Ericka Beckman: The House Always Wins

Appropriating the visual and musical aesthetics of a low-budget kids’ program, Ericka Beckman produces one of the great films about capital. You The Better is a joyful nightmare, a hallucinatory romp. For most of the film, we watch a group of uniformed players in a pitch-black space. They navigate a series of games, which share elements in a free-associative manner, but which otherwise have few clear rules or objectives. The players are all on one team, playing against a depersonalised opponent, but sometimes they seem to turn on one another, or bicker amongst themselves. The film abounds with imagery of houses and real estate developments, roulette wheels and coins, roller coasters and bowling balls. Beckman’s ever-shifting imagery invites all manner of metaphorical associations. To take just one: the house as a dwelling, the house as a commodity, the house as a ‘home’ position which the players sometimes try to reach, the house as a Monopoly-esque ‘piece’ in the game of capital accumulation, the ‘House’ as a euphemism for the operators of a casino or gambling racket. In this way, Beckman takes a single word or metaphor and lets it mutate again and again, colliding with other mutating metaphors to produce a remarkably dense text from the film’s relatively sparse plot and setting. The persistent themes of skill and chance, points and goals, evoke everything from real estate speculation, to primitive arcade games, to pro sports and their lucrative betting markets, to the derivatives exchanges where capital bubbles most intensely, all through the progression of ingeniously simple ball games. 

Life, the film seems to say, is a game, and a gamble, where the rules are never clear and the odds are never in your favour. No matter the sense, the house always wins. Capital, that depersonalised agent, embodied here by an endless succession of spinning wheels and glowing icons, continuously tricks and outmanoeuvres the human players. In an instant, winning strategies become losing ones, and those who don’t adapt are doomed to fail. As Beckman sings, “it’s got its own motion / By standing in the same place, I keep moving closer / to where I failed before.” Like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, the players can’t stop or rest for fear of sliding backwards, wiping out what little progress they’ve made. The capital-game sets the pace and makes the rules. It seems even to constitute the very universe the players inhabit, their literal home. Because of this, it can be comically flagrant in its manipulation of the rules, as when the players scramble repeatedly toward a coin-shaped hoop that flips and jumps away whenever they approach. Thus we are invited to understand capital not as a player like the other, human players, but as like a hybrid game and player, which is both everywhere and nowhere, and which is capable of shaping the humans’ reality towards its own inhuman interests. As game, it permits individuals to score and accumulate ‘points’, but these are tokens which only have value within its own system. As player, only it truly wins.

In the ‘Apparatus of Capture’ chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari reimagine capital as like a Turing machine, ‘calculating’ itself from certain, given axioms of accumulation and exchange. Yet it is a machine of a mutating kind, which is also capable of adding or subtracting axioms on the fly to ensure its own perpetual function, never terminating at a fixed ‘result’. Thus, capital ceaselessly absorbs emergent pockets of anti-capitalist resistance, re-articulating them as new ‘axioms’ of its own operation, and assigning them a value within its marketplace. However, if these axioms are what constrain and coordinate human activities, insofar as they distribute different forms of labour and wealth, and determine who receives certain opportunities and who does not, would it not be more apt to formulate them as the rules of a game? A game which constantly ‘cheats’ against its players, which pits them against one another and fixes the terrain on which they play. As Deleuze and Guattari note, capitalism names that game in which all other games, all local organisations of production, become isomorphic. Even socialist states participate in global capitalism. In this way, inconstant and inconsistent modes of production are joined into a smooth stratum. Capital finds equivalences between heterogeneous terms; the terms themselves form series which constitute its body, though it itself appears nowhere among them. Thus, capital does not seek to transform what is pre- or extra- or even anti-capitalist; rather it depends on them for its own existence. All it needs is to assign every thing, every activity, and every production a value or  ‘score’, to distribute ‘points’ in a way that cements its own authority as the game of games. 

It is this logic which Beckman captures so well. One moment, the players hit a glowing green house to score a coin. The next moment, they hit it to stop a spinning wheel. Next, they have a choice: to hit the green house, or the red? And what if they miss altogether? Are the bright yellow balls they roll and throw mere props of the game, or transmutations of the golden coins they were winning just a moment ago? In this universe, everything seems transformable, exchangeable. Take two points further apart in the series, and they appear to have nothing in common. Yet each links to the next by a lateral translation, and the totality has a certain, surreal coherence. The players devise strategies in response to each new transformation of the game, but the capital-game enfolds every strategy into itself. It is essential, for the game to retain its significance, that it remain unpredictable, that it incorporates emergent strategies as markets do, and mutates toward a new form in which such strategies are nullified. In this way, the game is perpetually unknown; the winning strategy is always the next one. 

For all this, You The Better ends on a seemingly chipper note. Having settled on a strategy of rolling balls to the mysteriously-appearing ‘One-Armed Bandit’, the players appear to have made some progress, and the house soon runs out of tokens. For the moment, things are finally looking up. In the final shot of the film, the game elements have reassembled themselves into a wide, almost goofy smile—the grinning face of capital, which finally appears not as player, but in the very fabric of the film’s reality. Yet there is something purgatorial about this ending, as though it feeds back into the beginning. Have the players won at all? Or have they just circled the board once more?