social relations. As presented in ‘Con Games’, the con artist might be seen as a metaphor for immaterial or affective labor, for the labor which takes the production and reproduction of social life as its content. For a con to be executed successfully, its agents must have a generic capacity for capacities: they must have intellectual ingenuity, exhibit personal affability, demonstrate a gift for storytelling, as well as an ability to rapidly adapt scenarios and modify plots as they unfold materially. Far from easy money, the con requires a tremendous exertion of physical and mental energy – a dopamine hit that many come to depend on.
The ambiguous relationship between the elegance of the con and the banality of work is introduced in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, a film grounded in pre-code Hollywood. Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) is a celebrated gentleman thief whose talent, however, lies precisely in the degree to which he can imitate the gestures, knowledge, and conduct of professionals. Gaston’s target is Madame Mariette Collete (Kay Francis), an industrial heiress and perfume manufacturer. Through an initial deception that wins Mariette’s confidence, Gaston scripts a role for himself in her entourage as Mariette’s personal secretary, a position which enables him to set her commercial and private affairs in order. The role demands that Gaston work late, a dedication which first frustrates and later arouses the suspicion of his business and romantic partner, Lily (Mariam Hopkins), who has also finagled a position in Mariette’s staff. In the world of Trouble in Paradise class subjectivities are inverted. The supposed captains of industry are depicted as impractical fops, whilst those steering industrial operations are doing so under false identities, con artists posing as capitalists.
Later installments like House of Games (dir. David Mamet) and Chameleon Street (dir. Wendell B. Harris) continue this association of the con artist with work. Characters in both films rely on confidence, inventiveness, and an intuitive sense of what is lacking in the other, an emptiness they fabricate a language to fulfill. In Chameleon Street, the intellectually restless and laconic William Douglas Street Jr (Wendell B. Harris) defrauds the system itself. Borrowing from the picaresque, William bluffs his way into the media, medical, academic, and legal professions, institutions that would otherwise bar access on account of his race and class background. House of Games, on the other hand, revolves around the psychological manipulation and destruction of Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse), a psychiatrist and best-selling author. Margaret is baited into an affair with Mike Mancuso (Joe Mantegna), who introduces Margaret to the aleatory rush and thrill of the con – an introduction that is in fact elaborately choreographed and sequenced. Whereas Chameleon Street draws attention to the systemic inequalities confronting Black Americans, House of Games transforms the hustler into a cruel and ruthless predator, a cynicism which is at the antipodes of the charm, sophistication, and grace evoked in Trouble in Paradise.
For many of the films presented in the collection, teamwork remains crucial. In this sense, whilst the con movie conforms to the ‘weak state mythology’ sketched out by Jed Esty in The Future of Decline, it does not necessarily promote the related myth of the strong, independent, self-regulating hero. Indeed, in Bielinsky’s Nine Queens, it is the very lone wolf operator who is stung by a group of previously abused associates. The Sting (dir. George Roy Hill), alternatively, presents the grifter as being bound by a code of conduct that verges on chivalric, an archaic form of solidarity distinct from the competitive individualism of the United States. Hunted and seeking revenge, Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) calls on the services of Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), a legendary con artist laying low in a theme park turned speakeasy. Gondorff is a kind of grifter auteur who scripts, designs, acts, and directs an ensemble cast in an epic drama which dupes the mafia and police alike. The grifter troupe redistribute the spoils equitably and, through a simulated showdown, resurrect Gondorff and Hooker into second lives free from state surveillance. If Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s characters are inflected by a nostalgia for social forms that have not yet been subject to industrialization, they nonetheless rely on the proletarianized labor of their fellow conspirators, on characters who have a single line to deliver, a single bodily gesture to perform. Of all the films included in ‘Con Games’, The Sting arguably gets closest to a collective rupture with the atomized everyday world of capitalism.
What consolidates the con movie as a cinematic sub-genre is the omnipotence of literature. It is through an ability to tell convincing stories that con artists circulate their dubious products, market dreams of questionable provenance, and persuade individuals to willingly part with their cash. As Nine Queens emphasizes, the hard power of physical coercion is anathema to the con, which is instead enacted through the insinuating soft power of consensus, through the imaginary and its affection of the body. Scams clinch on a susceptibility to stories. As a cultural figure, the grifter gives expression to a defiant refusal of soulless waged work, whilst also affirming the joyful possibility of making a living through words, language, and collaboration. The con asserts the power of literature in a period that often dismisses the arts as frivolous. On the other hand, the economics of hustle culture, its frenetic pace, intense work ethic, cold instrumentalization of the other, and privatization of reward, seem all too familiar to societies organized by neoliberal austerity. Metaphors for affective labor, the stories, imaginaries, and strivings of the con artist, like the mode of production to which they are attached, need to be transformed and re-articulated as projects for collective emancipation.
Thomas Travers 