Greed: The Original Punk Rock Art Film

  

Erich von Stroheim’s Greed isn’t just a silent film—it’s the silent film. A snarling, razor-sharp slap in the face to the glossy morality plays of its time, Greed feels like it was ripped out of the 1920s only to be permanently stationed somewhere just beyond now. If most silent films are quaint little time capsules, Greed is the one gnawing at the bars, flipping the bird, and laughing at its imitators. It’s the eternal outsider, the original cool.  

This is cinema stripped down and blown up, raw and unforgiving. Stroheim took Frank Norris's McTeague, an already grim tale of human rot, and made it into an acid trip through the American Dream gone sour. There’s no hand-wringing sentimentality here, no rose-tinted memory of a simpler time. This is a film where hope is currency, and everyone’s flat broke.  

The style? Endlessly modern. Every scene feels like a dagger aimed right at the heart of capitalism, greed, and humanity’s most grotesque instincts—and it looks good doing it. Stroheim’s obsessive attention to detail (the guy shot on location in Death Valley with real gold teeth in his actors’ mouths—who does that?) lends the film a texture you can practically taste: dry, metallic, and bitter.  

And the performances? It’s as if Gibson Gowland and Zasu Pitts knew they were creating archetypes that would ripple through film history. Their desperation, their joy (however fleeting), and their downfall feel like they were crafted for every generation to come. You can see their ghosts in everything from Pulp Fiction to There Will Be Blood. 

Here’s the kicker: Greed isn’t just timeless—it’s hip. It’s got that Gen X, irony-laced cynicism and a Beat Generation sense of doomed idealism rolled into one. It’s like Requiem for a Dream if it had the swagger to keep quiet about its moral lesson. You don’t watch Greed to learn something; you watch it to feel something—something messy, uncomfortably human, and undeniable.  

It was too much for the 1920s studio execs, and frankly, it’s still too much for a lot of modern viewers. Stroheim’s original cut ran nine hours (nine hours!) before it was hacked to bits and left at a comparatively lean 140 minutes. The butchered remains of Greed still slap harder than 95% of what you’ll see in theaters today.  

Greed will never go out of style because it never belonged to any particular style. It’s punk rock before punk rock, art film before art film, and nihilism before nihilism got a bad name. Stroheim’s masterpiece reminds us that the rot at the heart of the American dream is as fresh and fetid today as it was a century ago—and honestly? That kind of honesty will always be hip.