ERIKA & GINGER: a thread
#RHOBH
In 1995 a young waitress with dreams of marrying big saw Scorsese's gangster epic CASINO and came to a powerful realization: successful men who make more money than they claim need two things in life, and she certainly couldn't be Joe Pesci.
Ginger was DeNiro's moll, a tough-as-nails former child prostitute in Vegas to make her fortune by talking pretty. Saddled with addiction and an emotional co-dependence on her old pimp, she was a conflicted and riveting character that earned Sharon Stone an Oscar nomination.
Erika wasn't just a fan - she's a Casinohead. She claims it's her favorite film, cosplays scenes for instagram, and hails Ginger (not Stone) as cinema's greatest woman character (not performance from an actress).
It's easy to jump to jokes about how her character winds up - dead in a hotel after trading sex for more drugs. Her appearance is wracked and she's a shell of her former self because "the jig is up." But 2006-era Erika Jayne closer resembles this than she ever will now.
So let's stop joking for a moment. The core of Ginger's story is in the first half of the film where DeNiro's character finds something more than a romantic partner - he finds a collaborator.
Described as "Queen of the Casino," Ginger's at the top of her game when she's doing whatever it takes to help her husband graft more and more money out of unsuspecting marks ripe for a con.
DeNiro concedes that she was perceived to be his peer, matching the kind of scheming a man needs the mob to back with nothing but her looks and the right couple of words.
He makes it explicitly clear that she was a crucial part of his daily operations and a partner in all things, not just marriage. Business is what they shared and valued the most because without her, his was lighter, and without him, she had none to begin with.
Erika was raised in escapism, with a mother hinging her hopes on a kid she had too early. She pushed her into the arts before she could make a choice and raised her to believe the line between fantasy and reality was negotiable. No wonder she and Kyle get along.
When she surrendered to Scorsese's masterful cinematic machination and let her subconscious be reshaped to make an archetype out of a cautionary fable, she adopted the warped logic that turned "running a con" into "earning a living."
She decided long before she met Tom Girardi that she was going to compliment a big-league hustle. Ginger became goals for her long before moving out to LA, and she's so set in this pathetic emulation she's actually moved on from Tom to a CASINO OWNER - a geriatric one, of course.
Her commitment to this character is so complete she'll probably run back to her pimp proxy eventually - won't her mom be so pleased when she finally comes back home to do community theater with her?
And please spare me the defensive garbage about how films don't influence people in this fashion - there's another Scorsese/DeNiro movie that actually prompted a guy to try and kill the President once.
It happens. People like Erika Girardi are proof.
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