Definición del problema

The Big Short’s playful attitude towards genres, emphasised by the switch from the slow-paced and idyllic historical documentary style to a fast-paced heist film setting continues with a very fast-paced montage sequence that resembles television aesthetics and which suggests that in the 1970s not only banking, but also the American Imaginary more broadly went through a significant change. Although Vennett keeps the spectators’ focus on the changing nature of finance, saying that after the development of mortgage-backed securities “the money came raining down [for the major financial institutions], and for the first time the banker went from the country club to the strip club”, the montage sequence which follows stresses a wider change towards excessive spending in the United States. Before taking a closer look at the significance of the American Imaginary in The Big Short, the film’s use of genres deserves more attention.

450 _{The real moral complexity regarding contemporary finance could be termed, following Žižek, as the “Soros}

paradox”, and which he describes as such: “George Soros is undoubtedly an honest humanitarian whose Open Society foundation more or less single-handedly saved critical social thinking in the post-Communist countries. Yet a decade or so ago, the same George Soros engaged in speculation on the currency market, exploiting differences in exchange rates to make hundreds of millions of dollars. The massively successful operation also caused untold suffering, especially in South-East Asia, where hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, with all the attendant consequences. Such is today’s “abstract” violence at its purest: at the one extreme, financial

speculation pursued in its own sphere, with no obvious links to the reality of human lives; at the other extreme, a pseudo-natural catastrophe which hits thousands like a tsunami, for no apparent reason”, see Žižek 2011: 291.

451 _{Another instance of this, that unfortunately I do not have the space to go into, is the missing case of Meredith}

172 From the strip club scene ending with one of the bankers throwing money in the air, the film cuts to a very fast-paced montage sequence. The sequence creates an impression as if someone were quickly going through different television channels with a remote control, giving the spectator barely time to spot all the different images and clips. The sequence begins by depicting countless people on the streets and then cuts to a still image of endless rows of brand new houses on a hill. The film, thus, marks its central concern – people’s desire for private property and how the finance sector has taken advantage of this desire (the segment later returns to images of a private home being constructed). The montage sequence then starts to switch between images of popular culture icons [such as TheBlues Brothers (Landis, 1980), Top Gun (Scott, 1986), Apple computers, Snoop Dog and Tupac, Eric Cartman from South Park (1997– …)], more general American iconography (people in a typical American diner, the Twin Towers, a farmer by a silo, a heavy industry worker), and the different American presidents, marking the passing of time (Ronald Regan winning the election, Bush senior giving a speech, Monica Lewinsky celebrating with Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush looking worried while addressing the public). The illusory nature of all these easily recognisable images is suggested by the film repeatedly returning to a scene depicting the growing Manhattan skyline and Vennett saying: “And America barely noticed as its number one industry became boring old banking… And then one day almost thirty years later in 2008, it all came crashing down”. On the one hand, the sequence’s aim is rather clear. As all the different images are being repeatedly crosscut with time-lapse footage of new skyscrapers being built in Manhattan, this part of the segment becomes its anchoring point, suggesting that while the media images, politics, and people’s lives were in constant flux, the banks, in the meantime, got steadily bigger – their prosperity and stability expressed by the ever-growing real-estate [Figure 4–3]. The implication that the public was to an extent preoccupied – with politics, popular media, and their own lives – while the banks made a fortune with the help of the American Imaginary, is further suggested by the energetic saxophone music, which is the latter part of the lively heist-film score of the earlier scenes, slowly dying down and the images becoming more and more focused on stock exchanges, while a haunting note begins ringing in the background.

173

Figure 4-3 The pattern of American success.

At the same time, as almost everybody can associate with the easily recognisable images,they suggest a certain familiarity and perhaps even intimacy, bringing back memories of the past decades and suggesting that the audience is part of these images. The Big Short does not seem to want the audience to witness the United States’ transition from a safe and uninvolved distance. The film can be seen to be denying a position from which one can simply observe the selfish actions of the big banks as if one had no responsibility in the matter. The shared responsibility for the general shift towards excessive spending can be recognised as being hinted at already before the montage sequence begins, with Vennett saying that after the discovery of mortgage-backed securities “stocks and savings were almost inconsequential [for the banks]”, meaning that debt and housing began to increasingly outweigh stocks and savings. Although Vennett’s words appear again to be directed at the banks, on closer inspection The Big Short can be seen to imply that the financial system transformed because people moved from owning a portion of a company and keeping their savings in a bank, to a lending-based consumerism that found its main focal point in a desire for private real-estate.

Historically real-estate is one of the weakest contributors to wealth appreciation and a loan can be used to pay off a loan – a tactic that The Big Short later shows the modern-day stripper using to “own” five houses and a condo. The film could be identified as discretely allowing the audience to recognise their own part in the broader transition to debt-culture. The latter can be argued to have significantly reduced people’s actual purchasing power by allowing an individual’s expenses to exceed their income. Via the montage sequence’s focus on the growing Manhattan skyline and the images of private hosing, The Big Short suggests that the changing focus on creating an impression of prosperity rather than actually being well-off, concealed both the general public and 2007–2008 financial industry’s heavy reliance on debt and real-estate. The American Imaginary in this case is not just imaginary, in a sense of being

174 a fantasy, because via a loan one can indeed enjoy the benefits of prosperity, without actually being well-off. According to the montage sequence’s overview of the three decades leading up to the 2007–2008 crisis, the United States has, since the late 1970s, undergone a drastic shift towards imaginary success, upheld by debt and expressed via luxury housing, over an actual financial stability, emerging from a balanced combination of all aspects of finance, including stocks and saving.

While making use of pop-cultural images, especially televised images, is a highly popular choice in the multi-protagonist film, the way The Big Short deploys the montage sequence deserves closer attention as it differs from more common uses of found footage or televised imagery in the form.452 For example, although Killing Them Softly makes use of actual documentary material, while multi-protagonist films as diverse as Short Cuts, Magnolia,and Babel recreate television aesthetics to deliver certain aspects of their narratives, in all such cases the television images remain neatly within the diegetic world. The Big Short, on the other hand, does not confine the images within the characters’ world, but directs them at the viewers by using images from popular culture in a manner approximating how we might have encountered them originally. A closer look at 71 Fragments’ use of televised images provides an example of the originality of The Big Short’s approach in the context of the multi-protagonist film. On the one hand, 71 Fragments’ appliance of found footage appears to provide the closest parallel to The Big Short, because the film similarly starts with apparently unmediated news footage. As with The Big Short, the television news broadcast in 71 Fragments appears almost unmediated, as the televised images are presented as closely as possible to how one would have experienced them originally. In this way both films take an important step towards equality as the films are willing to curtail their own role as active mediators of the film world.

On the other hand, 71 Fragments begins by depicting news about Gamsakhourdia’s fighters and displaced people, failed peace negotiations in Somalia, and the unsuccessful U.N. intervention in Haiti. 71 Fragments continues to offer similar news of war zones and humanitarian crises throughout. The film’s highly negative, and thus one-sided, take on evening news, and therefore reality more broadly, is suggested already with the first cut from the news

452_{Babel shows how an accidental shooting of an American tourist in North Africa is turned into a media}

spectacle of the War on Terror, and how the same news is depicted with an ironical distance in Japanese media.

Babel furthermore emphasises how the sufferings of the American protagonists mean little to the Japanese protagonist – as she switches through the television channels – who is dealing with her own existential anguish.

Magnolia, on the other hand, uses television in order to suggest that the lovable “perfect” people we see on television screen can have dark secrets of their own. While formally Babel’s televised images remain firmly

within the diegetic world like it is in Killing Them Softly, then Magnolia experiments with the shooting style of television within the film as the televised parts were shot on different stock and nonstop to mimic the conditions of a making an actual television game show.

175 sequence to a young migrant boy fleeing through ice-cold water. By contrasting the detached and omnipotent position of the evening news with the local perspective of one of the countless anonymous migrants fleeing from a large-scale political conflict, while also opposing the two scenes via their duration and pacing, 71 Fragments could be argued to represent television news as greatly differing from, if not distorting, reality. The film returns time and again to different news sequences, until it eventually shows the film’s own action – a seemingly unmotivated shooting in a local bank and the suicide of the attacker to follow – as forming one of the clips in the evening news broadcast. Another anonymous piece of footage, the film appears to suggest, in an endless mass of information.

Although 71 Fragments initially treats film and television as equal media, the film ends up creating a sharp contrast between the two. Whereas 71 Fragments seems dedicated to carefully exploring the lives of all those involved in the shooting spree, the television news is depicted as reducing the occurrence to a simple bulletin. The moralising intent of 71 Fragments becomes most apparent when the film twice returns to a news sequence ending with a story about paedophilia accusations against Michael Jackson. This segment about Jackson also ends 71 Fragments,but only after the spectator comes to realise that the news piece about the film’s topic of interest was presented just prior to news about Christmas in a war-torn former Yugoslavia and the accusations against Michael Jackson. The media is thus shown as lacking taste and as treating the most disparate news on the same plane, seemingly unable to differentiate between different topics and levels of importance.

The Big Short,on the other hand, does not create a hierarchical contrast between its film and television images as both media, while offering drastically different modes of narration, greatly develop the narrative. After all, the found footage does a significant amount of work, filling the viewer in on changes taking place over three decades, before any of the main characters are even introduced. Although The Big Short eventually cuts from the media images to its central characters in a similar way to 71 Fragments, it downplays the importance of the main characters by having Vennett characterise them as a bunch of “losers and weirdos”. Because of Vennett’s screwball character, the film complicates the possibility of taking this characterisation at face value. This becomes even more clear from the fact that Vennett quickly distances himself from the other main characters, by explaining that he is not one of the outsiders, because he is “pretty fucking cool”. The main characters who could successfully predict the collapse of the United States housing market, are therefore marked as almost accidental heroes and as highly unlikely candidates to represent the truth about where the market was heading. The Big Short therefore does not contrast television news and popular

176 media with reality, but shows instead that the American Imaginary is entirely inseparable from reality. This is why, according to The Big Short, only a handful of people, whom the film depicts as having great difficulty adjusting to the American Imaginary, had a different view of where the economy was heading. The Big Short has been accused by many commentators of being “smug” about its explanations of the crisis, yet a closer examination makes apparent that the film is applying an array of complex aesthetic devices in order to reduce the sense of its authority over the subject matter as much as possible.453