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February 04, 2005
The Grifters
What's grifting? It seems to be something like con-artistry and breaking the rules to your advantage with the object of purely personal gain. If you're such a crook, you're "in the grift". If you're bad at it, you should "get out of the grift". So, that's basically what this movie is about, three people in the grift, Roy, Lily & Myra, and it's about their various ways of grifting, and it's about Roy's desire to get out of the grift. Oh, and it's also about incest.
At first, that may seem like a strange thematic overlay. But then you see the two themes - hustling & incest - running parallel, and they seem to work together seamlessly. The story: Lily is Roy's mom, she had him at age 14, and brought him up in this grifting milieu. There were hints in the movie that she had sexual relations with him before he left home at 17, and then she definitely approaches him sexually at the end of the movie.
More on grifters, then I'll get back to the incest theme: A grifter works purely out of self-interest. Grifters respect each other for not giving a damn about each other and for even besting each other. When Lily in the movie finally revealed to her cruel (but griftingly rational) boss Bobo that she had a (now 25 yr old) kid, he asked "What in the hell are you doing with a kid?" It doesn't make sense to have a kid in the grift-world, because you have to be so intensely self-interested (which ostensibly means you're money-interested, but it seemed in the movie that more important is that a grifter have the "upperhand", to "be the wiser").
Why doesn't it make sense to have a kid in the grift? Because (I'm guessing - I'm not a parent) good parents put the interest of their kids before their own. This is impossible in the grift world. And when Lily approaches Roy sexually at the end of the movie it is purely out of self-interest, so that he'll give her his money. And her doing this sorta thing made sense, when you looked at it from Lily's perhaps blinkered point of view.
Okay, that's part of the movie. Others can comment on other aspects of the story if they like, but the movie got me to thinking about incest. I wonder about our intuition that parent/child incest is bad - what makes us think this? If it is *always* (or almost always) the case that approaching someone sexually is more in *one's own* self-interest than the approachee, then maybe that's why it seems bad for a parent to sexually approach a child whose interest the parent should consider over the parent's own interest. A parent shouldn't be self-interested over a child like this.
And it's often said, when we try to explain what's bad about incest, that the child can't understand what's going on (if the child is young), and in that case it's hard to say sexual approaches are in the child's interest.
In any case, don't have a kid if you're in the grift. - Drew
Posted by lyceum at February 4, 2005 06:49 PM