RadixJournal - Darren Aronofsky： Caught Stealing (2025)

00:00:00.000 It's also fortuitous that we watch this with Pi.

00:00:03.680 That was also just a coincidence.

00:00:04.920 I just suggested that we sort of bookend Aronofsky, his latest film, and his first film, which is really a rough student film, Pi.

00:00:15.020 And it's fascinating because these films, basically, this film takes place in 1998.

00:00:22.780 And that is around the time when Aronofsky was filming Pi.

00:00:27.820 and he actually grew up in brooklyn but i would i would presume as he got older he might have

00:00:33.440 gone and lived in the lower east side uh for a little bit there are actually a lot of scenes

00:00:38.600 that are maybe even i would actually say conscious reenactments of pie so i think

00:00:46.260 but it also has touches of the wrestler as well right because he's similar now he he has a better

00:00:54.260 outcome than the wrestler obviously uh he's not made the sacrifice as the wrestlers made the

00:01:00.180 sacrifice uh natalie uh uh portland's character portman natalie portman's character is made a

00:01:07.000 sacrifice in the black swan uh this character doesn't appear to be made a sacrifice he appears

00:01:13.280 to he appears to sacrifice the jews effectively he steals home at the end you know yeah for the

00:01:19.760 baseball metaphor he kind of gets away with it which is remarkable um but anyway so there's a

00:01:27.820 scene where he's being um chased by the uh hasidic jewish mobsters through a uh convenience store

00:01:37.700 which i it's probably not the same store but it's just a mirroring of the the a very similar scene

00:01:45.680 and pie i think that was probably conscience conscious also uh when he's sort of you know

00:01:51.200 in the hero's journey where he hits rock bottom and all is lost uh he actually takes the bus to

00:01:57.680 coney island and he's at the same beach uh where the protagonist of pi is uh just sort of like

00:02:04.800 you're at the end of the world basically if new york is a world this is it this is the edge of it

00:02:11.120 And he sort of hits rock bottom and then admits some harsh truths about himself and picks himself up

00:02:18.320 and then turns the tables on these horrible gangsters.

00:02:22.880 So this film, I'll just mention, is based on a novel.

00:02:29.520 And the novelist is named Charlie Houston.

00:02:32.480 And I had never heard of Charlie Houston before.

00:02:36.180 but apparently he is a rather successful novelist and he's written some comic books

00:02:42.100 as well and uh done some other things and charlie houston is given sole credit for the screenplay

00:02:49.820 however i i think that giving him credit for the screenplay on aronofsky's part was a sort of

00:02:58.440 hat tip uh you know token to credit this man with coming up with the character and the story

00:03:06.760 uh this sort of interesting guy who's uh kind of reminds me of fletch the

00:03:12.660 ne'er-do-well detective uh he's a baseball fan ne'er-do-well kind of screwed up big time

00:03:21.920 but is also redeemable and and attractive and relatable and and so on um so i i think that was

00:03:31.540 sort of a hat tip to charlie houston uh because there there are some very interesting naming

00:03:38.080 conventions and then also there are just striking differences from the novel that i don't think

00:03:45.260 charlie houston would have made without the influence of darren aronofsky now again i admit

00:03:52.140 i've not read the novel i just learned about the novel's existence last night actually but

00:03:57.100 um there are but i've looked up these major differences there's a bit of a time difference so

00:04:03.260 the novel takes place in 2000 this takes place in 1998 i don't know if that's significant maybe it

00:04:09.420 it just centers it around pie it's like pies black mirror pies photographic negative or something

00:04:17.380 who knows the other similarity is the on maybe just a purely aesthetic level but there's probably

00:04:24.100 there could even be a deeper symbolic emphasis that um uh that aronofsky's making but the

00:04:31.380 the detective is remarkably similar to the uh one of the antagonists in yes and black woman

00:04:38.840 who are playing Aryans interestingly yeah yeah or yeah maybe they're representing a kind of

00:04:47.100 decline of an Aryan empire yeah right this is where I mean this is something it's become black

00:04:52.080 effectively or Rome yeah this is something that you have that Mark has stressed and I would even

00:04:58.320 resist this you know years ago uh when I was once a student uh you you really have to focus on the

00:05:06.640 naming convention because sometimes not always but very often your eyes can deceive you the the

00:05:14.180 the screenplay writer or the director can be signifying who the antagonist is say through

00:05:20.700 names and you sometimes like it's a black woman that just you know that that's sort of an image

00:05:27.980 it's a mask basically it's a red herring and the fact that she is inspector roman or sergeant

00:05:35.500 roman whatever she is now in the book i also learned that she is an italian male so make of

00:05:42.640 that uh what you will uh there there are also some interesting changes so the big bads the

00:05:49.920 drucker brothers are blacks in the book and uh aronofsky's film in aronofsky's film they are

00:05:59.640 hasidic jews now again you know are these two changes are they just sort of politically correct

00:06:07.480 changes maybe perhaps that had something to do with it but i i think they really add to the gem

00:06:14.820 and i i think this is something where aronofsky you know he's he he finds uh something and he

00:06:22.740 and he sort of curates it you know he finds a novel that is is really good you know it's got

00:06:28.700 something going on and he sort of sees symbolism that might not have been intended by the author

00:06:34.700 and he either changes a little thing here or there or he emphasizes something and demonizes

00:06:40.200 something else and turns it into a gem parable and i think he definitely did that and we can say

00:06:46.620 that i mean it's not just darinovsky it's spielberg it's jews uh doing adaptations of books

00:06:52.640 Right. So in other words, they're attracted to the book because of a story elements and symbol elements, but sometimes even names. Right. So in other words, because it's an adaptation doesn't mean necessarily that the naming the naming convention isn't there.

00:07:09.080 It's just that the names occurred in a kind of more organic way in the source material, and that became an attractive feature of the source material because that was one more thing that they didn't have to change.

00:07:23.660 And maybe also it sort of got Aronofsky's imagination going because he was thinking about the name symbolically, whereas maybe even the original author was not even thinking about the name symbolically.

00:07:33.960 that's possible but i think that i think assuming that to be the case i think that the names carry

00:07:39.080 tremendous meaning and that would sort of corroborate uh this idea that okay well yeah

00:07:44.820 he didn't he didn't come up with the names himself but he saw them out in the wild and he said okay

00:07:49.560 i can take this and maybe i can curate it a little and he does change a number of names

00:07:54.660 um of characters in the film as richard's been pointing out um so we start to see the process

00:08:01.860 here right and it but it becomes another layer of um obfuscation it becomes another layer of

00:08:07.940 mystery essentially because then you know if people if people start thinking there's a kind

00:08:13.300 of jewish message or something in a film uh he someone can say well actually but the source

00:08:18.960 material is you know a gentile writer so how how can this be uh have jewish names or whatever

00:08:26.400 yeah um in any case i'll let you continue yeah so i'll just start um describing some things

00:08:33.000 and um just to make sure we're all on the same page and then we can uh move forward so uh this

00:08:39.300 again it's a it's a three-part book you actually get to travel along uh hank thompson's journey

00:08:48.500 over three books with charlie houston and who knows maybe aronofsky will make a sequel but

00:08:52.780 our protagonist is uh hank thompson and um real quick james do you have a question you want to

00:09:00.340 jump in or it's not even a question it's just a corroboration between pie and caught oh good

00:09:06.660 yeah where where aronofsky in both films portrays these religious jews as kind of being like uh the

00:09:14.260 loser or he's he's sort of taking a shot at uh at hasids or like the the rabbi and pie yeah they

00:09:23.860 they come out you know obviously in pie they lose to the secular jew and in this film they are you

00:09:31.920 know in essence defeated by the gentile by a b esau yeah but yeah i mean both films he's kind of

00:09:38.960 taking a shot at the the out of the you know the religious order yeah the overly jewish

00:09:46.500 overly form formal formal yeah and superficial thus jews yeah um so anyway our protagonist is

00:09:57.020 hammer and hank thompson uh he's a baseball phenom and he has this terrible event in his life

00:10:05.140 uh where he is drunk driving with his teammate and he he had he's wearing a seat belt his

00:10:12.540 teammates not and he his he both effectively kills i mean he's you know sort of responsible

00:10:20.140 sort of kind of for the death of his friend and he also destroys his knee and so he could never

00:10:27.420 play baseball and um it's indicated that he was going to go you know 15th in the draft or number

00:10:32.620 one in the draft who knows but it it all got ruined and then he is living for 10 years apparently in

00:10:40.940 the the lower east side of manhattan and i guess for any zoomers on uh our panel here so uh new

00:10:49.580 york was a different place back in the 80s in the 90s it was really changing and they they got it a

00:10:56.700 lot of this but um you know just go watch the musical rent you know it's it used to it's funny

00:11:04.860 when that musical came out the lower east side had already been like gentrified and ruined uh but

00:11:11.180 the neighborhoods in lower manhattan were edgier uh there were more homeless people on the street

00:11:18.700 they're more drug users they're more flailing odd artists you know living together it was

00:11:26.060 maybe cooler uh but also definitely rougher and uh over the course of the 90s really giuliani was

00:11:35.340 enacting you know i guess the beginnings of stop and frisk uh for people in the burrows

00:11:41.340 in times square uh but also um he was facilitating this gentrification of new york which might have

00:11:48.220 happened without him who knows and and the um broken windows policing of you want to police

00:11:54.460 the small things so that people don't even try the big things sort of the philosophy and you

00:12:00.920 actually saw that we're in they're in this dive bar where people are drunk and doing drugs and

00:12:05.940 stuff and there's the no dancing ordinance which actually was a Giuliani thing so um uh they they

00:12:13.740 definitely get at some of this um fun stuff uh but anyway he is basically a loser deadbeat just

00:12:23.120 hanging out in the Lower East Side. He seems to have a, you know, budding love relationship with

00:12:29.040 Yvonne, who played by Zoe Kravitz, and she is an ER nurse. I don't know if it's significant or not,

00:12:39.660 but she bragged about, I saved one today, an overdose, when they first meet, and they're,

00:12:44.600 you know, young kids having sex and drinking and so on. His neighbor is Russ, who they depict as

00:12:52.040 this aging punk rocker you know in 1998 but it looks like he's living in 1978 and uh he's got

00:12:59.940 the mohawk etc and he wants um uh hank or harry to uh take care of his apartment and and take

00:13:10.880 care of his cat and next thing you know you learn that russ is uh in a lot of trouble he's got about

00:13:19.200 four million dollars in cash in a storage facility and all the people who are going to divvy it up

00:13:25.960 are trying to get their piece of it and so there's the uh russian mobsters there's uh uh what are

00:13:34.440 they puerto rican gangsters who are involved and the police woman um who he starts to work with

00:13:42.460 yes the puerto ricans named colorado i mean the uh the police woman he starts to work with is named

00:13:47.780 roman she is the law he trusts her but soon he finds out that she is just as corrupt maybe more

00:13:54.520 corrupt than these gangsters whom she's policing and she warns him about the big bads these terrible

00:14:01.220 killers who are hasidic jews uh who are you know in the uh you know in the in the lower east side

00:14:08.520 just murdering people cutting their eyes out interesting without um with reckless abandon

00:14:15.680 and uh so basically in the litter box uh hank finds a little key which he thinks must be

00:14:25.840 significant it's been hidden by russ the punk rocker and all of these people are searching

00:14:32.480 him they're beating him up they burst a kidney so he actually has this large wound in his side

00:14:39.260 interesting um and they even kill his girlfriend yvonne brutally execute her and it's it's really

00:14:48.720 at that point where hank realizes he's in deep shit uh russ comes back and they uh russ and

00:14:57.540 hank try to flee these gangsters and eventually or hank is just at the end of his rope he's out

00:15:05.760 in Coney Island everyone wants to kill him including the police what can he do he admits

00:15:11.600 to himself that he is responsible it wasn't just an accident I am responsible for both murdering

00:15:19.100 my friend and destroying my baseball career and you know I didn't even care about my friend I was

00:15:25.080 just so mad about baseball and he finally admits this to himself and he's a flawed character but

00:15:32.960 It is redeeming, I would say, that he can do that.

00:15:37.900 And once he admits that to himself, he faces his fear.

00:15:40.500 He's able to turn the tables on the gangsters.

00:15:42.380 So he links up with these big bads, the Hasidic Jewish gangsters,

00:15:47.940 and he basically tells them, Roman has the key.

00:15:51.480 So you need to go in there and kill Roman, and then we can get the key,

00:15:56.620 and I'll give you the money.

00:15:57.760 I just want to be left alone.

00:15:59.860 And they don't fully trust him,

00:16:01.740 So they actually lock him in the car with some zip ties.

00:16:06.820 He's interesting, able to use the lighter to get out of his zip ties to a fire, so to speak.

00:16:14.620 I don't know if that's significant, but it might be, probably is.

00:16:18.140 And he eventually confronts Roman and wins and beats her, stabs her in the foot with a broken baseball bat.

00:16:26.400 And then the Jewish gangsters come in at the end and put her away.

00:16:30.620 and then he tells them no she actually doesn't have the key um i have the key and i can take

00:16:37.340 you to the money and he's in the van and you get the sense that the acidic gangsters are actually

00:16:45.200 going to do him a favor that usually they would just kill this person because he knows too much

00:16:53.540 but he also has done them a mitzvah favor he's been good to them he seems like a good boy

00:17:01.180 who cares about his mom so maybe we're just gonna let him off this one time and then

00:17:07.420 hank notices that the jew is using the lighter of yvonne his sometime girlfriend and he just

00:17:17.820 he sort of want he wants to get revenge on these people who killed this innocent girl but i think

00:17:24.100 he also wants to just close the loop reach total closure by killing everyone involved in this

00:17:30.580 scheme and thus he reenacts the trauma of his earlier life and he willfully drives the van

00:17:39.740 into um it looks like the uh pole for uh supporting a overground subway and kills both

00:17:49.440 of these hasidic gangsters and then uh then pretends to be disguises himself as the dead

00:17:57.680 punk rocker russ and goes off to paradise uh gives his mom half of the million of you know

00:18:06.040 what is it four million dollars gives his mom two mil to live on takes the uh takes the rest of it

00:18:11.720 and it's interesting one of the themes is that he's just obsessed with baseball obsessed with

00:18:16.840 the san francisco giants he's a california kid and at the end of the film he actually turns off the

00:18:23.420 game and rises to a new level of consciousness or awareness perhaps but anyway there's my summary

00:18:33.260 of the film just so we're on the same page but um do you want to add anything there mark or should

00:18:40.020 we maybe talk about harry that was sort of the uh naming choice that i found most interesting

00:18:48.640 harry all right yeah i know go um so there is a uh region called seir where it which is basically

00:18:59.900 edom and the region of the city a city in edom yeah yes a city in edom called seir and it's also

00:19:08.840 a kind of pun on harry which is the way that esau is described and uh he's hank he's henry he's harry

00:19:17.860 um i i think that this might be any fortuitous naming that uh aronofsky found but for someone

00:19:28.900 like aronofsky i think he jumped on it and amplified it uh i do think that there are a lot

00:19:35.300 you could see a little bit of jesus and or the messiah ben joseph um in thompson particularly

00:19:42.580 the side wound i found that significant uh but i i think the way he i think he's esau and so

00:19:52.220 So that Seir is an interesting pun associating Esau with Edom, which will be done directly later on in the Bible.

00:20:02.460 And I think it's a very fortuitous name for this character.

00:20:07.420 There's also a way in which Thompson's big problem is that he gave up his birthright.

00:20:13.640 He wasn't really tricked out of it, as Esau is in the Bible with Jacob, but he squandered it much like Esau.

00:20:25.100 He could have been a superstar in the major leagues, and he just fucked it up for no good reason.

00:20:31.900 It's a very sad story, but if I were to associate this character with a biblical figure, it definitely would be Esau.

00:20:41.700 and um again i the fact that this movie is sort of esau's revenge esau triumphant is uh very

00:20:51.860 interesting uh that it was made by darren aronofsky but that's uh that's how i see that

00:20:57.200 character i don't know what what you think about it well yeah i mean in definitely he's a gentile

00:21:02.360 coded character i think that he's clearly a gentile right so um so the other thing i would

00:21:09.020 say too is that that name henry or harry uh which the the original meaning of harry is like a kind

00:21:17.140 of is a nickname for henry essentially and henry is uh means something like ruler or something like

00:21:23.680 this um but it has a kind of aristocratic suggestion um but i've noticed that you know

00:21:32.440 just naming conventions where names like Patrick, which mean, you know,

00:21:37.880 patrician essentially, right.

00:21:40.620 References to nobility are generally assigned to Gentile characters.

00:21:45.120 That's a kind of trend. Now I'm sure you can find exceptions,

00:21:48.240 but sometimes those exceptions are modified by other clues, for example.

00:21:52.900 Right. Yeah. I mean, I, look,

00:21:57.180 the other thing too is notable about his name is that I think that he's also

00:22:01.500 indicated basically a christian character and i think that there's a metaphor about christianity

00:22:06.820 in this film where it's kind in some way it's comparing it it would seem to uh the cult of

00:22:14.040 or to alcohol essentially right uh and this is it points to his so essentially he at least begins

00:22:22.840 as a kind of christian character where he's a sort of good-natured guy but he's decadent and

00:22:28.820 you know kind of wandering not really going anywhere in his life i think richard characterized

00:22:34.040 it very well but he's a fundamentally a good guy but he's a sort of a lovable loser he's a

00:22:38.320 lovable loser essentially um and he doesn't really uh have the kind of meanness i guess he'll he'll

00:22:44.860 eventually develop to succeed um or at least in that moment right when he's driving the car

00:22:50.760 uh so but the other clues would be that it's paul's bar right and paul is the apostle

00:22:59.200 gentiles paul is the apostle to the gentiles so that could be one clue um and the other clue

00:23:06.780 would be the last name uh thompson right thomas is the twin of uh christ so it could we could

00:23:15.160 read that as christian the last name is christian right yeah and what would come is like i

00:23:20.680 in my view what would come as strong corroboration of it because i i think a lot of these jews were

00:23:24.820 like comic book nerds and they were all reading stan lee because so much of this it just bristles

00:23:30.680 with gem and you you could learn gem by reading stan lee i mean that's how i've fucking learned

00:23:36.880 gem and um or that was one of the ways in which i learned gem and so but there we have this this

00:23:45.120 kind of antagonist of Spider-Man or Peter Parker, Flash Thompson. So he has the same last name.

00:23:52.360 And there it is indicated kind of esoterically. Interestingly enough, Flash Thompson is also

00:23:57.240 ends up being a drunk, right? That becomes his vice. He becomes a drunk. He goes to war and he

00:24:01.860 becomes a drunk. Now, I don't know if in that context, that becomes a metaphor for Christianity

00:24:06.480 as this kind of intoxication or drunkenness or something, right? Drunkenness of the spirit,

00:24:12.100 we might say. Maybe that's a metaphor that's going on here. I think that's definitely how

00:24:17.180 I view Christianity, is a kind of drunkenness or intoxication of the spirit, right? So that's how

00:24:22.840 I view it. And again, it comes from the Eucharist. It comes from Bacchus's cup, right? There's this

00:24:30.420 whole wine metaphor in Christianity where to commune with Jesus, you're literally drinking

00:24:35.140 alcohol right so it's um so i that's that's the way i understand an important aspect of the

00:24:42.700 christian metaphor and maybe that's what he's kind of indicating in this film um and the other thing

00:24:48.400 too i would say about this character flash thompson now i'm using this uh spider-man character to kind

00:24:55.360 of make the point about this character in the aronofsky film but i think it's worth looking at

00:25:00.100 flash thompson for a second here the whole joke with flash thompson is so first of all you have

00:25:05.240 spider-man and what does spider-man represent well he he's a jew like he's a crypto jew jews have

00:25:12.100 like you know uh there's a israeli producer who's produced all the spider-man films and he he has

00:25:18.600 articles you can look him up uh where he's just like yeah of course spider-man's a jewish character

00:25:23.740 right and and um you know and they give little clues in the article as to you know symbols that

00:25:29.900 signifying his Jewishness and so forth. But what Spider-Man is ultimately, he's more complex than

00:25:36.160 just being a Jewish character. He's ultimately represents something Christian, or at least his

00:25:40.940 superhero identity represents something Christian. He's the web slinger, right? And what is the web

00:25:46.160 slinger? Well, the web slinger is the fisher of men. It's St. Peter, Peter Parker. That's the

00:25:53.820 metaphor going on with spider-man so so what happens with uh flash thompson and peter parker

00:26:01.780 well they're flash thompson's like this bully and he's he's like one of these sort of gentile

00:26:07.140 stereotypes uh in in the other one is like sort of the rich gentile who's uh harry osborne right

00:26:14.500 so he's the jock he's like sort of the more common goy who's just irritating and he's the jock and

00:26:21.780 his name is flash thompson and he bullies peter parker though actually it's funny when you read

00:26:26.460 the comic he's like not that bad he's actually kind of a good he's like not that bad a guy

00:26:30.400 but peter parker still has this sort of jewish like kind of vendetta or whatever um but flash

00:26:38.080 thompson um you know we talked about bullying sometimes being jocular or a way of like trying

00:26:43.580 to include people and stuff like i i when i've looked at those parables it almost feels like

00:26:48.500 that's more what flash thompson is doing like he's trying to awkwardly befriend this sort of

00:26:53.020 crypto jewish character but flash thompson one of the metaphors that kind of established him as a

00:26:58.620 christian is that he sets up he's the one who sets up the spider-man fan club at the school so he's

00:27:05.800 like a huge spider-man fan he bullies peter parker who's the jew and he venerates spider-man who is

00:27:14.300 this christian character who is saint peter who is catholicism or christianity or whatever and

00:27:19.960 the whole time peter parker is kind of laughing to himself like this moron doesn't realize that

00:27:24.180 it's me who's spider-man right yeah that you're worshiping a jew that's what he doesn't realize

00:27:29.900 that's what flash thompson doesn't realize and it's just christian anti-semitism yeah and here

00:27:35.460 we have a character nerd at my school that they're like he he will never understand holy jesus my

00:27:41.220 savior you know something funny about it yeah no it is funny it's a brilliant little the stan lee

00:27:48.540 came up with this little metaphor and so meanwhile he's being a dick to peter parker but then he has

00:27:53.940 the fan club and he's completely like you know simping as they say for a spider-man and uh peter

00:28:01.560 parker is just kind of laughing about it right and i think that that's what jews do on some level

00:28:06.820 when you know people are christian anti-semites it's grisful to be a christian anti-semite you

00:28:12.840 worship a jew you started the spider-man fan club you know yes yeah and peter parker

00:28:21.400 the web might be a fishing metaphor yeah no that's what it is or casting a wide net

00:28:29.860 that's what it is that's exactly what it is it's it's uh peter is saint peter the fisher of men

00:28:36.120 he's the fisher of men so that's the metaphor and it's just uh so i would use that as corroboration

00:28:42.220 that probably this he's thinking the same with this name henry thompson so he's a christian

00:28:48.460 and he's he's an alcoholic he's imbibing the spirit as it were and then saint paul is who

00:28:54.500 is the paul is the apostle to the gentile uh and he's the bartender so i don't know i mean i think

00:29:02.440 that there there is that element and it's basically he's esoterically indicating christianity

00:29:08.600 is a kind of form of decadence a form of weakening and harming essentially though he also like his

00:29:15.420 two vices basically are sports right the guy's addicted to sports and he's addicted to alcohol

00:29:21.600 those are the two vices of the guy yes the plague of jocks everywhere yes um i in that last vice

00:29:32.300 or the one with sports i disagree with that i mean i think that you know men being joking here

00:29:37.920 but yeah well no no i mean i think you can obviously get too obsessed with anything but

00:29:41.640 absolutely yeah and many people have become too obsessed with obsessed with sports definitely

00:29:47.260 yeah but but it's also his greatest um it's also his greatest advantage or his his superpower

00:29:55.960 hour if you will i mean i think the a lot of what the movie did well was he they show his his like

00:30:03.400 baseball skills were integrated into the action sequences so he's like running away from uh

00:30:11.160 the the hasidic jews and it's almost like he's stealing home or like at one point he like slides

00:30:16.200 and the jews can't do that i mean there i thought that was um well integrated and again he triumphs

00:30:23.640 he triumphs because he gets rid of the alcohol but then sort of rediscovers being a willful jock

00:30:30.920 you know again after having the epiphany of like taking responsibility for what he's done

00:30:36.120 uh he he then sort of like rediscovers his jock self and that's how he wins in the end

RadixJournal - August 17, 2026

Darren Aronofsky： Caught Stealing (2025)

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