BILLIONAIRE FEELINGS
What an existential true crime drama from 1983 can tell us about today's billionaires
In his book Jackpot, author Michael Mechanic argues that the extraordinary sudden wealth of Silicon Valley and Wall Street is having profound effects on the not just the very rich but everyone else. (And for the middle class this era’s lust for premium, posh, and top-drawer everything is starting to clash against the dying myth of social mobility.) But how do the billionaires feel in this new gold rush moment? Other than Mechanic’s book there is scant research on how oligarchs think of their wealth, and how its sudden arrival changes them.
We do, however, have movies and billionaires can seem more real there than they do in life.
All movies inspired by William Hearst or Howard Hughes are essentially nepo-baby stories. There Will Be Blood is a portrait of a man who does not change, no matter his material wealth—it’s everyone else around him that changes. Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday is a Cockney gangster looking to level up to founder mode in Thatcher’s Britain, but a single bad day and a few IRA bombs end his dream. Then there’s Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka—a bipolar mess of an epic that maybe somehow gets it right.
“I used to have it all, now I only have everything”
Played by Gene Hackman in the best performance you’ve never seen, Jack McCann is a gold prospector who emotionally dies the moment he becomes the richest man in America. As his daughter, played by Theresa Russell, says, “He’d been looking for 15 years. And then one day he found it. How could he ever recapture that moment of triumph?” Eureka starts with McCann in the final days of the gold rush, surviving in a psychedelically violent Yukon before jump-cutting to the Bahamas in 1945. There, McCann is rich, life-weary, and unhinged, with good reason to believe everyone wants to kill him. He also has parrot shit on his shoulder according to his dipsomaniac wife. For screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, “The challenge of writing the script was to show convincingly one man’s life in two such short, intense bursts... It’s as if his story began before there were any humans, and ends after all the humans have gone from the world.”1
In that way, Eureka is less Citizen Kane and more 2001: A Socialist Odyssey. McCann’s orgasmic rebirth in a gold torrent set to Wagner acts as the film’s bad trip prologue. The film then becomes a true crime story with McCann’s spectacularly violent murder at the hands of… his son-in-law Rutger Hauer? Joe Pesci as Meyer Lansky? A fortune teller’s curse? Roeg presents us all three potential universes in his fragmented way.
“A sick movie made by sick people for sick people”
Roeg still reigns as the director who crafted his films most like novels. He wove his stories in and out of time no matter the script. He knew just how powerfully suggestive a glimpse or recalled image could be and his backgrounds are laced with witchy purpose—tarot cards, kabbalistic charts, Nabokovian doubles—all to throw us off.
Like most Roeg fans I started easy: a cable showing of 1968’s Performance. I then moved through Don’t Look Now and The Man Who fell to Earth. The studio that funded his 1980 film Bad Timing (starring Art Garfunkel) called the final product “a sick movie made by sick people for sick people.” It remains a powerful watch, though Simon and Garfunkel may be ruined for you as there’s really no such thing as “light” necrophilia. For Roeg, the rest of the 1980s was a grab bag culminating in his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. As Eureka was from 1983, I long assumed it would be lesser-Roeg. I was wrong. It’s his masterpiece, even if it was legitimately broken enough that MGM put it on the shelf for two years.
“A little leftover life to kill”
There are no normal emotions in Eureka and that’s fitting for a story of people lifted up by wealth from the realm of mere humans. Everything from the voodoo ceremony to the courtroom finale is not so much acted as exorcised. McCann and his relationship with his estranged daughter especially runs on Elektra currents. “All you can do in this life is stake your claim,” he says to her, both as a warning and to inform her of her status of belonging to him. Jack has learned nothing from his wealth other than the worth of gold—the substance he’s still obsessed with. She answers by imitating her father, and searching for her own version of the impossible: a marriage built on love, not money, with golden-haired horndog Rutger Hauer.
“What happens now? A mystery”
When McCann is beaten, tarred and feathered, set on fire with a blowtorch, then beheaded you can’t accuse Roeg of being excessive in his violence. Eureka is based on the still unsolved murder of Sir Harry Oakes, who was beaten, tarred and feathered, set on fire with a blowtorch, then beheaded despite being one of the richest men in America at the time of his death in 1943.
After claiming the largest gold mine in the world in Kirkland, Ontario2, Oakes decamped to the Bahamas for tax reasons, took on British citizenship and bought a knighthood. At the time of his murder, he was being pressured by Meyer Lansky to allow the development of casinos on the islands. Oakes also despised his son-in-law Alfred de Marigny, for eloping with his daughter. It was de Marigny who was arrested for the murder though it was discovered police fabricated evidence against him and he was acquitted at trial. Sir Harry Oakes was friends with then Bahamian governor, the exiled-Duke of Windsor, and it’s widely considered the Duke coordinated the failed frame-up. He was also a character in the Eureka script until legal pressure won out. According to Roeg, this freed him and Mayersberg to make a more interesting film.3
The major flaw of Eureka is that Hackman’s McCann—the volcanic, self-loathing void at the center of the film—is absent from the final act, except as a crime scene blowup placed beside the witness stand. I have a low expectation of most court room scenes.(They’re essentially theater within theater and that’s why they can never really take off.) But Roeg—who started as David Lean’s cinematographer—loved Hollywood surfaces no matter how much of a radical he turned into. Here, Roeg and Mayersberg lard the ending of Eureka with gavel strike–worthy lines like “My lord, I now call to the stand…my wife!” or “The only thing my husband is guilty of is…being innocent!”
In no way does this wrap anything up and maybe that’s the point. After all, for most of the twentieth century sudden excessive wealth was a state of mind known only to a few. That’s different now. Being eternally present, having a podcast if not a biopic, is part of the founder’s playbook. Rich and crazy is no longer a secret. The world has seen what the Greek god emotions look like of someone in the Hamptons denied a parking spot. And if being a billionaire has always been a kind of mental illness, then the billionaires of today are a lot like the rest of us: they’re owning it. Parrot shit and all.
Fragile Geometry, Joseph Lanza’s experimental biography of Roeg, is very worth tracking down.
Gold at Kirkland Lake was well known to the Indigenous people of the area but they were excluded from the Ontario treaties of 1906 and denied First Nations status until 2022. Last year they settled with mining companies on $23 billion in restitution.
From Twilight Time’s out of print Blu-ray of Eureka. The film itself is currently on Tubi.