American Culture Is Trash Culture

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

No kid needs to watch a movie about a Manhattan prostitute who kills one of her johns. But I did, once, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Not because I was on the Death Star or Krypton, but because I’d been plunked down in a drama whose opening sounds are rattling chains and the chattering of Black women’s voices. “La di da di,” somebody intones. OK, I thought, something’s off. The camera inches downward to survey an array of latte, caramel, coffee and chestnut skin, leaning, lying on the floor, in sundresses and hot pants, languishing. Somewhere, a liquid trickles. A toilet just flushed, and the colors here would match the ring around the bowl. The shot keeps going until it hits a logical barrier: jailhouse bars.

Then a guard calls out a bunch of names, and bodies rise, form a line to head up a set of stairs toward a light. Gutierrez, Luna. Washington, Tyra. Jones, Arabella. The top of somebody’s head makes an expectant pivot toward the guard: Call mine. When he gets to Kirk, Claudia, the movie matches the name with a face: Barbra Streisand’s. Our murderer and prostitute. The drabness of it all emits a ... a sheen, as if the grime had a halo — her. I vaguely sensed that Streisand’s casting triggered the movie’s offness. I’d never seen such an innately glamorous person give herself over to the sordid, seedy, salacious approach of a movie like this — a movie with the nerve to call itself “Nuts” — and do it with this much lewdness and vaudeville. Why flirt with Richard Dreyfuss, her brand-new, court-appointed lawyer, when she can just flash him? The wrongness of that felt ludicrously right.