It seems right that the Wall Street drama The Big Short should come from comedy director Adam McKay. The economic stakes are so insanely high – making fortunes betting against the biggest banks on Wall Street and, in effect, against the American economy itself – and the characters either so sociopathic or so eccentric, that nervous laughter seems a perfectly natural response as they edge ever closer to cratering the finances of the nation.
Every financial crash on Wall Street brings in its wake a comet-trail of movies that either tell how it all went down, or that are overshadowed by its grim economic aftermath. Frank Capra’s American Madness (1932) depicted a run on a bank 14 years before the repeat version in It’s a Wonderful Life. Almost the entire output of Warner Bros in the 1930s nods to the debilitating after-effects of Black Tuesday in 1929; it’s there as plain as day in everything from the kid-hobo drama Wild Boys of the Road to The Roaring Twenties. Likewise Black Monday 1987, whose most potent – still potent – cultural byproduct was Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, and whose worst excesses are retroactively depicted in the exhaustingly amoral Wolf of Wall Street. If they’d been making movies at the time of the Big Panic of 1873 (which devastated the western economy until 1880), they’d have made them about that as well.
And here we are again, in the seemingly unshakable aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 (it doesn’t get a Black weekday of its own, its effects being more diffuse, slo-mo and insidious). Alongside The Big Short – which does an excellent job of explaining the complex financial hi-jinx its depicts – we can set Curtis Hanson’s HBO movie Too Big to Fail, starring Paul Giamatti as Ben Bernanke and Billy Crudup as Timothy Geitner, which explains the collapse as it happened, culminating in September 2008, and dooming John McCain’s presidential bid in a single day. Too Big is the top-down view from the bridge of the ship, so to speak, while The Big Short is about the rats in the ballast.
Another kingly perspective can be found in JC Chandor’s Margin Call, in which a banking firm’s expensively tailored big swinging dicks (Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany) throw an utterly cynical and dishonest fire sale of the toxic assets they inadvertently discover now underpin – and threaten to completely undermine – their financial firm’s entire economic wellbeing.
These movies sit in a fairly ancient and honorable tradition of worst-case-scenario Wall Street stories stretching as far back as Alan Pakula’s Rollover (1979), whose climax features the collapse of the entire world economy, the novels of ex-banker and convicted fraudster Paul Erdman, author of The Crash of 79, and the autobiographical Silver Bears, filmed in 1978 with Michael Caine, and between-collapse financial thrillers like Boiler Room, Rogue Trader and Barbarians at the Gate. Everybody loves a swaggering monster-capitalist, especially if we get to see him fail big-time.
Some stories work better as documentaries than as features. Certain bugs in the system were evident in docs made long before the 2008 crash. Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room was a hubristic account exactly warranted by the delusions embodied in that subtitle, while Mike Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s The Corporation (2003) took said entity seriously in its claim to “personhood” under American law, and clinically diagnosed that “person” as a psychopath, inhuman, unappeasable, shark-like and guilt-free. For a zestier experience, look no further than Gibney’s Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer, which comes with a side dish of speculation as to whether or not Spitzer’s sexual antics with high-end escorts were deliberately exposed by Wall Street gremlins to curtail his regulatory assault on the big banks.
And after the deluge, the flotsam: a slowly evolving genre of movies shows the ground-level effects of all those grotesque, dubiously legal “financial instruments” cooked up in the skyscraper aeries of the banking elite. Up in the Air has for a hero one of the grotesque new archetypes of the post-collapse universe, an outside consultant contracted for the sole purpose of laying off entire work forces. (He is the better-clad twin brother of the bailiff in Michael Moore’s Roger and Me.)
The Company Men starts with a similar figure laying off lifelong employees, and traces their diverse fortunes in the face of unemployment and sudden indebtedness. The related housing bubble and collapse of the property market are the backdrop for 99 Homes, in which, for Andrew Garfield’s broke homeowner character, the only way to survive is to prey upon his equally distressed neighbours’ properties. And finally, Killing Them Softly cuts and pastes a 1974 crime novel by George Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle) into the economically shattered landscape of post-collapse America. It ends with a splenetically cynical discourse by Brad Pitt’s hitman character into the inherent malevolence of money and business in America from the country’s founding onwards. His final words are that American mantra beloved by Ray Liotta’s Goodfellas mobster Henry Hill, Alex Baldwin’s bilious Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, and now Wall Street’s big screen villains: “Fuck you – pay me!”.
