Two questions....
What was with Baldwin's constant snorting? Is it to show he's a coke head or something?
Also, the clip he showed Martin...was that somehow a reenactment of something Martin did with the other cop? Did Baldwin have that filmed to show Martin he knew the kind of stuff he had been doing?
About the snorting, first I thought he was faking it to break Martin's balls
Then on some episodes he stopped doing it
And then again, in a very key scene
I think its kind of allegorical in some way, there was this kind of strange sexual tension between the father, the girl and the (?) cop
Or maybe that scene was a joke gone wrong and Martin totally goes bananas, maybe not, i don't know, its kind of ambiguous
1. IMO it was to show his whole unpleasantness: greaser hair, unbuttoned shirt, parallels with Nixon and constant snorting. Maybe he was a coke head too.
2. Do you remember that scene in 'Mulholland drive' which includes some enigmatic box, little people coming out of that box, a hobo, etc.? That scene never made much sense to me - it was plain weird and formally out of the context. And yet it somehow fitted perfectly in the whole story.
'Too Old' is inspired heavily by Lynch so pretty much the same could be seen here: something weird that nevertheless fits into the narration. It is what you say: Baldwin had some dirt on Martin and was showing it to him. And for some reason, Refn decided to show these blackmail materials not as something straightforward (photos, surveillance camera videos, etc.) but as a reenactment.
This I guess was my favorite scene №2 )