James Poniewozik points out that, because of how television production works, the economy characters have to work with in television shows will always lag behind where we actually are:

Does TV have some sort of agenda to talk down the economy? Do programmers realize that average Americans are hurting far more than the statistics and positive spin might make it show? The truth, if you follow the TV business, is neither so nefarious nor profound. Whenever TV chases social trends and zeitgeist plots, there’s a lag time. It takes months or even years to develop scripted shows, and often by the time TV jumps on a trend in the headlines, the headlines have changed. Just as it was quite a while before primetime shows addressed the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, you’d have to expect it to be a while before they reflected any recovery. (Just look at the recent Work It, thankfully no longer with us, in which two guys dressed in drag to get jobs to play off the already-dated “mancession” trend.)

Though I also suspect that any recovery and boom—if and when there is one—will have to be well along before primetime TV is willing to acknowledge it. TV networks want a great economy to sell ads in, but TV writers probably like working with the assumption that it’s tough out there—not for propaganda reasons but dramatic ones. Hard economic times create conflict. They provide stakes, and they supply motivation. TV thrives on characters with challenges in extreme situations, and a recession provides a perfect reason to have characters go to extremes to put food on the table.

I’d argue, though, that the current crop of recession shows hasn’t actually confronted the economy particularly head-on for the source of drama. The use of Ponzi schemers rather than investment bankers is a perfect example of this. Television’s littered with Madoff-like Ponzi schemers from 2 Broke Girls, to Revenge, to Don’t Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23 all out of proportion to the actual number of Ponzi schemes operating and the damage they did. Outright fraudsters may be sexy and dramatic, but they’re not actually the reason the economy ended up in a recession.

Explaining what did happen is a much more complicated process, something that many shows don’t seem particularly interested in tackling. But there are other ways to get at the long-term changes in the economy that are going to affect characters and constrain their choices for years. Both 30 Rock and 2 Broke Girls have alluded to student loans their characters carry—Liz, when interviewing with a co-op board explains of her loan that “It is outstanding,” and Max labors in service to her debt rather than their future. But rather than shaping their decisions. In both shows, the loans show up briefly and then disappear—Liz talks to Jack about wiping out her debt and saving for retirement, and Max and Caroline pay off Caroline’s debt with a party. In neither show is debt the long-term problem it is in real life. Similarly, we haven’t had a lot of programing that addresses the lack of retirement security: there’s a generation of workers who are going to have to keep working much longer than they anticipated, and there’s drama in that, even if it’s not of the “what desperate act will I take to put food on the table this week” variety. It’s true America may be going to work. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll suddenly stop bearing the consequences of long-term changes in our economy that were under way before the recession started and will have consequences long after it’s over.

As Hollywood’s tackled the recession, it focused first on Ponzi schemers in the mode of Bernie Madoff, villains whose schemes were easy to explain, and whose evil didn’t require a thorough examination of the financial system. Slowly but surely, though, we’re seeing financial crisis movies that are structured like mysteries or heist films, where the action — and heroism — are to be found in understanding precisely what financiers got away with behind our backs and the full extent of the damage they’ve caused us. Half of Arbitrage, the financial thriller that premiered here at Sundance, is that kind of movie.

Arbitrage stars Richard Gere as Robert Miller, a hedge fund titan who is on the verge of selling his firm at a very high price determined by the success of his predictive model. It should be a windfall for his family, including his wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon), a dedicated philanthropist, and his daughter and Chief Investment Officer Brooke (a very good Brit Marling), who would prefer to hang on to the firm given its growth. But it quickly becomes clear that Robert is selling a company that was decimated by a bad bet he made on Russian copper, a giant hole that’s been papered over with a loan from a friend so Robert can pass an audit and offload the company at a price that will let him pay back the debt and make his investors whole.

That ought to be enough for one movie, as it was in J.C. Chandor’s justifiably Oscar-nominated Margin Call. But Arbitrage throws another factor into this deal-making stew, giving Robert a French gallerist as a mistress — and having him kill her when he falls asleep at the wheel as they head out for a lost weekend. Robert flees the scene with the help of Jimmy (Nate Parker, who is having one hell of a beginning of 2012 between this, Red Hook Summer, and Red Tails), the son of his late driver, who comes under the eye of angry working-class detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth).

The question becomes, then, whether Robert can play the information imbalance — his knowledge about the truth about the state of his fund and his mistress’s death — to his own advantage, or whether Det. Byer and Brooke’s investigations will move fast enough for them to expose him before the deal with an irritatingly elusive mogul (played, in one fun scene, by Graydon Carter, who director Nicholas Jarecki credits with commissioning the financial journalism that inspired the movie) closes. Jarecki makes the mistake, however, of thinking that the murder investigation is more interesting than the financial one. Roth is always fun, and gives Bryer a nice insolence in the face of authority, and there’s some appeal in listening to him rant about how men like Miller “outmanuver us, they outbuy us. I’m fucking sick of it. He did it! He doesn’t get to walk just because he’s on CNBC.”
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Brett Ratner is not exactly a producer of sophisticated entertainments or a sensitive societal compass, so I was prepared for Tower Heist to be a tiresome mess. It’s not a perfect movie, but he’s lucky enough to be working with a script that is acid — if not revolutionary — about the callousness of the 1 percent, and has action sequences that if not precisely believable, have some nicely scary bits. I’m not hugely fond of the movie’s main premise — that Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi schemers are responsible for the recession, rather than people doing risky but entirely legal things and taking advantage of people’s financial illteracy — but Tower Heist manages to be a nice movie about the pain of downward mobility.

It’s not easy to make me feel sorry for investment bankers who have fallen on hard times, but Matthew Broderick, as the depressed ex-Merrill Lynch trader who Josh Kovacs, the manager of the Tower, has to evict, actually succeeds. When Josh comes to tell him to get out, he asks if Mr. Fitzhugh knows anything about the markets. “I don’t know. I used to know. That’s why they hired me at Merrill Lynch,” Fitzhugh confesses mournfully. “I went to Yale 20 years ago. Now, I’m a squatter.” Later, when Josh comes and finds him in a miserable hotel, he explains in a perfect deadpan that “I’m thinking of becoming a male prostitute.” And he provides a bitter perspective on why Arthur Shaw took on the Tower employees’ pension fund even after his Ponzi scheme started collapsing, telling Josh that “At a certain point, it isn’t about securities fraud. It’s about catering.” Some folks on the right have used the idea that Occupy Wall Street has downwardly mobile participants as some sort of evidence that the movement is about preserving existing privileges rather than a just realignment of the system. But I tend to think that it’s more about a recalibration, a reminder that the American dream is about security and equal opportunity, rather than the promise of vast wealth.

There’s another nice reminder of that fact in the scene where Josh informs the staff that his decision to ask Shaw to manage their pension fund has left them broke. “I never asked anyone to triple my portfolio,” Odessa (a very funny Gabby Sidibe) tells him bitterly, exposing the ridiculousness of the promise Shaw used to haul Josh in. She just wanted a reasonable rate of return. Lester, the doorman whose planned retirement is ruined by Shaw’s fraud, just wanted to go on a cruise with his wife. It was Josh, who listens to a ludicrous lifestyle radio show about cheese so he can recommend food and wine pairings to Shaw, and mistakes their chess games and Shaw’s professions of familiarity for friendship, who let himself get sucked into an unsustainable dream.

A key question for a lot of folks about this movie is what it means for Eddie Murphy’s career. He gives a good performance in a deeply annoying trope, the black man hired by pasty white dudes to teach them how to commit crimes. But he’s not nearly as much fun as Gabby Sidibe, proving she can crush comedy as well as drama in her turn as Odessa, the Jamaican maid turned safecracker for the team. I can see how some folks might see her as a stereotypical sassy, curvy black woman. But she’s refreshingly and hilariously tough and pragmatic, entering the movie to inform Josh, “My work visa is about to expire. You must find me a husband!” and later, when her plan to drug an FBI agent with a piece of cake fails, explaining nonchalantly, “He’s allergic to chocolate. I had to beat him.” And honestly, it’s nice to see a movie where a woman can be a member of a team not because she’s a hot distraction, but because she has skills that are absolutely vital to the operation.

I saw Tower Heist, Brett Rattner’s financial-scam thriller, last night, which was both better than I expected and confirmed a definitive trend: our movies are moving away form narratives of individual or localized hardship, like the foreclosure in Drag Me To Hell or the layoffs in The Company Men and Up in the Air, and towards identifying individuals and institutions responsible for the downturn and making them pay. So I was interested to read a bibliography put together by Loren E. Miller, a PhD Candidate at American University, and forwarded to me by a generous reader, tracing the evolution of financial regulation in Hollywood movies from 1914 on. Miller writes about the evolution from a moral and individual perspective from an institutional one:

The earliest silent films, created during the 1910s, depicted financial misdeeds as stock speculation and manipulation, as well as embezzlement…However, there is no real institutional punishment for financial misdeeds. Characters are punished by fate and misfortune, but there are few government repercussions…

During the 1920s, many of the same types of misdeeds are depicted in films; however the reasons behind the crimes and the punishments shift. Characters often have good intentions and noble reasons for committing misdeeds, such as helping an impoverished family member. These characters are often redeemed in the end of the film, perhaps because of the good intent behind their actions…

The 1930s is by far the decade with the largest number of films focusing on financial regulation. The increase in movies on this topic provides insight into the historical moment; the country faced the Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929, and at the same time film technology grew. The motion pictures of the 1930s reflect the country’s preoccupation with the stock market crash, and the influence money can have on people. Many movies in 1930s include crimes such as embezzlement. There are also a fair number of films that survey past financial panics. During the 1930’s, characters that perform these misdeeds are subject to governmental punishments instead of moral ones. For example, The Gorilla mentions an SEC agent investigating a financial crime.

It’s not surprising that we’ve been here before. The question is whether a public passion for some sort of reform, or at least, for making the bastards pay — I haven’t heard a crowd cheer as loudly as the one did at the end of Tower Heist in quite some time — will actually translate into enforced regulation. Dodd-Frank’s still tied down in all sorts of missed deadlines and Republican obstructionism. Richard Cordray still hasn’t made it to his office at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And we’re not getting New Deal levels of public investment. Obviously robbing Bernie Madoff isn’t a possible solution or a systemic one. But I sort of see how it would resonate when institutional change doesn’t seem like an available option.

Adam Carolla, master of subtlety and complexity, is sort of on to something in complaining about celebrities who make an enormous amount of money even while claiming solidarity with the poor, but as usual, misses the point:

“These bigger name guys, they go out and do corporate gigs, they do casinos and theaters, they make 200 grand a pop,” says Carolla, whose own ideology defies simple labels. “Then, they come back to their pulpit and talk about Joe Sixpack and how times are tight.”

“They never talk about the money they make… and you pretend you’re one of them? Bullshit,” he says.
Carolla isn’t shy about telling tales of woe from first class flights or how he feels uncomfortable around his nanny. Nor does he mind being in a cutthroat entertainment business, one that cast him aside in 2009 for failing to live up to Howard Stern’s ratings legacy on the FM dial.

It’s not actually more attractive to complain about your first world problems than it is to reach for solidarity, however clumsily, with people who have fewer resources than you do. But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful for rich people who want to support everyone else to recognize that they aren’t coming from the same place as someone who, say, is losing their home, or experiencing a prolonged period of joblessness. Kathy Bates’ desire to see Obama go after the “rat bastards” on Wall Street does not actually spring from an identical place as someone who is crushed under the weight of student loans, or whose mortgage was part of a complex financial transaction.

And that’s actually a good thing. It’s critically important to illustrate that there are large constituencies for issues like financial system reform, or for student loan forgiveness. And it’s important to draw connections between issues that people will argue are separate to avoid regulation. Bernie Madoff’s fraud was different from the rise of mortgage-backed securities, in terms of both how they were carried out and legal culpability, but they’re both part of a culture that valued profits over accountability. It would be useful to have wealthy victims of Madoff’s fraud, like Larry King and Kevin Bacon, come out in favor of much higher regulatory standards for the financial industry as a whole. You don’t actually have to establish credibility as a member of the working class to be a useful ally to the working class. But it is useful to know which one you are before you start acting as an advocate.

The bridge is yours.

-Star Wars-horror movie poster mashups.

-The movies Marvel is working on after The Avengers.

-Yup, bankers are still jerks, at least on television.

-Reports from the Man of Steel set.

-Insanely gorgeous maps.

I’m on record as being pretty excited for Tower Heist, and for a movie that considers the non-extremely wealthy of Bernie Madoff’s fraud. And it seems like Bernie Madoff revenge fantasies or victim stories are everywhere this fall. Ponzi schemes play a role in 2 Broke Girls and Apartment 23. A Bernie Madoff grotesque is one of the assassination targets in Colombiana

But the obsession with Madoff isn’t just a bad thing because it’s a derivative trope. If pop culture makes him the sole scapegoat for the financial crisis, our television shows and movies will be dodging a complicated but important issue. I understand why Madoff’s convenient. If he’s to blame for people losing their trust funds and job opportunities, shows can give us a slightly shrunken New York, a recessionista version, as it will, without blaming all those cute investment bankers who are potential love interests for our heroines. But that’s a dodge. Not every story should be a complete chronicle of the entire financial crisis, but shows set in New York or with interests in our reshaped economy should be clear that you didn’t have to be criminal to cause an incredible amount of damage even if they’re not incredibly specific about the mechanisms of the damage.

I want badly for Kat Dennings to have a great career, and have ever since she stole The 40 Year Old Virgin away from the movie’s adults every time she was on screen. It was frustrating watching her play second banana to the leaden Natalie Portman in Thor, and I really hope she breaks the streak in 2 Broke Girls, a show that, among other things, seems to be about the Bernie Madoff scandal and small business ownership, as well as about the gentrification of Brooklyn.

That gentrification thing, first. Part of Michael Patrick King’s schtick in Sex and the City was giving the sense that he was ahead of the curve on New York Trends: the show helped create the country-wide sense of the Meatpacking District as cool and cupcakes as a thing. But 2 Broke Girls feels like it’s desperately trying to catch up and prove its cred. Max’s (Dennings) monologue that’s been all over the trailer — “I wear knit hats when it’s cold out, you wear knit hats because of Coldplay. You have tattoos to piss off your dad. My dad doesn’t know he’s my dad.” — is both unfunny and a couple of years ago. Only the final, dry line about how unaroused her customers’ rude behavior makes her has any sting. Similarly, Max’s lament that “The cliental used to be all Eastern Bloc criminals and crack whores, but then he took it over and ruined it,” would be funny if Brooklyn wasn’t already so ridiculously gentrified and if there wasn’t something a little bit weird about treating folks from the former Soviet Union as they’re all sleazy, slutty crooks.

Then, there’s the Madoff thing. Caroline, Max’s blonde foil, is the daughter of a Madoff-like con artist named Martin Channing, and apparently, we are supposed to feel sorry for her, even though my reactions trended much more towards Max’s. I feel some pity for Mark Madoff, who finally figured out his father’s fraud, reported it, and eventually committed suicide as the investigation into Madoff’s frauds mounted. But I find it a lot harder to feel pity for someone who just totally missed that her lavish lifestyle was financed by extensive white-collar crime, and who very belatedly is having her first experience with the idea that people have to work to support themselves. And the show overcompensates by making Max’s other boss, a Manhattan socialite, so pathologically stupid it’s impossible to imagine how anyone stands to be in the same room as her. She’s a walking hathos alert.

All of that said, I think this show has potential. Dennings is very good about keeping her character from becoming sour; in 22 minutes, she’s stressed, seduced, warm and wry. Beth Behrs, who plays Caroline, may be stuck with some unfortunately high-concept characterization, but she’s got a nice way around a line reading, whether she’s telling Max’s loser boyfriend to get up out of her Chanel when he tries to hit on her, or coming up with a new business plan on the spot. That last bit is the smartest thing in the show: the frame device for at least the first season looks like it’s going to be Caroline and Max working together to save the start-up capital to earn a bakery. It both feels timely—the recession prompts people towards alternative jobs and start-ups—and a good character synthesis. Max is hustling, but so exhausted she doesn’t have the energy to put together a bigger plan, and Caroline is irrepressible enough to give her the kick she needs, even as she needs Max to keep her honest and from doing things like stealing the extra money she’s charging for cupcakes. That’s a great, sturdy setup, if the writing calms down a bit. And if the show stops making bad jokes about people getting raped at Duke.

A programming note: I’m finally on the list for movie screenings in the DC area, so expect more reviews. And feel free to treat these reviews both as guidance on whether or not to go see something, and as open threads for discussion over the weekend.

I went to see Colombiana, a movie about the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking, the moral justifications for assassinating Bernie Madoff, and Zoe Saldana’s naughty bits, hoping for a slickly nasty little late-summer action movie in a year that’s been somewhat short on female heroines, and on gleeful darkness. There are bits and pieces of an entertaining film here, notably an interagency rivalry between the CIA and the FBI and a downturn revenge fantasy. But Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the movie, and the delightfully named Olivier Megaton, who directed it, are probably right to trust that the sight of Saldana dancing braless in her apartment or setting off plastic explosives in her skivvies are selling points in and of themselves.

The movie begins with a reasonably promising, if somewhat overacted, premise. After watching her family murdered by a drug cartel, a young Cataleya (a promising Amanda Stenberg, who has a key role in the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games and is a welcome reminder that not only white little girls can get tough) gets herself to Chicago and into the home of her uncle Emilio. “I used to want to be Xena: Warrior Princess,” she tells him. “I want to be a killer. Will you help me?” “Sure,” he promises, rather jauntily. I was hoping we might be on the road to a non-white version of Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s relationship in Kick-Ass, a gleefully twisted but genuinely loving father-daughter training movie. But after buying her way into a private school and shooting up a passing car to illustrate why she should attend classes, the movie skips forward 15 years, denying us the privilege of seeing Cataleya learn her stuff, and into the much less creative pleasures of letting us see her deploy it as she goes after Don Luis, the man who had her family killed, and the people who worked for and with him.
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I’ve been pretty harsh in the past about Ben Stiller’s sourness. But there is one thing I think it’s perfect for: a movie about robbing Bernie Madoff.

I have some reservations here, particularly the plot device of a bunch of pasty white boys hiring a black man to advise them in how to commit felonies, which I thought, even with a twist, was the weakest part of Horrible Bosses. But on the whole, I’m actually more optimistic about this than I thought I would be. There’s an admirable frankness to things like a conversation between two luxury apartment building employees, where one says, “You know what these people are really buying?” and the other responds, “White neighbors?” Or the withering condescension with which the movie treats Alan Alda’s declaration that “I may have my own private island in Belize, but deep down, I’m just an Astoria boy like Josh here,” when he’s really someone who believes that “You people are working stiffs. Clock punchers. Easily replaced.”

Our popular culture spends a lot of time treating the decadence and myopias of the very rich as if they’re admirable, or at worst, an amusing excuse for judgement. There’s something refreshing about a movie that upsets that assumption, and suggests that its characters tear down that false idol rather than aspire to it. That’s much blunter than the class politics of American pop culture normally get, a rebuke to the industry from within the industry itself — whether it’s self-aware or not.