Will capitalism survive “The Big Short”?

Is everyone seeing “The Big Short,” now playing in local theaters? Everyone should be. We should all be thinking and talking about it. It’s a high energy tragi-comedy about about the hit-and-run of the 2008 housing collapse—and about the sort of work that tends to produce that sort of disaster.
There are some movies which, if you are as naïvely fervent a believer in the power of free speech as I am, you say to yourself on emerging: Wow. They sure blasted that out of the water. No way we’re going to be the same after that.
“Dr. Strangelove,” the great 1964 satire, was one of those. No way the Cold War nuclear standoff would survive that, it seemed. A few years later, “The President’s Analyst” had a great old time exposing spying on both sides of the Iron Curtain and the sinister workings of the Telephone Company. No way business-as-usual would survive that skewering.
“The Big Short” is one of those. The story of the housing bubble and those in big investment and banking companies responsible for it. How can Wall Street’s business-as-usual go on after this movie?
One of the side-effects of this movie is, in focussing on the work of those responsible for 2008, to put the lives of the rest of us in perspective.
The main characters in “The Big Short” spend their every waking moment doing something that most of us spend practically no time doing: that is, gaming the system. That’s their work. (Those of us with investments may of course hire others do that work for us, in our behalf, as we let the police do our shooting for us.)
The bad guys in the movie are those shown giddily reaping the profits of creating the housing bubble. The better guys are those smart enough to see the bubble for what it is. But they, too, use their foresight to game the system by betting on the bubble’s bursting. There are no good guys in the usual sense.
Nobody in the movie does what almost all the rest of us do fulltime: producing, building, fixing, helping, nurturing, serving– in general being useful to fellow humans. The guys in the movie have the same relationship to the productive, helpful work of the vast majority that the oddsmakers in Vegas have to bigtime sports: they don’t play the game, they just bet on it.
The merry pranksters whose story is told here would argue that betting on the system is the main game in our culture, the game taking place on center court, and the rest of us losers in not even understanding that. Why get bogged down in all that producing and serving to make a salary to enable you to live, when you can bypass all that and make money directly. You can see the appeal.
What percentage of the citizenry, I wonder, is actually engaged in that sort of parasitic work? I’m guessing a very small percentage. All the rest of us are alluded to in the movie only as the victims of their shenanigans.
You would think that surely after 2008 this parasitic activity would be outlawed as immoral and dangerous to others. But no, according to the followup story that ends the film, only a few years later, despite all the havoc wreaked, the bad guys have in fact gone back to their old tricks. Few punishments were meted out to the perps of 2008. Gaming the system is still apparently alive and well.
The world survived the entertainingly radical analyses of the 1960s movies cited earlier, although with an overlay of self-knowledge that is still with us. Will Wall Street survive “The Big Short”? Probably. But it’s exhilarating to see a movie take on the system like this, even if it is, after all, only a movie. Perhaps it will make the work of the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in reining in the parasites a little easier.

Brent Harold of Wellfleet, a former English professor, blogs at www.capecodonline.com. Email him at kinnacum@gmail.com.

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