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.