Galvanised by Austin Walker’s terrific Off the Clock series, I’ve decided that February 2016 is an auspicious time to get back into this blogging thing. Following his lead, I’ll be take reflecting on some of the experiences I’ve had during the last week, mostly likely media-related seeing as my life as of late is an uninterrupted l relay race from one nutritious content package to the next. I hope future entries will be a bit more conversational in tone as I get more comfortable with the format but for now, here’s some fairly stiff-sounding observations about The Big Short.
Before the lights go down, The Big Short has already made its point. As a comedy about the handful of Wall Street outsiders who saw the 2008 economic meltdown coming, the film’s premise is its own argument. Its insight is this: the fact it’s admissible to turn the financial crisis into a comedy at all speaks to the success, witting or not, with which the banking system conceals the violence it brings to bear upon society’s most vulnerable.
Humour needs distance to be considered tactful; this is principle implicit in the question “Too soon?” comedians often ask after sending up a touchy recent event. What the banking system does, through its oodles of lingo and bureaucracy, is create this distance. Through layers of abstraction it hides the stock market’s human cost and renders blame diffuse when things go wrong. It’s this same opacity, the systemic gulf between boardroom decisions and people’s lives, that excuses the humour. We can laugh at The Big Short because just like the bankers who let it all happen, we don’t see the direct connection between some dodgy trades, some risky loans and the livelihoods of millions of people.
The film’s gradual shift in tone reflects a growing awareness of this connection, getting less farcical proportional to how much we learn about the crisis’ real world effects. The change is embodied by Mark Baum (Steve Carell) the comically obnoxious management honcho who cuts taxi queues and interrupts almost every meeting (including a group therapy session) with loud phone conversations. Somewhere along the line, Baum becomes the film’s moral centre, keen to use his role as an insider and part-accomplice in manufacturing the crisis to try and do some good. Despite this sort of detective fiction-style plot of slowly accumulating evidence, there is something of a sharp turning point about two thirds in, triggered by a remark by self-exiled ex-Wall Street guru Ben Ricker (Brad Pitt):
“Here’s a number. Every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die.”
I’ve haven’t managed to track down a source for this quote, which is the film’s most direct attempt to lay down the gravity of the situation, but here’s a similarly chilling statistic from Elizabeth MacBride in the Atlantic:
In the modern era, for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate, there has typically been an increase of about 1% in the number of suicides.
A suicide does in fact feature in the story – we learn that pseudo-protagonist Mark Baum’s brother took his own life a few years prior – as does a perfunctory David Simon-style anecdote which sees a recently evicted family packing their bags as part of a montage sequence, signalling that the film is actually aware of the seriousness of its subject matter. And yet, while hardly a laugh a minute, The Big Short is emphatically a comedy. When Ricker delivers the sobering line quoted above, he’s doing so to snap two young traders, whom the impending catastrophe is about to make very rich, out of their agonizingly goofy victory dance, a cringe-worthy display like something out of a typical nerd-to-hero comedy like Superbad.
So why then, did writer/director Adam McKay and co-writer Charles Randolph choose to make a comedy instead of an outright indictment? Well, maybe because the financial crisis wasn’t a discrete, coherent fuck up with obvious perpetrators. Maybe understanding the financial crisis as a comedy – the ultimate comedy of the errors – is closer to the truth.
While they’re happy to list off character traits that helped fuel the disaster – ignorance, incompetence, selfishness – the writers don’t single out individual culprits; there are no villains here. Even the most corrupt and morally deficient of the bankers, like the sleazy Miami loan sharks who make their money selling multiple homes to naive immigrants and pole dancers, are played for laughs. Rather than anger, what the film prompted me to feel towards these types was something between ridicule and pity. It’s the same response I have to bumbling politicians like Ed Miliband: when I see types like him, the nauseatingly awkward sandwich eater that he was, I don’t see a contemptuous poor-hating bastard but a bewildered product of a particular kind of upbringing, so far removed ordinary civilization that the workings of everyday life are mystery. Of course someone like that’s going to be totally oblivious to the real world impact of their actions.
The same is true of these bankers I think, with their cocktail parties, weighty wristwatches and sports cars with tinted windows. These are people with an aptitude for numbers who probably went to university, had a good social life and did alright in their studies, and then came out the other end without any particular calling other than to nab a quick, well paying gig to start putting that student debt behind them ASAP. Who knows, maybe they even had an uncle or a cousin at a firm somewhere to give them a leg up. Just like all of us, they’re a product of their circumstances, and while of course a certain amount of personal values and morals must come into it, at the end of the day they’re just folks doing what presents itself most obviously to them as a sensible way to get by.
This is the realisation dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk came to during his three year investigation of the working environment at London’s big banks. Speaking to Janice Forsyth in an interview for BBC Radio Scotland, he explains that his assumptions about bankers were much the same as most of us, fed by popular media representations like The Wolf of Wall Street. “They’re all cocaine snorting, whoring, gambling addicted psychopaths selling us shares in companies that don’t exist – that’s what I thought.” What Luyendijk discovered though – and I think this is the same message The Big Short tries to put across – is that they’re just ordinary people trapped and eventually transformed by a corrupt system. “Many of them are just rather naive, 22-year-old working class lads and girls who are really good at maths and they look at their student debt and they have no idea what they are getting into… then they enter this environment that is fundamentally abusive.”
The problem with banking, Luyendijk argues, has nothing to do with individuals. Simply hiring “better” people won’t change things. The problem is the system itself – a cut throat, gruelling business in which employment spins on a dime and profit conquers all. “I think if you want to understand why banks treat us citizens so badly, we need to understand first why banks treat their own people so badly and I think this is because banks in their current form… are really blueprints for short-termism. And so rather than blaming individual bankers for acting on the temptations of all of them, we should change the laws so that the interests of an individual banker is again aligned with the common interest and the general good.”
I think this is why The Big Short’s humour is an appropriate and effective way to tackle the financial crisis. Not only does it capture the absurdity and dramatic irony of events that no one involved quite grasps, chaotically spinning out control (there’s something darkly funny about Mark Baum realising only too late that the company he’s been screwing over all along is his own), but it allows us to empathise with the bankers to some degree. Comedy arises from recognition; we recognise common foibles and can imagine a similar situation happening to us, god forbid. While none of the characters are supposed to be likeable, the comedy humanises them. Baum is the typical high strung, naval gazing finance guy who devotes his entire life to his work, and it’s funny to watch him get into a tizzy until we learn that it’s because of this same rabid workaholism that he wasn’t there for his brother when it mattered most. Jared Vennett’s (Ryan Gosling) transparent macho schtick is comical in how desperate is comes across, but we come to understand it’s a survival mechanism, a necessity in a business that’s trying to push him out. After things go south and the Lehman Brothers clear out all their staff, all that’s left among the empty desk and scattered papers in an enormous pyramid of Red Bull cans, like a kind of monument. It paints a funny picture, but also a sad one.
“Many of them are so unhappy,” Luyendijk says of the bankers he met in London. “Many of them told me ‘actually I would take a huge pay cut if I could be proud again of my job’.”
Yes, some of the bankers in the The Big Short are idiots, and laughably so. But there are no villains; just people doing their jobs.
What I’ve been…
Playing:
Watching:
- The Thick of It
- The Man Who Wasn’t There
Reading:
- Fire Season by Philip Connors (Re-reading actually, helping to get me in the mood for a certain upcoming video game)
- First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek (Still. I’ve been at this for nearly a year)