On September 12, 2024, the first episode of a fictional video series called Smiling Faces dropped on YouTube. This self-described “hood movie” had been shot with an Android smartphone on various city streets north of Delmar. Its budget was roughly zero. The dialogue was improvised. All the actors were locals—none of them professionals, but some with criminal records that lent an air of authenticity to the plot, which, over the next six episodes, would come to include a whirl of gang wars, contract killings, honey traps, and at one point, intimidation by live alligator. The concept of the show was “everyday life in the trenches,” said its creator, Dise (rhymes with “twice”) Buckley. His collaborator, the rapper Profit Marley, described it as “backdoor St. Louis. Scandalous. Grimy.”
They said this in a video-recorded interview with Hot 104.1 FM in October. “The movie is going crazy,” DJ Raymond observed—and indeed, by that point, the first four episodes were on their way to racking up a combined 78,000 views. Raymond told them he’d watched some clips himself: “I was like, ‘Man, this is so, so St. Louis right here.’” Marley touted its accuracy. “It’s the real St. Louis,” he said, head cocked, his dreadlocks spidering out from his headband. “It’s showin’ what St. Louis doin’ right now.”
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Hometown representation wasn’t the only goal, Buckley would later tell me. A major motivation was for Smiling Faces to serve as marketing for his record label, Elevated Street Music; many of his artists play characters in the movie. But he was sincere in seeking to fill a content void. When folks he knew would kick back at night and search online for something to watch, they’d visit YouTube or Tubi and type in “hood movie,” a genre that exploded in the ’90s (Boyz n the Hood, New Jack City, Menace II Society) and today includes countless low-budget offerings. While many of those offerings come from Detroit, Buckley noticed, none came from St. Louis. So he tried to move into that lane. Once he did, he realized, “There was demand for this shit.”
The movie’s title, Buckley explains, comes from the local underworld’s cutthroat ethos. “People smile in your face,” he says, “then they want to take your place.” And certainly, the series does reveal—even revels in—a very real phenomenon: “instrumental” violence, or physical harm done in pursuit of some tangible goal (e.g., the seizing of drug turf or money). There’s no question that this occurs in St. Louis and beyond. The fact that drug gangs persist after a half century of raids by local, state, and federal law enforcement only demonstrates their staying power—and the durability of a marketplace fueled by addiction.
Yet even the series’ creators acknowledge that another kind of violence also wrecks North City and North County neighborhoods—a kind that’s less sensational but more common. The good news there, however, is that researchers and practitioners are discovering ways to thwart it. If they can succeed, the next generation of Buckleys and Marleys might be able to break out of the cycle—and create all the violent movies they want, without having to grow up in them first.
MAJOR CHARACTERS
SMILING FACES HAS A LARGE ENSEMBLE CAST, BUT THESE ARE THE CHARACTERS WHO GET THE MOST SCREEN TIME:
Odis “Dise” Buckley rolls in for coffee at a Starbucks near his West County apartment with his signature look—baseball hat, thick beard, “Money and Family” pendant—minus the dark sunglasses. Asked about his youth, he says that he was seven the first time he saw someone get shot. Growing up in the city neighborhood of Wells-Goodfellow, he sometimes slept under his bed to avoid stray bullets. He was raised by his single mother; his daddy, he says, was “a hustler.” Dise admired local drug dealers for their cars and fat wads of cash. He himself got into “small-time hustling,” he says, did some rapping, dropped out of high school, then eventually got into music production. In 2019, he filed the paperwork for Elevated Street Music LLC, and over time built a roster of local rappers: Cory G, 3skiies, Deechi Deechi, and Marley.
In 2024, Buckley and Marley converged on a plan to make a local hood movie. Marley, a tall and breezy Jennings native whose “government name” is Courtland Newland, had been incarcerated a combined eight years on felony convictions for assault, armed criminal action, and firing a weapon at someone from a motor vehicle. He mined his memories for storylines and fed them to Buckley, who typed up scenes on his smartphone. They reached out to people from different (and in some cases, adversarial) neighborhoods on the city’s North and West sides, and then everyone met up to start recording. “We was straight in the trenches,” Marley recalls, “like, where shit go down. [But we had] Crips, Bloods, 6Deuces, GDs, and nobody clutchin’ no gun. It’s fives and hugs.” Marley was chosen to play the role of the leader of the Bloods.
Then Kenny “Sauce60d” Winfield arrived. With his belly-length braids, short stature, and smoldering affect, Winfield was in certain ways a contrast to the lanky, effervescent Marley. He’d grown up between Omaha and St. Louis. (As a student at McCluer North High School, he was featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch because, after finding $400 cash on the gym floor, he did the right thing and turned it in.) Winfield says he got into some trouble as a teen and relocated to Phoenix, where relatives lived, but he got into trouble there, too: In 2014, he was convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping and spent seven years behind bars. After returning to St. Louis, he got a call one day to participate in the movie, so he showed up. It was not a part of town where you could “tinkerbell around” (or stroll carefree), he says, so the comity among groups surprised him. Residents, too, seemed unused to seeing a camera capture screen acting on their block. “You don’t know how much impact it is to have all these different types of people in one spot together,” he says—people whose “common agenda” was to show “what St. Louis is like.” As soon as Buckley saw Winfield, he decided: Winfield should play the Crip leader.
The rivalry between the two gang leaders—which begins when one rebuffs the other’s proposal to cooperate on drug trafficking—serves as the thickest thread in a tangle of betrayals, attacks, and counterattacks. One group tries to branch out to North County and comes under fire from a group already there. A crooked police detective tries to shake down multiple gangsters for thousands of dollars. Whereas some hood movies of the ’90s drew criticism for degrading women, female characters in Smiling Faces are anything but inferior. They’re murderers for hire or bosses in their own right. “That was intentional,” Buckley says. “I know some strong-ass queenpins. I wanted to show that.”
There are moments of levity, too. At one point, Marley’s character briefly goes to jail, and upon release, tells his associate: “I look at life different now, gang… They put crack in the hood for us to sell it. They put guns in the hood for us to kill each other. You put all that together, it’s chaos, bruh.” Replies his friend: “Look at you, you locked up a weekend, you come out thinking you motherf—kin’ Farrakhan or some shit.” Certain scenes are interrupted by smartphone notifications going kuh-CHING!; others by the camera person’s exhaling smoke into the shot. The gunfire noises and muzzle flashes, added in postproduction, are amusingly crude. Buckley intended as much, he says: “We wanted to give it that rough-and-ready feel. We don’t want it to be too Hollywood, too perfect.”
Buckley kept a brisk schedule: They shot on Mondays and Tuesdays, he would edit in Adobe Premiere Pro on Wednesdays, and then he’d release episodes on Thursdays.
As the episodes streamed out, comments poured in on social media. The actors started getting recognized in clubs and gas stations. Winfield says this only spurred him on: “That just amped me up and made me learn tricks of the trade to do it better.”
Smiling Faces is not The Wire—the much-lauded HBO series that dramatized the structural reasons why the War on Drugs failed. It isn’t trying to be, either. It’s silent about neighbors who are scared to go outside and the well-intentioned police officers who risk their own safety to protect them. There’s no mention of grieving mothers or difficult family dynamics. (Buckley, Marley, and Winfield all say they grew up without fathers.) At no point does the movie show drug-trade customers with addiction problems, although they’re referred to by the slang word “geeks.” (As a character in one scene is counting money, his associate says, “Only in the Lou we get paper like that. Junkie city, baby!”)
But Buckley rejects the idea that the movie promotes violence. He argues that, on the contrary, it has reduced it by giving everyone involved something “productive” to do. He has also heard some critics complain that Smiling Faces besmirches the city’s reputation. “We’re making St. Louis look violent?” he asks rhetorically. “It is violent. And what movie don’t glorify that?”
Leaving aside the debate over the effects of violent media—and it’s a long-running one—those who wish to stop the bloodshed in real life will get nowhere pretending it doesn’t exist. The first task, rather, is to understand its origin. And there’s an emerging view that the most common understandings are woefully incomplete.
FILMING LOCATIONS:
SMILING FACES WAS SHOT DOWNTOWN, IN NORTH CITY, AND IN PARTS OF NORTH COUNTY
In the forthcoming book Unforgiving Places, Jens Ludwig, a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, asks: What if everything we think we know about gun violence is wrong?
The political right favors the “wicked people” hypothesis: that violent criminals are inherently rotten. A small number of such people do exist, Ludwig concedes; they’re called psychopaths. But even though they loom large in culture, psychopaths account for only a small amount of violence. The political left, for its part, favors the “root causes” hypothesis, which holds that shooters are victims of poverty and act out of desperation. There’s truth to that, too, Ludwig writes; look at how murders concentrate in low-wealth neighborhoods. But poverty doesn’t explain, for instance, why violent crime is more common at night and in the summer. People are no less poor in the morning or in the winter.
What both hypotheses have in common is that they assume shooters make rational decisions—that they use the slow, analytical brain processes that the Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman referred to as “System 2” thinking. But in most cases, Ludwig argues, shooters don’t use this. Instead, they use System 1 thinking, which is fast, automatic, and associative—and can easily make conflicts spiral.
Pointing to analyses of police and FBI homicide data, Ludwig concludes that only a small portion of gun violence is “instrumental,” or done for profit or personal gain. This includes gang wars over drug turf, robberies, contract murders—the kinds of things you see in Smiling Faces. By contrast, Ludwig writes, most gun violence is “reactive” or “expressive.” It erupts suddenly over petty disagreements, disrespect, jealousy, or rage. The goal is to hurt the victim. This can then set off a cycle of revenge that’s wildly disproportionate to the original incident.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department appears to concur about the nature of the problem. “Much of our gun violence,” it says in a statement, “has stemmed from personal disputes.”
Even the creators of Smiling Faces acknowledge that, for all the suspense of gangs calmly plotting out murders, what happens on the streets is often more spontaneous. “I don’t think it’s calculated,” says Buckley. The disagreements may be about women, debts, or “past interactions,” he says, but “for the most part it’s [decided] on-site.” (In Smiling Faces, the first episode closes with just such a situation: One group in a car spots the brother of an “opp” and instantly decides to jump out and blast.)
Winfield says that because carrying a gun is so common in St. Louis, you’re more likely to get shot by guys who fly off the handle than by someone you have a long-running beef with. “A trigger-happy motherf—ker will kill you before a motherf—ker who really wants you,” he says. But the most common reason either of them would want to shoot you, he says, is “respect”—or more specifically, the failure to show it. (In Smiling Faces, there’s a hint of this when Marley’s character impatiently tells a hitwoman that a rival “gotta go” because he’s “all over Instagram, all over Facebook, braggin’ like the city his, showin’ all this money… I need you to finesse that n—a and bring him to me. I need that n—a to me, like, today.”)
Marley himself has said that the most common reasons for gun violence are jealousy, women, and debts, but he also points to revenge cycles. The mindset, he says, is this: “If you kill one of mine, I don’t wanna fight you no more. You kill my people, I wanna kill your people. I want you to feel how I feel.” Marley concludes: “A lot of people do this because they can’t control their emotions.”
What he’s describing is System 1 thinking, and researchers are now focusing on how to interrupt it. One way, according to Ludwig, is to get more “eyes on the street”—that is, to increase the presence of pro-social adults who intervene and help cooler heads prevail. Certain policies have been shown through randomized control trials to help draw such adults into public spaces, Ludwig writes. These include cleaning up vacant lots, fixing abandoned homes, improving street lighting, opening more stores, and even hiring unarmed security guards.
Ludwig also identifies the value of self-interruption. Decades of research have shown that System 1 thinking, however useful it might’ve been for human evolution, can lead to grave errors in how we read situations. It causes us to “catastrophize” (e.g., literally nothing is worse than the car in front of me going slowly), to take an “egocentric perspective” (e.g., that driver must be doing this to block me personally), to commit the “fundamental attribution error” (e.g., they must be inconsiderate or incompetent). Yet there are cognitive tools that have proved effective at slamming the brakes on that train of thought. The Becoming a Man program in Chicago, for example, teaches kids not to do the right thing, but rather, to notice and manage their System 1 thinking. In a randomized control trial involving more than 4,000 youths, BAM reduced violent-crime arrests by an impressive 45–50 percent.
In St. Louis, such cognitive tools are being passed on to the workers at Show Me Peace, a group of violence interrupters deployed in some of the same areas featured in Smiling Faces. The task of these “trusted messengers” (so labeled because they have experience on the streets) is to halt revenge cycles. So far, the numbers look encouraging: In their areas of focus, there were 25 fatal shootings during 2023, their first year; during the second, there were 12. Whether it’s fair to attribute that drop to Show Me Peace is unclear; violent crime is falling nationwide. But either way, they’re now being trained on how to use and teach evidence-based ways to slow down System 1 thinking.
At the organization’s most recent training, held at Mission: St. Louis on February 5, the trainer James Timpson of the nonprofit Roca told a room full of Show Me Peace workers that mediation between warring youths is not by itself enough. He has tried it. “I’m mediating, and then I leave, and then as soon as I’m gone, shit poppin’ off again,” he says. “So, I wasn’t leaving them anything to help them not get back to those situations.” Interrupting automatic System 1 thinking, he says, “may not stop them from doing what they’re going to do. But it’s gonna slow ’em down. The beauty of this is that you’re giving people a choice.”
After the session, Timpson tells me that would-be shooters are misunderstood by society. The public believes “they inherently want to do bad just because they’re bad people. But that’s not the truth. A lot of kids are just stuck in survival mode and they want something different.”
“Each character came from imagination, and we manifested that into reality. That’s fire to me, bro.”
Profit Marley wanted something different in 2018, when he got locked up a second time. He went sober and confronted his demons. “I learned who I was,” he says. “But if you know yourself, you can do whatever.” That meant, upon his release in 2020, focusing on rap, and later, Smiling Faces. Yet entertainers in Marley’s genre face a conundrum: To captivate their audience, they must be authentic, but too much authenticity—that is, too little distance between reality and spectacle—is a death or prison sentence.
On one hand, Marley says, music is his therapy, an outlet for destructive feelings. Take the Smiling Faces theme song “Head Shots” (which, yes, is just as sinister as it sounds). “At that time, I probably wanted to shoot somebody in the head,” he says of laying down the track. “I wasn’t gonna do it, but I have to express it. That’s how I’m gonna let it go.” On the other hand, Marley himself is a father of two. He knows that his rap persona and his Smiling Faces character—which he identifies as the “lower” version of himself—will be something that kids want to emulate. So he has gone on Instagram to warn them that reality is darker than the spectacle. For example, on December 8, he posted a Reel saying:
You goin’ to jail, you facin’ life, you don’t know if you comin’ home? That do somethin’ to you, boy. You chained there like a slave in front of yo mama [who’s] in the courtroom cryin’ cause you ain’t got no bond? Yeah, it hit different… You never been in that cell [thinking] This might be it, I might never see my kids again, I might never get no pussy again.
Marley can’t lead with that message to kids, he argues, or they’ll tune him out. He leads with media such as Smiling Faces, which is a kind of content that he himself also happens to appreciate and hopes one day to earn money creating, even if right now, it’s primarily a labor of love. “Each character came from imagination, and we manifested that into reality,” he says. “That’s fire to me, bro.”
There’s a cost, though, to hyping the violence that shatters parts of St. Louis. The metro area has sought for decades to shake its “dangerous city” label. And while Smiling Faces casts light on a real problem—one that can’t be ignored—the mere perception of danger causes residents to flee and tourists to flock elsewhere. If Ludwig’s thesis in Unforgiving Places is correct, then such avoidance will take eyes off the street, which will let people’s System 1 thinking run rampant, which in turn will lead to more violence.
Violence, unsurprisingly, is how the first season of Smiling Faces ends. The rival gangs face off in a climactic shootout inside a downtown building. Both leaders end up wounded. What follows is a sequence of nighttime shots of the skyline and streetscapes of downtown St. Louis—the very symbols of our metro—with the title of the movie in big letters spread across the frame. The soundtrack is Marley’s song “Been Thru It All.” In between a female vocalist’s renditions of “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver, Marley sings a verse that’s by turns bitter (“I lost my n—a… whoever thought he’d be snitchin’”), defiant (“middle finger to the judge”), and sad (“[my granny] died two weeks before my graduation / I walked across the stage / I was in so much pain”). Given his character’s acts of brutality and the movie’s central theme of deceit, the performance strikes a contrast with its seeming rawness and vulnerability.
The downtown streetscapes in this sequence, meanwhile, are shown in an equally unfiltered way. The Arch, the Old Courthouse, Kiener Plaza, Washington Avenue—they’re all lit up and glowing in the warm evening. There’s something else a viewer might notice about those streets: By and large, they’re empty.
Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of the feature “Shooting Scenes,” which was published in the April 2025 issue of St. Louis Magazine.
