economic crisis

Floored

annette — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

What do you get when you cross a documentary film about the supply and demand frenzy of the Chicago Stock Exchange with a borderline Marxist, feminist film critic? A whole lot of screaming. But that’s really just happening on screen during Floored, the new movie from director James Allen Smith (My Name is Smith), which presents Chicago traders and their associates telling stories of how it felt to be in “the pits” during the “glory days” before the boom of Internet trading and the recession of late, risking their clients’ (and often their own) money. As for the room where I was sitting, there was silence and a yawn. This liberal wasn’t shocked or amused by a showcase of the distinctly capitalist obsession with money.

Smith does everything by the book: he knows who to interview, and where, and how. It’s not enough that the men who used to trade tell us about how much they love money (one couldn’t be away from the floor on vacation with his wife and children because he missed the possibility of acquiring greater wealth too much); we must see their other obsessions: cigarettes, booze, status symbols (Rolex watches, fast cars, large homes, decorative companions such as models and porn stars, etc.) and phallic symbols (guns, golf clubs, cigars, etc.). We must visualize their aggression to understand how their circumstances were; and only then can we understand how even the most successful traders turned out looking and sounding as foul as Mickey Rourke—on his worst day.

“It’s just not any fun… unless you can die,” one former trader says of hunting. But is he really just talking about hunting? He could as easily have said, “It’s just not any fun… unless you can go broke.” These men–and an estimated four women–of the trade are gamblers. They get a high from risking big and winning big. They get off on fear and anticipation. And when they think about winning and losing $100,000, they’re not thinking the things your average 9-to-5er is when he or she goes off to work: how will I pay my utility expenses, my taxes, my mortgage bill; will my health insurance cover my doctors visit/prescription drugs/surgery, etc.? There’s too much loud, naked—and yes, male—aggression in the air to be concerned with anything other than shouting, pushing, waving and clawing one’s way to fortune. The emphasis in stock trading wealth acquisition is less about how much you can spend at the end of the day, and more about how big a pile of cash you’ve managed to hoard.

Of course, there’s a token female trader, who has (fittingly) made a graceful transition to electronic trading. She poetically mentions Darwinism when she talks about the shift. (You’re forced to picture apes foraging for food, grunting and beating their chests before the glow of computer monitors.) And it is, of course, a female psychotherapist who helps the “guys” evolve into electronic traders, even after they feel like they’ve lost their mojo. The Internet has robbed them of the game, many feel. It’s “the most vile invention in the world” that allows “evil” people to cheat at trading. As the film depicts, computer trading is certainly more sedate than open outcry on the floor.

Could the juxtaposition of self-contained, successful women against a pile of sweaty, angry and ultimately unhappy male former stock traders be a little too conveniently giving viewers the sense that men are predisposed to aggressive behavior and ruin in its wake? Yes. But as anyone who’s ever walked by the boys’ locker room after a crushing defeat on the football field knows: boys will be boys. (That is to say: masculine boys will be masculine.)

Floored doesn’t really offer up anything new or exciting, but it does confirm the essentialism we collectively already subscribe to. A better movie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, confirms the same information, condemns the ethics of unscrupulous capitalists, and keeps you glued to the screen.

Written by: Rachel Moehl, April 13th 2011

Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home

andrea — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Caitlin Shetterly

Hyperion Voice Press

I’m sharing this book with everyone I know. Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home is a strong memoir about a young couple going broke in the recession and it gives readers the satisfying feeling of walking around someone else’s shoes for 250 pages. We’re all connected by some basic humanity and a good memoir reinforces this connection as we don the cloak of another with ease.

Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me doesn’t simply resonate for us at the level of humanity. It is us. Within the first few pages I learned we are the same age and as she discussed her career moves, life plans and even the love of her pets, I felt we were kindred spirits. Though this may be true, I must attribute this to Shetterly’s writing style more so than the potential that we are long lost siblings. One key element she mentions after a few lengthy tales of her family pets is that writers often neglect the importance of pets in a tale, or even in a life. She refuses to subscribe to this and keeps her promise throughout the tale by consistently accounting for the pets’ needs and whereabouts at every step of their journey.

The pets aren’t the whole story, however. Caitlin Shetterly and her husband Dan Davis struggle through mid-thirties job searches, the want for something more, and the need for some basic success amid an economic recession that brings it all to a screeching halt. The pair is an example of the hidden layers beneath the CNN-drafted economic tag lines and phrases pundits regurgitate at us daily. They are the living, breathing case that represents us.

What’s so endearing about this book is that not only do you recognize the story and eagerly peel back its layers, but you also come to feel the very real emotional stresses that television news stories are leaving out. Particularly moving in Shetterly’s storytelling is her ability to frame her husband through the nuanced lens of gender expectations. These two critically educated people know that they’re held to ideological gender standards and in many places in their lives seem to balk at the hegemonic practices that secure them. Yet, Shetterly’s descriptions of her husband’s transformation strikes at the very core of how masculinity is a powerful framing force that deeply impacts the psyche of men and women alike.

You feel for both of them, but what’s moving the story is the way her gentle, honest tone captures the nuance we need to see in order to understand this is us, this is how we plan our lives, this is what we want for ourselves.

Shetterly frames the story around my childhood favorite, the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, Little House on the Prairie. Little House’s Manifest Destiny, coupled with the lyrics of “This Land is Your Land,” act as a critique woven throughout the story of their financial struggle, and her tale becomes a memoir with more take-away meaning than most. The mirror she holds up to us reminds us that the American Dream is complex, and that the drive within you has as much potential as a Horatio Alger success story as well as the potential to break you with exhaustion, crisis, trepidation and economics. It is this paradox that is particularly comforting and engaging about Shetterly’s story. Her recession tale sheds light on more than just a tough economy. We often argue that the ideology of capitalism and the American Dream have been disrupted, and we do not live in the world, economic or otherwise, that our parents or grandparents did. Shetterly’s work shows us that the resulting reality is complex and dynamic and many of us are struggling within it.

Basic ideas about family, support, goals, ambitions, and working hard are surely themes across the surface of Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home. But Shetterly also takes those themes and moves them from trite assumptions about how we are to live and packs them full of the struggle they cause us, inside and out, when we’re simply fighting for survival.

Written by: Dr. Julie E. Ferris, March 8th 2011

Living in the End Times

barbara — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Slavoj Žižek

Verso

Reading Slavoj Žižek for the first time is not unlike being stuck on a bar stool next to a slightly inebriated, repentant MBA who just read a Karl Marx biography and thinks he has the world figured out. An aside about the deeper meaning of 3:10 to Yuma, a diatribe against Slovenia’s failure as a communist state, and praise of the five stages of grief seem like disconnected nonsense unless taken as a larger, comprehensive analysis of the failure of global capitalism. After a while, you’re either also drunk or so bewildered by the onslaught of information that you begin to see the reason behind this grizzled young man’s ramblings. Now just imagine that this is one of the most gifted living intellectuals.

Žižek—one of the world’s leading contemporary academic thinkers—is at once obscure and brilliant. In Living in the End Times, he pulls together themes from several smaller works and dozens of speeches and papers from the past several years to illuminate the apocalyptic zero-point for which the world is headed. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching—ecological crisis, explosive social divisions and exclusions, consequences of the biogenetic revolution, and systemic imbalances (struggles over raw materials, food, and water; as well as more abstract battles over issues like intellectual property)—and our textbook-diagnosed reactions show that the end is nigh.

Using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ model, he categorizes our reactions to modern economic, social, and ecological crises as stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While many believe Kübler-Ross’ framework to be somewhat flawed, it does provide a handy way of determining one’s own stage of grieving the collapse of society. How else to make sense of our apathy in the face of the simultaneous rise of extreme religious fundamentalism, crumbling banking systems, and expansive, violent political repression? What other way to explain away the near-psychotic binaries in wealth and poverty in places like Kuwait and Dubai, oil-dependent towering desert empires built by thousands of slave-wage immigrants and ruled by a frighteningly wealthy upper class—and the ways with which we turn the other cheek?

If you believe the state of the global economy, social hierarchy, and legal affairs to be as dramatically desperate as Žižek, you’ll not be surprised that he beckons us to prepare for famine, plague, global warfare, and ultimate death. If you have little faith in humanity, you’ll find good company in the bright if troubled theorist. If you believe in our eventual recovery, you’ll also find nuggets of helpful wisdom between his dismal predictions.

You may not be able to keep up the apocalyptic philosopher, but you’d be better off for trying.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 23rd 2010

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

mandy — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Oliver Stone

20th Century Fox

I knew when I bought my ticket that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps would not be a feminist film. I had an idea of the storyline: Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) returns for Oliver Stone’s modern depiction of the beginnings of the current economic crisis, told through the eyes of Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), a young ambitious businessman, and his girlfriend Winnie (Carey Mulligan), Gekko’s daughter. I entered the theater prepared for a film starring and made for men.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a hyper-masculine telling of extremely wealthy business executives engaged in dangerous and unethical games with each other. Apart from the lack of strong female characters, which I would expect in a “business thriller” film, there are parts of the movie that betray a more pervasive and insidious destruction of women. The film’s treatment of Winnie made my jaw drop on several occasions—not only because of the harsh ways she was manipulated by other characters but also by the sheer banality of this kind of treatment. Little energy is spent questioning the ways Jake hurts her, and Winnie's routine mistreatment normalizes such behavior.

In a key moment, Jake deceives Winnie into handing over her hefty fortune to his pet project, all the while assuring her that this means she will be “doing something with her life." Jake implies that her actions are only worthwhile if done in support of his business goals, not her own passions. This felt hollow and manipulative to me, but not to Winnie; she signs away her millions with a smile. Jake’s dishonesty and colossal mistake with Winnie’s money is a blip in the film, and its effect on their relationship is shockingly negligible. Winnie is simply a piggy bank who doesn't complain about being the plaything of an ambitious businessman.

This isn't the end of Winnie's misuse, as Jake uses her as a bargaining chip for his own gain when he discovers she is pregnant, a development that brings the idea that a woman’s worth is in her womb to the fore. When the characters meet after a brief time apart, Jake clasps Winnie’s growing belly. What should have been a time to discuss the dishonesty that had driven them apart becomes a moment of instant reconciliation.

By juxtaposing male economic success with female pregnancy, the film compares traditional male and female creation. This dichotomy could make for an interesting discussion of gender role expectations. Unfortunately, Stone lets this point fall flat. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn't discuss social attitudes nor does it adequately confront the issues it raises surrounding the male ownership of female bodies.

While Winnie's objectification stands out as the most problematic aspect of the film, if we take a distanced look we can make some larger conclusions about how women have been treated during the financial crisis. Women, on average, are more severely affected and are more likely to live in poverty than their male counterparts, and pop culture’s focus on the downfall of wealthy men narrows the film's narrative about those most vulnerable to the crisis. Like most of what is coming out of Hollywood, this film doesn’t focus on the real victims, but on a few stylized anti-heroes.

Even without a feminist lens, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps lacks intrigue and depth. It misses the mark by not telling an interesting story about the dangers of our economic habits nor about the personalities involved in our nation’s latest catastrophe. Stone merely captures a few fleeting moments in the lives of the country’s richest businessmen and throws in some objectification of women for good measure.

Written by: Andrea Gittleman, October 7th 2010