There Once Was a Cautionary Tale: "The Color Of Money"

I think it's often the case that the more difficult a scene in a film is to understand, the more important it is to the film. Creating (and understanding) meaning in narrative art is a tricky business, and scenes that are hard to think through often represent places where meaning is at its most dense and tangled, where the story itself is trying to understand what it's up to. Because of this, those are the moments that must be grappled with if one wants to try to come to terms with a story, or with the elements of human life a story is trying to get at.

In this vein, there's a scene in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986) that has always remained opaque for me, no matter how many times I see the film.

It comes just past the halfway point in the movie. Paul Newman's character is "Fast" Eddie Felson, a once-great pool player who was forced into retirement many years ago when he refused to serve as a money making tool for a gambler named Bert Gordon (in the 1961 film The Hustler). Now much older, Eddie has taken a younger player named Vince (Tom Cruise) under his wing, along with Vince's girlfriend Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). On the surface, Eddie has offered to play stakehorse for Vince, bankrolling him in games and teaching the young couple to properly hustle pool.

Beneath this, though, Eddie is using Vince for his own purposes. This parallels the way Bert (impeccably played all those years ago by George C. Scott) was attempting to use the younger Eddie, with one significant difference. For Bert, the arrangement was about making money and asserting control. For Eddie, the arrangement is less about finances than it is about trying to recapture something he has lost.

What is that something? For the moment, call it a sense of purity.

In the scene that confounds me, Eddie has grown tired of trying to teach (or use) Vince and goes out one day to hustle pool on his own. He runs into a friendly player named Amos (Forest Whitaker), who is good but doesn’t seem to be at Eddie's level. They're playing for money when Eddie sees Vince and Carmen enter the pool hall. After this, Eddie gets hustled by Amos. In doing so, he exposes himself as a mark – someone who's fallen for the exact technique he's been trying to teach Vince – in a humiliating way.

Vince and Carmen watch as Eddie breaks down after the game, cursing his own stupidity. His anger at his own embarrassment precipitates a fight in which Eddie ends his relationship with them, claiming that he doesn't have anything left to teach Vince and that they would be better off on their own.

So why is this sequence confusing to me? Because I've never been sure how completely to trust what is happening.

There's something overwrought in it, an eruption of emotion that seems out of place in a film about a man in Eddie who makes his money through always being in control. This eruption seems so jarring that I've never been sure if Eddie has really been hustled by Amos, or if he has set up a kind of hustle himself, allowing himself to lose money to Amos as a way of initiating the turmoil that will let him push Vince out on his own.

It's this indeterminacy that makes the moment so pivotal; and the more I've watched the movie, the more I've come to think that the indeterminacy itself is the point.

Eddie is both hustling and being hustled, both in control and not in control. The density of meaning in the scene comes from the way it reaches a finger down into the murkiness to probe for the heart of the matter: it’s a film about corruption and purity, about whether they can ever be separated, and very directly about the role money plays in these things.

At the opening of the film, Eddie is making his living as a liquor salesman, plying Chicago bar owners with knock-off whiskey they can slip into bottles to imitate the more expensive stuff. He has plenty of money, drives a Cadillac, and is in love with bar owner Janelle (Helen Shaver). But there's something missing.

This changes when he meets Vince, who's young and innocent and a tremendous pool player – in obvious ways, a younger version of Eddie himself. Eddie takes Vince and Carmen on the road in his Cadillac with the goal of getting Vince seasoned before entering him in a tournament in Atlantic City. The problem is that this seasoning includes learning how to manipulate other people – losing games intentionally, pretending to be something you're not – and this goes against Vince's nature.

Unlike Carmen, who is street-wise and knows the score, Vince doesn't understand duplicity. Pool is one of the two things he's great at (the other being a video game) and he simply wants to play as well as he can.

It's this resistance to falsity that finally causes Eddie to cut Vince and Carmen loose at the end of the scene I mentioned above. After they're gone, Eddie goes back to his roots as a pool player, practicing and hustling people in pool halls, and then enters the Atlantic City competition himself. There, he runs into Vince and Carmen again, and finds that their time alone on the road has changed them. Vince has embraced the idea of hustling, and sees as much art in dumping a game as he once did in winning one.

When Eddie and Vince inevitably meet in the tournament, Vince does just this: he places a big bet against himself and throws the game. He makes a killing off of it, but Eddie is furious when he finds out, because he thought he beat Vince straight up. This, chasing greatness at the game rather than simply making money, is what Eddie has discovered he really wants to do. The film ends with them playing pool against each other, giving each other their best game, with Eddie announcing triumphantly that "I'm back."

At play in all of this is a complex dynamic of character juxtaposition. Vince begins as an innocent who plays pool to figure out who the best is; he ends up as a hustler, less interested in the purity of the game than he is in using it to make money. Eddie charts the opposite course. He begins as a hustler selling imitation whiskey and seeing pool as just another way to earn a buck; he uses Vince as a way to regain some measure of innocence – meaning, in the film's terms, a pure love of the game – and ends up as someone who wants to play just to see who the best is.

In some sense, then, the film is about corruption and redemption: Eddie's redemption comes at the cost of Vince's corruption. But things are not quite as simple as that.

The primary reason for this is that the terms of the film can't be reduced to an equation along the lines of love of the game being good and hustling being bad, because of the complications of money.

The hustle itself has its own claims to purity. It's an art form, a dance to be mastered. "Money won," Eddie famously notes, "is twice as sweet as money earned." Which is to say that in the vision of the film, the quest for money (in the form of the hustle) is intertwined with the quest for pool greatness (that purity Vince is searching for at the beginning and Eddie is searching for at the end) almost all the way down to the foundations of the latter.

And here's the rub. How much weight do we assign to the "almost" in the closing of that previous paragraph? Exactly how far down do the tendrils of money reach, at what cost, and in what ways?

To return to the scene in which Eddie plays against Amos, at stake are two questions. The first is whether Eddie gets hustled by Amos or is pulling a hustle himself. Has he lost his touch and become a mark? Or is it the start of his redemption? Is it real weakness or has Eddie, out of regret for the way he's been using Vince for his own ends, set up Vince and Carmen to see him as weak so they'll accept the fact that they don't need him anymore?

As I said above, I think the answer lies somewhere between these two. Eddie doesn’t really need an excuse to cut Vince and Carmen loose. And there's something in the fury of his reaction that seems to signal that he has really made a mistake.

On the other hand, the camera work clearly indicates that Eddie is aware of their presence throughout, perhaps even playing a role for them: a reaction shot shows us that he sees them enter, and when he’s beating himself up afterwards they are visible in the background. Beyond this, the incident serves to get Eddie where he wants to be: alone again, so he can commit himself to re-learning the game. Which is to say that when a hustler gets what he wants, one should always suspect that the moves behind it were intentional.

So perhaps Eddie has partially been hustled and partially allowed himself to be hustled, sensing that there is something in it for him. I don’t think a definitive answer is necessary (or possible); what’s important is to try to articulate a sense of the situation Eddie has found himself in.

This, in turn, leads us to the second question, which more difficult to articulate although it's certainly suggested by the title of the film. Loosely, it goes something like this: how are we to come to terms with the role of money itself, and is it possible to defend our souls against it?

To begin with, we might ask why exactly Eddie has been humiliated in the scene? It's not because he lost to Amos. It's because he has been (or has pretended to be) a sucker. If there had been no money on the line, Eddie might have been forced to admit he was wrong about his ability to judge Amos's abilities, and his own, but this would not have caused nearly as much pain. It's the money he lost that stings: if money won is twice as sweet as money earned, then the inverse is also true.

Additionally, we might also note that one of the trick shots Amos uses to win money from Eddie is a virtual replica of a shot that Eddie himself once used to make money off a mark in the opening sequence of The Hustler. Which is to say that what Eddie is facing in this sequence is at least in part the humiliation of becoming what he once despised. He is now the mark, the weak character he himself used to win money off. This parallels the way he has also become Bert, the parasitic stakehorse living off the talent of others.

So at play here is a struggle with the past, or more precisely a struggle with the dreams of the past and the realities of the present. And what lies between the young Eddie all those years ago, and the aging Eddie now? Money.

At the end of The Hustler, Eddie refused to reduce the game he loved to a quest for profit. But the result of this idealistic refusal has been virtually the same as if he'd never made it at all: he has found himself in a position, as a liquor salesman, devoted to that exact same enterprise. And in trying to free himself from that life, in trying to regain the purity of his love for the game by tutoring (using) Vince, he has instead achieved the exact opposite. He has taken Vince's purity and shown that the only way forward, the only way into "the big time," is to subvert skill and belief in the nobility of the game itself to the pursuit of money.

The fury that erupts in the scene with Amos, that is, comes from the inability to escape the pervasion of money.

The double-bind presented by the film, and the one Eddie is trying to escape, is that on the one hand, the goal of the characters at their most noble is simply to be excellent at something, unencumbered by the question of whether or not there is profit involved. On the other hand, the only way the world – and perhaps they themselves – will let them judge excellence is by the question of whether or not they are profiting from it.

Virtually every game in the entire film ends with an exchange of money, bills being handed over or laid down on the table in forfeit. The inescapable question – and it will always remain a question, not so much un-answerable as monolithic – is whether one can ever separate the terms we've been so far conceiving of as discreet: purity and money.

There are several final notes to append to this. The first is that it lends, I think, an unavoidably bittersweet note to the end of the film. When Eddie announces that he's back, he’s in some sense declaring that he has returned to his more idealistic younger self, who once wanted to beat Minnesota Fats, and now wants to beat Vince, just to prove that he can do it.

But is he really back? Or has he simply returned to an earlier moment in the cycle? We have seen Eddie himself at this stage before, and have seen what happened to him. We have also seen Vince at this stage, and have seen what happened to him. What right do we, or Eddie, have to think things will turn out differently this time around? There is to Eddie's declaration an air as much of incipient tragedy as of rehabilitation.

The second note is simply an observation about the relevance of all this to our current moment. If we are to read the film as I've presented it as a kind of cautionary tale about the role of money in our lives and quests, then the issue of contemporary relevance seems unavoidable.

We live in a world radically different than that of 1986 (or 1961). In the main, the notion that there might be a troubling conflict between our passions and our profits, that money might have a corrupting influence or be in conflict with purity, is today ridiculous.

Athletes are lauded to the extent that they turn their talents into financial empires. Film studios are media arms of corporate conglomerates. To launch one’s own product line is to reach the pinnacle of cultural success. Movies, music, ideas and even thought itself are all reduced to "content" – certainly one of the most revealing words of our age – everything just another widget to be packaged and sold.

Everywhere we turn we are encouraged to leverage our loves into dollars. Our very personas – particularly but not exclusively through our self-presentations on the internet – are warped into money making schemes. And this reduction is not mourned but celebrated.

Does this all render The Color of Money archaic, a relic of another time and a different relationship with money? Or does it turn the film into a kind of sad prophecy, a vision in which we're all hustlers, proclaiming our purity and doomed to realize that in the end it will all be reduced to chasing a buck at each other's expense? Probably both.

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