Movies in the Age of Obama by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Then, once again, we have the link with the terrorist attacks of 2001:

And it’s greed that makes the government of this country cut the interest rates to 1 percent after 9/11—so we could all go shopping again.

Here, Americans of all classes are implicated in a crassly consumerist distortion of the American Dream. But, via Gekko, Stone tells us that the principal threat to that dream remains Wall Street. Though not as (mis)quotable as “greed is good,” Gekko’s new message is that “the mother of all evil is speculation.” In a dialogue with the fiancé, Gekko warns that high-risk speculation in pursuit of short-term profits now constitutes a genuine threat of financial apocalypse, and that there are no longer the necessary regulations or institutions in place to prevent it. As Gekko puts it, “Nobody knows what to do next except repeat the insanity until the next bubble blows. That’ll be the one—the big one.”

Stone’s perspective, like Michael Moore’s, is moral: Gekko remains duplicitous, old-school bankers kill themselves, and LaBeouf’s halfway sympathetic character is guilty of serial deceit. This film has the cultural argument of Inside Job, but, unlike the original Wall Street, it is superficial in its treatment of the inner workings of the financial world.

Not so Margin Call (2011), probably the best film ever made about Wall Street. Written and directed by J. C. Chandor, the film is set in the offices of a Manhattan investment bank during a twenty-four-hour period in which financial analysts realize that their firm is overleveraged and laden with toxic assets. The quality of both the script and the performances are such that even reluctant viewers will find themselves acquiring at least some understanding of how the structural dynamics of the financial system, and the workplace psychological pressures they produce, could induce in brilliant people a collective myopia, or even delusion, that would take their firm to the brink of destruction.

The film does not expect us to like its characters. Those who insist on finding a hero will settle on the risk analyst Peter Sullivan, played by Zachary Quinto. Sullivan is a perfect specimen of the problem identified by Andrew Sheng in Inside Job: an engineering Ph.D. who moved to financial modeling as a massively more lucrative career. It is Sullivan who discovers the potentially fatal extent of the overleveraging of the firm. Over the course of the film, we watch as the various players come to realize the magnitude of the problem. What alarms us is that they are as incredulous as we are. Gordon Gekko’s apocalyptic warning suddenly seems more credible.

Once the problem has been discovered, blame has to be allocated, and the firm has to be extricated from the catastrophic position into which it has put itself. There is much finger-pointing before the ruthless scapegoating. But the crisis is so deep that CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) has to descend ominously from the sky by helicopter in the middle of the night. What Tuld brings to the situation is not intelligence or insight, but ruthlessness.

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