Big Short
The financial crisis of 2008 almost feels like a lifetime ago, which I guess it was if you’re seven years old, in which case you have terrible parents if they let you read this. I bet a lot of babies got born during the meltdown, though. Married people got kicked out of huge houses specifically designed to maximize their avoidance of each other, and then had to live in their cars where the only things to do at night were play with the power windows and hump. Power windows would get boring after a couple months.
The crisis hit Arvada pretty hard. They stopped giving away free air at the Amoco. Fancy-ass lofts in our yuppie Olde Town sat vacant. People with expensive cell phones started riding buses, and bitching about having to ride buses into those same phones. I once overheard this guy furious that he couldn’t refinance his house in order to buy a boat, and a boat was the only thing that would make him feel better about losing his job. The Family Dollar fired me for warming a burrito in my pants. Hard times. Delicious burrito.
I bet the crisis hit even harder in places where people are huge assholes. That is, Florida, California and Las Vegas, where buying shit is a sport and jackasses compete to have the biggest and best: cars, homes, watches, tits. Those people were probably up to their God damn eyeballs in debt and looking to go deeper because the neighbor just bought jet skis.
The banking industry has built its success upon the belief that poor people can’t afford to look more than a couple months ahead. They’ve always told their customers to trust them, and then blamed the customers for doing just that.
People fucking love money. People love spending money on shit that they hope will make them feel like the winners wish they were: phones, shoes, vacations and chrome spinner rims for their Hyundais, all received now and paid for later. The truth is, none of that shit truly brings happiness. True happiness comes from the simple things in life, like a sale on Mad Dog 20/20 and a dry culvert to drink it in, or winning an argument with a stranger about who the best Harlem Globetrotter was (Curly Neal).
The problem in 2008--and probably now--was that banks didn’t give a flying fuck if loaning people money was a bad idea. Soulless, immoral dicks had gamed the system to make mad cash just for lending it to you, with no regard for whether or not you paid it back. They didn’t care what happened one, two or five years down the line because they got their gratification immediately.
There have been craploads of stories about how the average joe got fucked when the housing market collapsed, and about how the financiers whose greed caused the collapse got off scot-free. Unlike those stories, though, The Big Short is from the perspective of a few people inside the banking system who saw a way to capitalize on the impending collapse. Because of that, they were motivated to think more clearly than all the consumers and brokers drunk on easy cash.
The Big Short starts with Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a dude with mild autism, a fake eye, and a love for speed metal, who first spots the bubble. Since he naturally doesn’t care much about other people’s emotions, he doesn’t see any need to pretend that everything is fine. He sees the potential collapse of the housing market as an opportunity to do his job, which is to identify market opportunities and make shitloads of money. Before him, it hadn’t occurred to the banker asshole types that betting against what everyone wanted to believe in could be a moneymaker.
Burry’s activities pique the curiosity of a few others, most notably Mark Baum (Steve Carrell and a horrifying wig), a sour contrarian who already suspected the worst of people, but had no idea the system was this full of shit. Baum and his co-workers are drawn in by Jared Vannett (Ryan Gosling) who simply overheard what Burry was doing and thought it sounded great.
What follows is a movie mostly consisting of a lot of white guys in suits talking to each other, occasionally yelling. This is typically a scenario that’s only interesting to old people when it’s on TV and the white people are talking about scary the world is. However, it worked for me. I got taken for the movie’s ride.
It’s directed by Adam McKay, who has been behind the camera for some of the good and bad Will Ferrell movies. The Big Short isn’t isn’t slapstick or silly, though. There is some humor, but it’s sly and more surprising, coming from huge and real egos clashing rather than a dude getting hit in the nuts. He also keeps changing the scenery: from New York to Vegas to Colorado to Florida. And Burry and Baum are genuinely interesting characters. One can’t see the crisis past his spreadsheet and the other can’t see it without being appalled at how much worse the big banks are than he ever imagined.
The movie doesn’t explain every detail about how bonds and mortgages and high finance work. There’s enough, though, that is explained to keep even a guy like me from feeling stupid, and up until a couple months ago I could sit near an ATM for hours just hoping to see the dwarf who works inside it come out to use the bathroom. Now I get it: there’s a tiny bathroom inside the machine.
The Big Short also tries harder to entertain than to outrage, which is good because we’ve all had plenty of opportunities to be outraged, first by the crisis, then by the way the fuckers got away scot-free, and soon enough when it happens all over again.
My only hope is that next time there are a lot more naked ladies and car chases, and fewer pasty white dudes, in the collapse. Then it’ll make for a better story. Three Fingers for The Big Short.