Cheap Thrills: Late-Stage Capitalism and Human Nature
Time has made this low-budget gem feel increasingly like a documentary.
I have an acquaintance who more or less believes that no movie worth watching has been made after 1995 or so1. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Getting them to view a film made in the last few years is a Herculean task, as they basically assume it’s going to be disappointing—and due to their confirmation bias, it usually is. As a result they’re unnaturally focused on older media, and have a remarkable knowledge of movies made before 1950, especially old horror movies2.
What amazes me is how they’re able to keep coming up with new films and other creations despite their narrow viewpoint. I tend to view the past as a finite resource—there are only so many movies and TV shows back there, and if you dig long enough you’ll hit the bottom3. That isn’t exactly true, of course; the past is constantly growing. And I’ve also noticed that even stuff I don’t necessarily consider to be part of the past, to be that old, escapes my notice. If I can’t even keep up with relatively recent pop culture, how am I surprised that my friend isn’t comprehensively experienced with several decades’ worth of entertainment?
Time is a distortion pedal. Which leads me to the phenomenon of stumbling over a film or TV show you think of as “recent” and realizing it’s from 2013. Which is what happened to me recently with the film Cheap Thrills.
The Memory Hole
NOTA BENE: As always, I’m gonna spoil this movie gleefully. If you haven’t seen an 8-year old film and don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading, bubba.
What’s weird about time and our perception of it is how wrong we all are on a near-constant basis. I can remember reading about Cheap Thrills when it was originally released. I’m certain I read a review somewhere that intrigued me, and I though, heck, I’d watch that. I even recall keeping an eye out for it. Then it slid off my smooth brain and I forgot about it. So when it turned up on some rando listicle of best horror movies or thrillers or something on streaming services, I thought, oh yeah! that movie.
In my mind, it had been released in 2019, maybe 2018. The year 2013 was almost a decade ago. This blows my mind4.
Naturally, we’re almost 400 words into this essay and I haven’t yet stated my thesis or gotten to any sort of a point, because I am an educated and trained professional writer what knows how to make good the essays and stuff. But if you’ve subscribed to this newsletter you know full well how Jeff Somers rolls, so you also won’t be surprised to learn that there is no complaints department5.
So:
Cheap Thrills. The reason the date of this film’s production is such a marvel to me is because the film can be seen as an indictment of the Gig Economy, despite the fact that in 2013 the Gig Economy was in its cultural infancy. Yes, Uber existed and you can make the argument that gig work has been a thing for more than a century, but in 2013 it wasn’t as pervasive and universal as it is today. Yet Cheap Thrills works perfectly as a metaphor for the horrors of gig work—the dehumanization of labor, the way those who control capital exploit laborers, the exhausting nature of side hustles6.
Of course, in a larger sense that means the film also works as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism, of which the Gig Economy is just a symptom.
Boiling a Frog
If you haven’t seen this gem of darkness, here’s Cheap Thrills in a nutshell: A failed writer named Craig (Pat Healy) loses his job just as he receives an eviction notice on the apartment where he lives with his wife and child7. He goes to a bar to drown his sorrows, where he meets an old high school buddy, Vince (Ethan Embry). Their reunion is a little awkward8, and is interrupted by Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Sara Paxton), who are celebrating Violet’s birthday. Slowly, Colin begins offering cash rewards to Vince and Craig for various pranks and stunts9. These start off simple—who can drink a shot of tequila fastest, who can get a girl at the bar to slap them—and then begin to escalate until we reach extremely demented and horrifying levels.
What’s great about the script and the performances is how well they calibrate. Colin is gregarious and relatively polite. He enjoys the misery he’s inflicting, but he’s fair—no one is compelled to do anything, and he works hard to keep up the party atmosphere, the fiction that this is all in good fun. And Vince and Craig’s desperation doesn’t show immediately, either. Initially Vince is in it for the easy cash and the fun, while Craig hesitates and hangs back, put off by the whole thing10. As they start to smell real money, however (and as the drugs handed out by Colin like candy start to take hold) they become willing to debase themselves more and more—and turn on each other.
The story is classic frog boiling. The dares and pranks escalate slowly, always pushing Vince and Craig to go a little further into the rabbit hole—but never too far. Things stay relatively benign for a surprisingly long time considering the clear air of menace Colin and Violet have wrapped around them like a cloak. The slow pace of mounting horror and the uneasy relationship between Vince and Craig really sells their descent. The dares are do-able, until they shouldn’t be, and the growing drug-fueled animosity between the two men goes a long way towards explaining why they’d keep going. As anyone knows, the greatest motivator in the universe is thinking someone you despise is going to get something over on you11.
Low Budget Misery
Then you notice how depressingly little money these guys are getting. Sure, two hundred bucks to whoever can hold their breath the longest seems like a lot of money in the moment. But then you start to realize that even if the dares stay at that level, spending your night dancing like a monkey for the entertainment of rich assholes and walking home with two, three thousand dollars doesn’t seem like a lot. The energy expended isn’t commiserate with the income it generates—in precisely the same way that driving an Uber around for twelve hours in order to make less than minimum wage (once you deduct expenses and wear and tear on your vehicle and consider the health implications) is a raw deal. Yes, you’re making money. No, it’s not at all fair or dignified.
Once you view the dares that Vince and Craig endure for cash as gigs, once you imagine them as slightly more dystopian versions of Mechanical Turks or Task Rabbits, the whole movie crackles with sinister energy—because there’s not much difference. When you get to the part where Vince and Craig are bidding against each other over who gets to cut off their finger for the lowest payout, you’re in capitalist hell.
Horror—and this movie is a horror movie—depends on finding a thread to our reality, our actual existence, and soaking it in dread. Cheap Thrills plays on the fact that almost everyone watching is selling their time—their lives—hour by hour, and what we do for that living is increasingly terrible12. The film simply presents the question: If you’re a gig worker dependent on lowest-bidding for shit work from “clients,” what will you do when market forces get your income down to the lowest possible number and you’re already working 100 hours a week?
The Fallacy of Sunk Costs becomes a physical force later in the story as both Vince and Craig decide that after going through so much pain and suffering they can’t walk away empty-handed. The fact that the $250,000 Craig eventually “wins” by murdering Vince isn’t life-changing money is just salt in the wound13. Sure, that’s enough money to live off of for a few years. Or, if Craig gets a job, it’s a nice safety net, or possibly the seed of a solid investment strategy. But it’s not like Craig, after cutting off a finger, betraying his moral code, eating dog meat, and killing an old friend, is set for fucking life.
That’s the true horror of the story: These two guys demean and destroy themselves for just enough cash to get by on. That’s the gig economy in a nutshell, and the film is a prescient vision of its lowest depths, where there is no light and the pressure is crushing. Anyone who has tried to add a side hustle14 to an already shitty day job, anyone who has been offered a penny a word to write a white paper, anyone who has to be polite to assholes in exchange for theoretical tips knows exactly how that feels.
Me, personally, I wouldn’t cut off any digits or murder anyone for cash. I would, however, do a variety of humiliating dances that can be filmed and uploaded to the Intrawebs. In case any billionaires reading this are wondering.
Next week: ‘The Chair’ and lazy endings
It’s not just movies. If you have a curmudgeon like this in your life, you know the underlying thesis is that civilization itself is on the downswing and coincidentally has been ever since there stopped being shows on TV they enjoyed.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard a variation on the phrase “the effects are primitive but really impressive” when discussing some 1937 clunker.
“If you dig long enough you hit bottom” is also my House Words.
I am increasingly convinced that I keep dozing off for months or years and no one has the heart to tell me. Eitehr that or my existence is actually an Owl CReek Bridge-style death rattle, and this is just my brain cells dying.
Also: No refunds.
As a freelance writer who, early in his career, took on writing 1,200 catalog descriptions of sex toys, I know gig economy exhaustion very well.
I like the fact that Craig’s writerly ambitions are only vaguely referenced throughout and not harped on. The vast majority of writers have put aside their novels to work straight jobs in order to support themselves, and making Craig’s literary ambitions background material feels very right.
Incidentally, it turns out that Pat Healy and Ethan Embry didn’t get along well during the shoot, and so a lot of their animosity towards each other in-character was informed by the fact that they hated each other.
The film owes an obvious if unofficial debt to Roald Dahl’s famous story Man from the South, which is excellent and you should 100% read.
Craig is trapped, initially, by politeness: He clearly wants to leave, but is uncomfortable pissing people off. I felt this aspect of the character harder than anything else in the film: If you doubt someone can be forced into doing something they don’t want to do through simple peer pressure, I am here to tell you that you are wrong.
This is why I publish books: So I can write nasty emails to other authors.
Unless you’re a Master Distiller. In that case, your life is awesome.
I am increasingly becoming Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, still impressed by the idea of ONE MILLION DOLLARS when the fact is that $1,000,000 is the new $100,000.
The greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing us that working two jobs is something fun that can be described with the words “side hustle.”