“Even the losers get lucky sometimes.” – Tom Petty
If you watch Adam McKay’s uniquely brilliant film The Big Short and attempt to review it without giving it some time to settle in, you do yourself, the film, film criticism overall and the world of cinema a disservice. This happens too much lately. We need snap judgments. We need a thumbs up or thumbs down. We need to know if it succeeds or fails. But The Big Short is a movie that throws so much at you it requires time and contemplation to settle in. You might walk out saying, “Wow, that was great,” but still have no idea what you just saw. You might walk out – as a Bernie Sanders supporter might – saying, “Yeah, those evil crooks on Wall Street, those 1%ers really stuck it to the poor people! Fix it Bernie!” Or you might walk out saying, “What the fuck was that?” The Big Short flies by like a truck of headless chickens dancing to Uptown Funk. You think you know what you just saw but what did you really just see?
Because I knew there was a lot more there than could be caught in one pass (I don’t trust anyone who claims to have gotten it all the first time through), I picked up Michael Lewis’ excellent book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine to find out what the real story was, the one that Adam McKay threw in a blender and then stuck back together like a crazy Jackson Pollock. It turns out that the two go well together. You can read the book without ever seeing the movie (though you will want to see the movie after reading the book), but if you really want to know what that whole big short business is all about? You’re going to have to dive into the Lewis version before or after.
The Big Short, the film, is perhaps the first of its kind. It is almost as though Adam McKay is saying – forget everything you already know about filmmaking in 2015. Forget any kind of pre-agreed upon structure, forget about dumbing things down so everyone will understand and be entertained by your movie. Instead, here is a thoroughly modern film that takes off fast and doesn’t look back. It blends how we communicate now, how we ingest media, how we infuse our brains with many different types of media at once – music and news and audiobooks and texting and snap chatting and Twittering to invent almost a new way of storytelling. No, he doesn’t put the internet in the movie at all. But he has adapted and evolved his filmmaking for those who have been raised by this second-to-second insanity many of us live our lives by.
The Big Short, the movie, is a send up of the Wall Street collapse. It really doesn’t want or need you to know the specifics. The basic idea is: what happened while you weren’t paying attention. So are you paying attention now? Still not? Does everybody still want to get to rich at any cost? He’s flipping the mirror back at us in a way, and doesn’t give us an easy out the way, say, the progressive movement has: it’s all Wall Street’s fault. Get rid of the fat cats on Wall Streets, tax the billionaires, and all of your problems are solved. But will they? Can this ever be a country where no one wants to get rich anymore?
The Big Short the book is about a moment in our recent history when the internet allowed for anyone with a little time and curiosity to kind of pretend to be professionals in the stock market. One method of selling credit default swaps opened up a side market – an incredibly profitable one – that bet on the failure of mortgage loans. From the very bottom of the catastrophe – where poor people with terrible FICO scores were just trying to grab hold of a little something for themselves took out loans they couldn’t afford even if the opportunity seemed too good to be true – to hungry young students who wanted to try their hand at getting rich quickly by selling stocks that were too good to be true – all the way up to the banks that sold and bought their swaps and hedge funds even when they knew it was too good to be true.
This story is about how it’s the American way – maybe the human way – to think you can get something for nothing. You want to believe you can buy a house with no money down because no way is anyone ever going to raise the interest rate and make you pay more per month. They’re offering you a refi on that home which will put $200K in your pocket today. Something for nothing. By the end, a few people at the very top would make billions off this game and millions of homeowners would be left holding an empty bubble of dreams. It wouldn’t even be bankers who made out like bandits. It certainly wouldn’t be the American people who had to bail out those bankers. It would be those scrappy, resourceful opportunists who slipped in through the backdoor, made their iron clad deals, and walked away scott-free after fleecing everybody. The Big Short is about those guys.
It is also about most of us because there are always going to be people who want a piece of the pie. The golden ticket. The keys to the kingdom.
The only thing that could have prevented this house of cards from coming down was if someone who had the chance to do so had blown the whistle to alert the bankers and the government to what was going on. And in fact a few people did try, but their calls went unanswered. Bernie Sanders, and yes Hillary Clinton and other progressives, want stricter regulations on Wall Street so that this never happens again. That might solve part of the problem but it will not solve all of the problems. There is still that needling plea from Americans up and down the ladder of success that says “what about my fair share?” Because that plea is there, because we are ruled by and driven by consumerist culture that tells us we are what we buy, Americans will always want more – more money, more houses, more stuff.
No politician can remove that desire. Perhaps if revolutionaries wanted to teach us a cruel lesson, they could let the big banks fail. They could let the economy collapse, thrust the world into deep Depression, obliterating all credit options for everyone – and maybe then most of us would be cured of the desire to live as rich as possible as quickly as possible. Americans aren’t the only ones who chase that dream – millions of people in socialist countries were pulled into the credit default swap catastrophe as well. Many of those unprotected banks did fail, however. Take a look at Greece to see what happens when a government defaults along with its banks.
This is a big problem and I’m not sure Adam McKay’s film is the solution. It is a great piece of art that expresses the frustration of being caught in an impossible loop. Other films of this order have also expressed this sentiment really well, like Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street and JC Chandor’s Margin Call. There is no doubt that the top executives and the middle men walked away with billions, never went to jail and probably still wonder how they can make something like that happen again. This is funny money people played with and continue to play with.
What will it take to ultimately to stop this cyclical looting? It isn’t going to be one guy with a high ideal and a church of progressives following him around. Before we fix the problem people have to decide that’s what they really want. This American orgy of excess doesn’t stop and start with regulating Wall Street. It is about consumption. Many of those same progressives will eat meat even though they know it is raping the natural world, polluting the ground water and perpetuating unthinkable abuse of animals on a mass scale. Those same progressives continually and will always look for the cheapest deal, which usually means “Made in China.” The American way is the American way. Before we can change it we have to figure out just what exactly we’re talking about. The way I see it, our problems are much deeper and darker, in our genetic makeup. When we ourselves change, Wall Street will follow suit.
The Big Short is absolutely worth seeing, but do yourself and the world a favor and read the book; to really understand the bigger picture you have to understand how it happened, why it happened, and why it will keep happening. You’ll have to navigate through Michael Lewis’ roadmap. Either way, The Big Short is one of the best films of the year – a complete mess and a spectacular, inventive triumph.