MORE THAN A LOVE OF LAMPS
More than a year ago, I talked to movie director Adam McKay, who was receiving an award from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Because of the occasion, I asked him how he might take on a figure like Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, who represents some of the same cultural phenomena run amok that McKay has skewered in films such as Talladega Nights. McKay told me it might be impossible.
But at the time, McKay was working on a different sort of straightforward movie about a piece of U. S. history so absurd that it defied parody. And now that we have the results of McKay’s adaptation of The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s chronicle of the housing bubble and the resulting Great Recession, it’s fascinating to see how McKay’s career has been leading to this sort of outraged, but not quite predictable, storytelling all along.
His muse is Will Ferrell, who under McKay’s direction has played San Diego newsreader outraged at having to share his desk with a talented woman in Anchorman; a NASCAR driver corrupted by fame and money in Talledega Nights; a petulant man-child in Step Brothers; a cop with a dark side investigating financial wrongdoing in The Other Guys; and even a deadbeat behind on the rent he owes to a cranky toddler in the viral video The Landlord.
Liberal political rhetoric often scorns the sort of embattled white men McKay and Ferrell explore with such love and humour. It’s this kind of contempt that leads liberals to mock conservatives for voting against what liberals perceive to be their self-interest, or to vilify them for trying to hold on to privileges that are rapidly losing their value. This kind of self-satisfaction is precisely what McKay rejects. Movies such as Anchorman and Talladega Nights persuade everyone to empathize with Ron Burgundy and Ricky Bobby, and to get outraged at the distorting, winner-takes-all systems that surround them instead, pitting Ron against his eventual wife and co-anchor Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) and Ricky Bobby against his best friend and racing partner (John C. Reilly).
The Big Short s hares many preoccupations and villains with McKay’s comedies, among them financial wrongdoing and people who have marinated in superiority so long, they’re begging to be slapped on a grill. But if McKay’s comedies are about persuading audiences to care about individuals who find themselves at a loss in crazed environments and moments of social upheaval, the great genius of The Big Short is to recognize that those individuals are sitting in theatre seats, rather than playing out the drama onscreen.
Lots of political movies want to speak to audiences, but The Big Short does so explicitly and constantly; the fourth wall might as well not exist in the movie. Sometimes that means a character like Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), an independent investor who bet against not just bonds made up of obviously shoddy mortgages but also supposedly more reliable ones, pauses to let you know you’re watching a prettied-up piece of movie magic. At other moments, investor Jared Vennett ( Ryan Gosling) is narrating bits of financial history, like the invention of securities made up of large bundles of mortgages.
But most powerfully, The Big Short enlists the audience in the characters’ outrage. In these moments, Mc- Kay makes ignorance of the causes of the Great Recession not a source of shame, but a badge of moral purity. “I’m guessing most of you still don’t really know what happened,” Jared tells viewers at the beginning of the movie. “Yeah, you got a sound bite you repeat so you don’t sound dumb, but come on.”
The result is complicity rather than condescension, especially when Jared asks us “It’s pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored? Or stupid? Well, it’s supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or even better, for you to just leave them the (expletive) alone.”
And McKay’s puckish method of empowering his audience is to have Jared announce breaks in the film so that Margot Robbie can explain how mortgages are bundled into bonds from the comfort of a bubble bath; chef Anthony Bourdain can compare the repackaging of subprime mortgages to the way he reuses fish that isn’t selling in fish stews; or so Selena Gomez can hang out with a behavioural economics expert in a casino and we can all walk away understanding synthetic collateralized debt obligations.
These interludes aren’t just educational — at times they take vicious swipes at other movies about the financial industry. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese aimed a camera up Robbie’s skirt while letting his movie fall prey to the charms of its subject, the stock market fraudster Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). McKay keeps Robbie comparatively covered up, even though she’s in the bath, he gives her substantive things to say.
There’s another important way in which McKay has reversed the political polarity that animates his comedies. In McKay’s fictional movies, the message is always that individual men can change, shucking off the larger forces that have deformed their characters and rediscovering their real and decent selves. But while the subject of The Big Short is a small group of men who spotted rot in the system early enough to profit from an inevitable crash, McKay spikes their profits with poison and pessimism about the prospect of systemic change.
Cantankerous hedge fund manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell) hopes to make bets big enough to hurt both huge institutions and individual bad actors within it, but ultimately he must settle for cashing out in a way that won’t hurt his business partners. “Average people are going to be the ones that have to pay for all of this, because they always, always do,” Baum warns in a speech he gives as the value of Bear Stearns begins to fall.
But in the end, Baum’s foresight can’t help him find a way to extricate himself from the “era of fraud” he describes. He can make money from recognizing that a bubble exists, but he can’t prevent it from being popped or stop a new one from beginning to inflate.
Shipley and his partner Charlie Geller (John Magaro) get a sober lesson from their mentor Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) in what it means to bet against the American economy. “If we’re right, people lose homes, people lose jobs, people lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about (expletive) banking,” Ben tells them. “It reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number for you: For every one per cent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die. Did you know that?”
Charlie in particular comes to understand that anticipating a crash means not just a windfall, but an apocalyptic vision paired with a feeling of powerlessness; when the market starts to collapse, his first impulse is to call his mother.
And Michael Burry (Christian Bale) discovers that while his devotion to reason and clear thinking has made the investors in his hedge fund very, very rich, it has also profoundly discomforted them in a way that suggests further financial madness is inevitable. “People want an authority to tell them how to value things but they choose this authority not based on facts or results,” Burry writes in a letter closing down his fund. “They choose it because it seems authoritative or familiar, and I’m not and never have been familiar.”
And at the end of The Big Short, Jared’s vinegary narration slaps down the audience’s expectations that the outrages the film described must have led to substantive, lasting reform. The idea of reform itself is just another lie governments and businesses use to appease us, McKay suggests. And while that may feel like a more pessimistic message than the themes of personal redemption that animate McKay’s comedies, the two aren’t incompatible.
We shouldn’t mistake saving ourselves for saving our institutions or our country. And sometimes what seems like moral vision is really just another way to become compromised. “I never said I was the hero of this story,” Jared cautions us.
When I spoke to McKay last year, he was working on The Big Short, and his political impatience was evident. “It’s time to panic. Climate change, the level of violence, the level of income inequality?” he told me at the time. “It’s time to full-on lose our cool.”
It’ s a lot easier to be amused and appalled by the sight of Steve Carell wandering around brandishing a grenade and killing a guy with a trident in Anchorman than it is to watch him, as Baum, declare a necessary war on the U.S. financial industry and our predisposition to successes built on perilously airy foundations. The danger from the former is both obviously fake and requires nothing from us, while the threat of the latter is terrifyingly real and demands so much.
If The Big Short doesn’t become a rallying cry, McKay can go back to making sharp comedies that resonate both with people who recognize their politics and with audiences who are with him only for the jokes. But if it does resonate as more than a sharply told, intelligently acted movie, McKay might finally be recognized for the political thinking and communicating he’s been doing in his films all along.