To understand Zohran Mamdani, watch this Stanley Kubrick movie!

"Killer's Kiss" was released in 1955, when Kubrick had yet to become a famous director.

“Like the man said, ‘Can happiness buy money?’”

- Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera), “Killer’s Kiss”

Jews who voted against Mamdani need to watch “Killer’s Kiss.”

Seventy years before Zohran Mamdani was elected New York City mayor, a little-known New York Jewish director made a movie that explains his victory.

I urge my fellow Jews, especially those who voted against Mamdani, to pay attention. Both Kubrick and I, their fellow Jews with New York roots, have something important to say about why Mamdani will soon be the next New York City mayor. It also explains why the rest of the world may soon elect Mamdanis of their own.

Running as the Democratic nominee, Mamdani won just over 50 percent of the vote, followed by 42 percent for the centrist independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and 7 percent for Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. Mamdani offered democratic socialist programs as solutions to bread-and-butter problems, promising to tax the wealthy to pay for a panoply of progressive policies. These include community-owned grocery stores in each of New York’s five boroughs, a rent freeze, building 200,000 affordable new homes, reducing transportation fares and air pollution through congestion pricing, fighting climate change by investing in green technology and guaranteeing free child care for all New Yorkers up to the age of five.

In July I compared Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy to that of a less electorally fortunate Democrat, Norman Mailer, who was also Jewish. (He was also in my estimate guilty of more “anti-Semitism” than Mamdani, whose alleged “anti-Semitism” entirely consists of poorly-worded but legitimate criticisms of Israel. By contrast, Mailer once said “the Jews are an incredible people at their best. At their worst they are swine. Like every WASP I ever met at their worst. They are awful.”) I observed that one could learn much about Mamdani’s appeal by understanding Mailer’s failed 1969 campaign. By defying political convention and speaking directly to the disaffected, Mailer tried to build a “hip left-right coalition” that would empower ordinary people over political machines by having New York City secede from New York State. Mamdani attempted to do the same thing as Mailer — empower ordinary people over political machines with bold proposals and a radical vision — but he did so with a straightforward economic program. Being a cerebral literary type, Mailer’s campaign addressed New Yorkers philosophically and wished to treat their spiritual malaise. Mamdani, though likewise promising to empower New Yorkers over their political and corporate overlords, has instead been pragmatic and programmatic, going into details about how they are suffering and why his economic programs will help them.

Because make no mistake about it: New Yorkers are suffering, and immensely, from rising rents and grocery prices to widespread crime and unemployment.

“Killer’s Kiss” is a film noir that accurately depicts the widespread poverty which defines New York City life for most of its residents.

This brings me to a movie made by a famous New York Jewish director, Stanley Kubrick. Though released in 1955, a full seventy years before Mamdani’s election, “Killer’s Kiss” — Kubrick’s second feature — depicts a city mired in conditions like those that led to Mamdani’s electoral triumph. The brisk 70-minute picture tells the story of washed up New York City boxer Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), who after losing a nationally televised bout decides to flee the miserable city for the other side of the country. He plans on taking with him a taxi dancer named Gloria Price (Irene Kane), even though he only knows her in passing as an attractive, mysterious neighbor. Gloria accepts Davey’s advances because she is trying to escape a traumatic childhood, which she is already semi-achieving through taxi dancing (i.e., the profession of dancing at a studio with usually-forlorn customers). That childhood trauma occurred for only one reason: Her family was too poor to afford her father’s medical care after he was diagnosed with a terminal disease.

This information is conveyed to the audience not only through exposition, but via Freudian interpretation. Kubrick’s second wife Ruth Sobotka, who was also a costume designer on the movie, plays Gloria’s sister Iris and beautifully depicts her life of unfulfilled romance and squandered professional potential through psychoanalytical choreography. Davey’s self-hatred, meanwhile, is depicted through the beating he almost wills himself to endure during the opening boxing match. There is a good reason why film historian Peter Cowie described Davey’s defeat in that scene as occurring amidst “one of the most vicious boxing matches ever seen on the screen.”

The match is perhaps a metaphor for life itself. Critic Gavin Lambert wrote in Sight and Sound that “Killer’s Kiss” was “too full of familiar and not always skilled contrivances,” but praised its “simplicity of outline, an atmospheric power, a directness in its characterization.” Even contemporaries who didn’t like “Killer’s Kiss” recognized that it had cut out, preserved and understood a real slice of life.

Within that slice of life, those who discover love do not question its origins. Therefore Davey and Gloria embrace each other not because they share a deep connection, but because they are panicking about their seemingly lost places in life. This is hardly the foundation for a durable romance, but then again, “Killer’s Kiss” isn’t really about the Davey-Gloria relationship, at least not in terms of what drives most of the on-screen plot. The titular killer is instead Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera), the jealous owner of the studio where Gloria dances. Vincent openly lusts after his uninterested employee, and “Killer’s Kiss” heavily implies that Vincent tried to rape Gloria, prompting her to quit his studio and further incentivizing her to accept Davey’s offer to move to his uncle’s horse ranch in Washington State. Yet Vincent isn’t going to let go of Gloria without a fight, prompting the movie’s climactic action scenes, which culminate in a memorably bizarre fight to the death between Davey and Vincent inside a mannequin factory.

Kubrick later described “Killer’s Kiss” as “a silly story,” and he was right. On the surface, “Killer’s Kiss” is a standard melodramatic film noir. The genre is suitable for social commentary, however, and that adds depth to the picture. As film critic Gene D. Phillips wrote in “The Stanley Kubrick Archives,” “film noir takes place almost entirely at night, often in murkily lit rooms, alleys, and side streets. What’s more, the sinister nightmare world of film noir is one of seedy motels, boarding houses, shabby bars, and cafés — a night world of distorted shapes, where rain glistens on windows and windshields and faces are barred with shadows that suggest some imprisonment of body or soul.”

The genius of “Killer’s Kiss,” which ranks as a great movie despite Kubrick dismissing it as “frivolous,” is that it shows how the REAL New York City is in fact a “sinister nightmare world” where widespread poverty causes “imprisonment of body or soul,” if not both. The high points of “Killer’s Kiss” (and there are plenty) come from absorbing the scenery, ambiance and zeitgeist of 1950s New York City. “Killer’s Kiss” includes more than the standard iconic location shots (although it includes plenty of these, the most notable being the old ironwork Pennsylvania Station that existed before being torn down in 1963). From the tawdrier areas of Greenwich Village to the Bronx slums and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), “Killer’s Kiss” is filled with footage of in-real-time New York City. To add spice to his formulaic film noir story, Kubrick packs “Killer’s Kiss” with visual flashes, tiny vignettes from actual New Yorkers going about their lives in the background of his furtively-shot feature. These details add up in a great way, making “Killer’s Kiss” a bigger picture of widespread social and economic despair beyond what’s portrayed in its narrative.

“‘Killer’s Kiss’ clearly illustrates Dana Polan’s observation of Kubrick’s films: ‘Humans are often little more than meat,’” writes Nathan Abrams in “Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual.” Throughout this movie Kubrick includes “close-ups of food in shop windows — confectionary, hot dogs, and ice cream — [which] segue into shots of the dancing girls sign, linking food, women and sex in much the same way as the earlier nude calendar.” After incorrectly labeling Gloria as a prostitute (taxi dancers were sometimes linked to prostitution, but many were not prostitutes and the profession did not intrinsically involve sex work), Abrams perceptively adds that “as Davey waits for Gloria in the street, a Hi Grade All-Beef Frankfurters billboard can be seen in the background, suggesting Davey is also just a form of food, specifically meat…”

What does it say that, seven decades after Kubrick’s “Killer’s Kiss” accurately depicted a depressing New York City in which people are treated like slabs of meat, America’s most populous city can still be accurately described that way?

It says, among other things, that New York City was ripe to elect a democratic socialist like Zohran Mamdani.

I often rewatch “Killer’s Kiss.”

Why do I often rewatch “Killer’s Kiss”? Film scholar Norman Kagan dismissed it as a “weak, naturalistic thriller” in “The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick,” adding that “it wavers and lacks the obsessional drive and energy of the later films, as do the characters.” Yet even Kagan admits “‘Killer’s Kiss’ is most successful at creating the ambiance of lower-class New York life, realistic touches and urban types.” While to film snobs this is the film equivalent of “just an old man” who “smells bad,” there is more substance to “Killer’s Kiss.” Despite the gloomy tone, this is a movie that captures the authentic spirit of New York City. Aside from the gorgeous industrial-age and now-extinct Penn Station, virtually everything about the New York City that Kubrick shot in 1955 rings true in 2025. Poverty is rampant, people fear violent street crime, advertisements are inescapable and everyone seems to be swept up by larger social and economic currents beyond their control.

Hence the film noir love triangle between Davey, Gloria and Vincent, though superficially cliché, strikes a nerve. When told by Kubrick, the 1950s New York City setting is so powerfully conveyed that the three main characters’ adversity feels like an inevitable consequence of their environment. As far as moviegoing experiences are concerned, “Killer’s Kiss” is an unforgettable experience.

It also has a Jewish subtext, as Abrams observes when noting that Gordon is coded as Jewish. Kubrick was, of course, also himself Jewish. I have no idea if he would have supported Mamdani; Jewish New Yorkers in 2025 went 63-33-7 for Cuomo, Mamdani and Sliwa, respectively. As a Jew, Kubrick might have privately supported Cuomo from his faraway studio in England. Then again, as a man who survived on unemployment benefits while shooting “Killer’s Kiss,” he might have understood Mamdani’s appeal. Either way, I find it deeply disappointing that Cuomo won the Jewish vote, as he represents the same status quo that the Jewish New Yorker Kubrick subversively critiqued in “Killer’s Kiss.” Regardless of the man’s specific politics, “Killer’s Kiss” remains painfully relevant to democratic socialists for as long as the existence of dire poverty makes democratic socialism necessary.

I wish that more of my fellow Jews understood this. Certainly the history of New York City, which holds the largest Jewish community in the diaspora, should demonstrate this point to us.

Between 1955 and 2025 — or from “Killer’s Kiss”’s release to Mamdani’s election — New York City has had practically everything BUT a democratic socialist mayor. Three of the first five mayors during that period can be described as varying shades of center-left: Robert F. Wagner Jr. (1954-1965), Abraham Beame (1974-1977) and Ed Koch (1978-1989); two others, John Lindsay (1966-1973) and David Dinkins (1990-1993), were solidly liberal without being democratic socialists. Three of the next four were either right-wing or center-right wing, with Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001) falling into the former category and Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013) and Eric Adams (2022-2025) being in the latter. Only the center-left Bill de Blasio (2014-2021) has offered any recent interruption from this overall conservative approach to governing.

During all of these different administrations — from Lindsay and Dinkins on the left to Giuliani on the right to the vast array of comparative moderates between them — New York City remained a “world of distorted shapes, where rain glistens on windows and windshields and faces are barred with shadows that suggest some imprisonment of body or soul.” It was and is, as Phillips wrote later in the same review, like the rest of the world but only more so, a place where “modern man gradually [becomes] dehumanized by living in a materialistic, mechanized world in which men exploit one another in the mass effort for survival.”

This world is entertaining to watch as fiction on a movie screen, but a whole lot less enjoyable to inhabit. People will turn to any solution that sounds feasible, even if others label it radical, when they are forced to live in the world of “Killer’s Kiss.” Hence Mamdani’s victory.

Personally, I believe Mamdani’s policies will drastically improve the quality of life for millions of New Yorkers, at least if the political establishment will give him a fair shot at implementing them. I think the accusations of anti-Semitism against him are entirely based on the fallacious argument that anti-Zionism is itself anti-Semitic. Yet even if Mamdani utterly fails to implement his vision and does prove to hate Jews, that will not erase the fact that the establishment’s failures elected him in the first place. “Killer’s Kiss” is a testament to those failures, a documentary-style film noir with real life sprinkled all through it, and that as such feels more truthful than virtually anything else set in New York City either then or since.

Bluntly put: Much as I enjoyed rewatching “Killer’s Kiss,” a film noir made 70 years ago by a Jewish New Yorker who regarded it as “amateurish,” I shouldn’t be able to connect its dire world to my own reality. Yet I regularly identify aspects of that movie with contemporary New York City and, ultimately, the entire world.

Even people who haven’t seen “Killer’s Kiss” can see what I see and feel what I feel about our shared world. “Killer’s Kiss” is merely a brilliant exploration of those themes, one that thus goes a long way to explaining why Zohran Mamdani will soon become New York City’s 111th mayor.

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Back Seat Socialism

Back Seat Socialism is a column by Matthew Rozsa, who has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently, he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.