Little Atomies #3: Match Me, Sidney

Thus do I ever make my fool my purse.

A recent sick-in-bed rewatch of Sweet Smell of Success confirmed its status as one of the sharpest movies ever made about downtown New York or anywhere else, certainly the best depiction of parasitism, or commensalism, between cultural journalist (Burt Lancaster as the Ba’al-like newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker) and sniveling publicist (Tony Curtis as the perfectly amoral rodent Sidney Falco). Their relationship cannot be called mutualism—the columnist can live without the publicist, as Hunsecker barks in an early scene, a proposition that does not signify the other way around—but they use each other in ways that electrify the wet streets of Manhattan, powering the neon of a dozen raucous jazz clubs, the bare bulb of a cigarette girl’s tenement room, and the skyline view from the penthouse of a born winner.

It’s a love story such as I have never seen represented in any other film: the content creator and the press agent, confidants and enemies, lashed together against that infinitely greater enemy, irrelevance. Maybe Iago and Othello would be a close match if Othello were not witless and instead knew the score, divining every scheme of Iago’s in advance. They remain similar in that Iago/Falco (an unlikely coincidence of vowels) is an advisor and courier so far beneath his better in every respect that enmity and hatred must occur, not out of any special personal reason—not even, exactly, out of envy—but out of physical forces of social inequality, the way static electricity is generated whenever two surfaces cross a threshold of energy imbalance that overcomes their distance. Few films have so adroitly depicted this resentment of class and power—the Nietszchean ressentiment at the heart of American culture, the evils it drives both men to—as a kind of clout altitude sickness, locating it precisely in the mechanisms of mass media, and in the emergence of those high-energy states of “hot” and “not.”

The difference today—the vibe shift—is that cultural journalists and columnists are, if not quite worthless, then at least subservient to all other actors, including their subjects and intercessors. Comment itself is overrepresented in the landscape, its coin debased and subject to hyperinflation, just as there is now a glut of text, a surplus of opinion, and no one feels they need to be told what to like or laugh at by clever writers anymore. Thrashing against their own irrelevance, culture writers become credulous. Any new scene will “inevitably attracts the dorks and posers as well as orbiting critics and commentators, who participate through rejection and are symbiotic or parasitic, because they cannot help advertising their proximity even as they criticize.” In other words, they “will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are.” Hunsecker’s awesome power is as removed from our contemporary moment as the divine right of kings. Whereas the role of the press agent—to curate, to know, to assemble a style, to divide the worthy from the unworthy, to hype and pump or dismiss from sight, in short to manage image—is ascendant. If Sweet Smell of Success were made today, its power dynamic would need to be inverted: a columnist desperate for relevance chasing the flack who dangles choice baubles of cool before him. Today it is the publicist who is the stylish writer and the journalist who is the lame stenographer, dull steward of the downtown scene.