The Pusher Trilogy

[tr0nic]

Ah, Franke!

Finally, someone else I know has seen Pusher and I get to talk about it. I know the feeling of madly trying to convince everyone within pissing distance that Pusher is a trilogy of hidden gems, I recently rambled at a stranger about it the other day.

I initially found the trilogy from a short video essay on YouTube about them about 2 years ago, and I've been obsessed ever since. I haven't been this enamored with a crime film(s) like this since I first watched Heat and Hard Boiled back in high school. There is just nothing else quite like Pusher. It's so grimy. It leaves you feeling unclean. It does such a great job at taking any kind of sexiness out of the crime film or portraying criminals and just leaves it with the trashy, greasy gold chain-wearing gaudiness and nothing else. The criminals in Pusher are not particularly clever or cunning, they're mostly average idiots that just happen to steal things and sell heroin, and barely competently. They're just regular people.

One scene that I think about all the time is this moment in Pusher II where Mads Mikkelsen's character finds out he had a kid with a prostitute he hooked up with before going to jail for 2 years. He's standing in the kitchen in his underwear, and his baby mama is telling him he's a father. He makes a bowl of cereal, and goes over the table she's sitting at and scrapes some leftover heroin off the table and into the cereal very casually and eats it. It's so fucking grimy, and horrible, and bleak, and utterly hilarious all at the same time.

I was reminded very often of Gaspar Noe's films when watching Pusher. The horrific and gut-wrenching tone of 2002's Irreversible has a toned-down cousin in Pusher, for sure. Nicolas Winding Refn and Noe have worked together and exchanged ideas before, and it's clear that Refn has riffed off of Noe in Pusher. All of the skin crawling, visceral, human disgustingness of Noe's work can be seen here. But unlike Irreversible, it's not almost unwatchable.

Pusher II is definitely my favorite out of the 3, although it's almost tied with Pusher III. Mads is just incredible. But making the crime boss the protagonist of the 3rd film, the one who was at the center of all the problems for the last two protagonists, was just a brilliant move. Putting Milo in the same position as Franke and Tonny completely elevates the movie and ties them all together firmly as one big three-part story.