Spring 2020 Issue
Misdeeds and Meltdowns ‘Preserved in Aspic’ by Online Streaming Services By Hal Williams
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vents and actions have defined and defiled our apparently enduring financial landscape. Some of those events and actions were legal; some were illegal, others questionable, unbelievable, incomprehensible, or unconscionable.
Some were all six, but mostly they were inscrutable – to people like me, anyway. While the main players were liningup ducks, trashing competitors’ careers, issuing sell notes and shorting sure-things to make cunning billions, we – I’ll take the liberty of dragging you into my zone of ignorance – bumbled about in our daily lives. What we knew about breaking news in the financial sector came in the form of soundbites, headlines and those screen-crawlers across the bottom of the TV while something unrelated, like a drugs bust or a penalty shootout, is going on above. A lot of it we barely noticed, some we noticed but didn’t understand, and when we did understand we failed to gauge its import. As with so much in life, it all just happened around us. Mainstream content aside, online film-streaming sites have become troves – permanent records, almost – of businessthemed documentaries and feature films, laptop-friendly clearing houses for all the teasers, thrillers and exposés that slipped under our radar (or went over our heads) the first time around. For entertainment value alone we are spoiled with modern classics such as The Wolf of Wall Street. Aside from the grimly fascinating spectacle of Jordan Belfort’s excess and errant genius – so well portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio – the film offers humour, eye candy and some brilliant cameos. Director Martin Scorsese has the ability to allow an ordinary head a two-hour peek through artistic eyes. This is a story of glam, of greed… and a glimpse of a teetering house of cards blown down and rebuilt so often, and with such verve, nerve and speed, that it manages to retain an illusion of brownstone solidity. We gloss over the harsh lessons learned from the Wolf’s rapacious behaviour and celebrate instead his charisma, tracking his paw-pads to the lair of success. A shame about all the people who got burned along the way, but hey… Many cinematic recreations and reveals punch harder, to the point of grabbing viewers by the scruff. The titles in this genre tend to take the definite article – The Big Short, The Great Hack – and for good reason. These are defining moments in the haunted and horrifying financial and political systems we have created, and the psyches we have developed to help us cope with their effects. And, it must be said, it all makes for cracking viewing. While The Great Hack is noteworthy more for its exposé of the gathering, hoarding, peddling and misuse of Big Data – democracy is as doomed as ever, thanks to those flaming algorithms – The Big Short is a timely analysis of just what happened during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. As markets worldwide teeter in 2020, here’s some 20/20 in terms of over-the-shoulder clarity, an immersive retrospective of the slow-then-swift collapse of a system CFI.co | Capital Finance International
based on trust but designed to be exploited. The Big Short should be compulsory viewing for every business-school student, and seems genuinely geared as much to educate as to entertain. The tale is told from several perspectives, with Hollywood stars appearing in fourth-wall-breaking cameos to explain crucial terminology – I’ll allow you to step out of my zone of ignorance for a moment – to people like me. Margot Robbie (as herself) in a bubble bath, defining sub-prime mortgages, is an example, and one that sticks in my mind better than the definition. Arcane terminology is frequently used by sly traders to ensure that I/we remain embarrassed by ignorance and grateful that someone – anyone – is onhand to deal with all this. That’s how Wall Street likes it. Even for those without a firm grasp of the finer points of the financial lexicon, The Big Short is a gripping study of the players, victims and facts in (or near) the spotlight of the American-dream buster. It’s brilliantly acted and cast, and even, as I said, explained within the script. Somehow, even with to-camera explanations in a 2015 film, years after the events in question, I still failed to grasp the finer points of the financial skulduggery. But I enjoyed the film. And I guess that means the mortgage market’s still open, folks. No less creativity has gone into some of the documentaries lining the virtual shelves of your streaming library. Some are so hard-hitting and damning that you wonder, as a viewer, why anyone would agree to take part: few participants come out looking good. Credit to the pushy documentary makers for not taking “He’s in a meeting” for an answer. Take a look at Dirty Money, which flips the corporate world (well, Volkswagen, if we’re being precise) on its back and eviscerates it as it lies there helpless, ugly and squirming. There are biopics too, to expose and celebrate the big guns, from (the eponymous) Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (Inside Bill’s Brain) all the way down to, er, Donald Trump. I didn’t watch that one. These visual biographies can be every bit as exciting as your generic boobs-booms-bangsbad guys blockbuster… and sometimes even bloodier. Schadenfreude – let’s face it – plays a part in our willingness to delve into this sector of the cinematic catalogue. We watch with quiet awe the gathering of someone’s success wave, waiting all the while for the equal, opposite and wicked joy of seeing it all come crashing down. (Oh, sorry, you want out from my zone again…?) In those terms, anyway, and as a cautionary tale if you are in the promotions / event-organising world, the documentary Fyre (The Greatest Party That Never Happened) comes highly recommended. Here’s hubris on a stick with payback as a side-dish, served lightly chilled in the comfort of your living room while some poor rich bastards scramble and bawl and brawl in a mire of mismanagement, greed and fraud. This is a feast that can be enjoyed by anyone who has ever been ripped-off – and that’s most of us – because in this one (spoiler alert), the biters get bit. But, as so often, so does everyone else. i 157