Overview
You get up two and a half million, any asshole in the world knows what to do. You get a house with a twenty-five year roof, an indestructable Jap economy shitbox, and you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes, and that’s your base, get me, that’s your Fortress of Fuckin’ Solitude, and you are for the rest of your life at a level of “fuck you”. Someone wants you do do something? “Fuck you”. Boss pisses you off? “Fuck you”. Own your house, have a few bucks in the bank, don’t drink, that’s all I have to say to anybody at any social level…The wise man’s life is based around “fuck you”. The United States of America is based on “fuck you”. You’re a king? You have an Army, the greatest Navy in the history of the world? “Fuck you, blow me”. We’ll fuck it up ourselves.
With inflation, that number might be a bit higher now than it was in 2014, but the concept prevails. The scene with this quote is probably the best part of the movie, with the rest of it being slightly too goofy to take seriously as some kind of existentialist meditation on the relationship between talent, identity, and purpose.
James Bennett is born as the grandson of the 17th richest man in California and grows up to be an assistant professor of literature who published a book that made $17,000 in royalties. He’s born with virtually every kind of privilege imaginable, but he also realizes that his life has no real consequences or stakes since his privileges will always catch him. It’s not until he’s able to burn down his life in a radical fashion that introduces insane consequences that he can experience a meaningful choice, and through that, experience the freedom to choose. Jim says at one point, “I need to have no past. If I can get to nothing, then I can start over.”
He suffers from what we might call a black-and-white, all-or-nothing cognitive distortion in which there is only prodigal talent, defined by perfectionism, and worthless mediocrity. Frustrated by his own mediocre position in life and failure to meet his own standards of greatness despite his overwhelming privilege, he sets out to destroy everything in his life irreparably so that anything that comes after is entirely his. He destroys himself to feel free and start again through tabula rasa, or a blank slate. His career, his relationships, his reputation, all of it must go to avoid being tainted by the expectations of the legacy that came before. One of his first lectures we see involves him lamenting the unequal distribution of talent among the human race, such that someone can be given all the privileges to succeed and ostensibly live a comfortable life, but they may never approach something like the “highest level” of their art or field. On the other hand, someone might be born into a family caught in the intergenerational cycles of poverty and trauma, but they may also retain an unbelievably competitive talent that opens up that “highest level” to them. We in the audience never really have a reason to sympathize or root for the protagonist to succeed in his freedom, though it was surely intentional. He starts out with a winning hand, refuses to find happiness or contentment within it, and actively sabotages himself while recklessly involving those around him.
Still, I can’t say that there aren’t relatable elements to that core theme, despite its sometimes awkward, sometimes silly execution. The film openly flaunts its inspiration from Hamlet and Camus’ The Stranger to frame Jim’s struggle as a wealthy heir who despises the superficial legacy he inherit due to their fixation on the absurd indifference of the universe in giving him any true meaningful talent, at least according to his own standards of talent.
If we want to take an Eastern lens, we look at the Hindu trinity of creation, preservation, and destruction, destruction is not just the antithesis of creation; instead it serves as the mechanism through which room is made for creation to begin again. Creation is often a reckless act of the imagination while destruction is often a targeted act of modifying the balances within reality. Creation is responsible for the unequal, uncontrollable distribution of talent between individuals regardless of the circumstances of their birth. Destruction is responsible for deciding what’s worth keeping as a legacy and what’s worth relegating to the ashtrays of history. Jim participates in destruction because he can’t find meaning in his creation, in the hopes that after the destruction he can create free of the perfectionism and expectations of greatness engendered in his privilege upbringing.
There’s a logic to the film, and if you don’t think about it too hard and accept Mark Wahlberg’s general goofiness, you can enjoy it. Addiction comes up in the movie a few times, once when John Goodman’s character says that he thinks alcoholics are crybabies who can’t handle their liquor and once when Jim’s mother says she doesn’t really believe Jim’s compulsive risk-taking constitutes a disease. It’s not really focused on the nature of addiction itself or the identity of a gambler as much as the logic of self-destruction that Jim indulges through gambling. He raises this point himself once, asking that if you found him with a needle in his arm saying he wasn’t a junkie, would you believe him? Addiction is always deeper than just the physiological compulsions to use something against your own conscious wishes, though that is still a necessary part of the pathological concept of addiction as a disease. But someone can self-destruct, self-sabotage, and seek to destroy their self-image through addictive processes even without having an addiction, so I don’t think there’s too much to dig into from that perspective.