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ABSTRACT
This article uses the 2015 film, The Big Short, to explore the limits of representing and critiquing Wall Street culture on film. Critics have praised the film, suggesting that it offers an account of the 2007–2008 financial crisis that both critiques Wall Street culture and democratizes financial knowledge. I argue that the film is an early representative example of a public narrative based on behavioral economics. A popular movie informed by this discipline has a good deal of political potential for challenging injustices produced by neoliberal approaches to the financial services industry. However, I also argue that despite this political potential, The Big Short is unable to fundamentally challenge the belief in efficient markets that justify many of Wall Street’s practices. I also argue that the film uses unexamined and problematic understandings of both class and gender in characterizing the film’s protagonists.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Gavin Benke is the author of Risk and Ruin: Enron and the Culture of American Capitalism. He teaches writing at Boston University.
Notes
1 The roundtable discussion followed a screening of the movie and included McKay, David Wessel, a Brookings fellow and former reporter, Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Ip, Adam Davidson, the co-founder of the National Public Radio show ‘Planet Money’ who had also worked as a consultant on the film, Donald Kohn, a Brookings fellow, and Danny Moses, one of the Wall Street professionals depicted in both the book and film.
2 Over the film’s ‘wide opening weekend,’ it earned over ten million dollars. By the time it left American theaters in April, it had grossed over seventy million dollars domestically.
3 Though the term ‘neoliberalism’ has a number of different uses, I use it to indicate an overall abiding faith in a market system requiring little, if any, state intervention.
4 In Lewis’s book, the author explains that the real-life Burry was autistic. In the film, however, Bale portrays him as simply eccentric.
5 This emphasis informs their recent scholarly work as well as books the pair have written for a general readership.
6 Hansen uses the terms ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neoclassical’ throughout, and sometimes interchangeably. However, The Big Short addresses neoclassical economics more directly.
7 Likewise, the participants in the 2016 Brookings Institution roundtable also grasped the importance of popular narratives about the crash. As David Wessel, a financial journalist and the event’s moderator put it, ‘movies have incredible power in crafting a narrative’ (Brookings Institution Citation2016).
8 Here, Gournelos and Greene are specifically referring to irony. However, they also make similar assertions about humor and comedy as broad categories.
9 Thaler also references this line in his 2015 book, Misbehaving.
10 For a broad introduction to behavioral economics, see Baddeley (Citation2017).
11 By ‘culture,’ I refer to the definition offered by Clifford Geertz, that culture is comprised of ‘webs of significance’ (Citation1973, p. 5). The specific type of culture, though, is different in the case of the short sellers.
12 Liar’s Poker, his first book, skewers the cultural norms of that world.
13 For instance, Ho notes the recruiting tactics that investment banking firms use in courting potential employees in Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Princeton.
14 The scene in the film is almost wholly absent in the book. Discussing the convention in Las Vegas, Lewis writes, ‘A friend of Danny’s returned from a night on the town to report he’d met a stripper with five separate home equity loans’ (Citation2010, p. 152). There are other examples of this sort of behavior in the book. Eisman’s family nurse, Lewis reports, owns six homes.
15 ‘Regulatory capture’ has been an issue since the 1970s. See Waterhouse (Citation2014).
16 Elsewhere, overly sexualized depictions of women overshadow some of the movie’s most potent political moments. Notably, many initial reviews of the film specifically mention a scene featuring the actress Margot Robie naked in a bubble bath, offering a testament to the ways in which some viewers’ reception of the movie mirrored the sexualized depictions of women in the film.
17 Notably, many of these questions of power fall outside the bounds of what behavioral economists are typically interested in studying.
18 Even when female sexuality and ambition is not foregrounded, the film repeatedly implies that the market is an explicitly male arena. Some of these choices seem innocent, such as the middle-aged real estate agent driving around Baum and his team pointing out various ‘motivated’ sellers. At this moment, the team’s snarky asides clearly telegraph the real estate agent’s relative ignorance. At other points in the movie, Tomei’s character, Baum’s wife, acts as a separate spheres character, repeatedly calling Baum’s attention away from the market and towards supposedly more important matters. Women’s proper role in these instances is to offer respite from the market – but not be a part of it.
19 Here, I am not suggesting that every depiction of gender in the movie neatly fits into this binary. There are several instances of women in positions of authority who are not overly sexualized or treated as distractions. However, this gender binary (which has a much older history in American culture) is certainly one of the dominant ways in which gender is used in the movie.
20 I am not suggesting that the subprime mortgage crisis was the only reason Donald Trump grabbed the presidency. As many have noted, sexism, racism, and nativism, along with a distrust of elites, all played a role in his presidential campaign. However, the discourse surrounding the 2016 election cannot be separated from the context of economic stress exacerbated by the Great Recession.