Margin Call

Slavoj Zizek is a shrew cultural critic; his conclusions are interesting and insightful and, as long as you ignore most of the apparatus of his discourse – a incoherent combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism – he’s well worth reading. In a recent essay, Zizek observes that the Occupy Wall Street movement, and its various international correlates, has no agenda, no political program, no ideology. Late Capitalism, to use the phrase coined by Frederic Jameson, has so occupied and commodified the world, that protest movements have literally no conceptual or intellectual basis – Occupy Wall Street is, in effect, another commodity, a trademarked stance or attitude, much like the 501 jeans ad that cites Whitman and William Burroughs and shows images of youthful revolutionaries to sell hawk slacks. This precise phenomenon is visible in J. C. Chandor’s current Margin Call. The film concerns a group of Wall Street traders grappling with the recognition that their MBS (Mortgage-based Securities) are fundamentally over-leveraged and without value. The picture is tightly scripted with hushed dialogue and portentous silences and shot something like a post-modern horror film. The acting is uniformly excellent and film is very gripping. The dialogue is intelligent in a stylized theatrical sort of way – it’s like David Mamet without the insistent minimalist poetic effects that the Chicago playwright favors. But the film is ultimately unsatisfying, although entertaining in a bitter and morose sort of way. This is because the film has no conflict of any kind. We were all taught in High school that the essence of drama is some kind of conflict. The idea predates Aristotle. Margin Call doesn’t develop any sort of conflict of any kind. The characters suffer brief twinges of conscience but, even, the best of them don’t resist the system and don’t take any actions except those motivated by greed and self-interest. Everyone is corrupt or corrupted. You keep waiting for some character to become a mouthpiece for the author, to deliver a blistering speech about the evils of capitalism, or, at least, about the evils of this specific form of enterprise – but no one delivers this speech and no one opposes the frenzy of corrupt and fraudulent trading that occurs when the MBS assets are discovered to be valueless. Even characters that seem sympathetic are powerless or cede their power to the firm in exchange for enormous amounts of money. Inadvertently, the film demonstrates Zizek’s point – there is no viable alternative to the ideologies of greed and self-interest that motivate the characters in the film. When the movie ends, you are left with a gnawing sense of pointlessness – a man is burying a dead dog, apparently, the film’s symbol for the rotting financial system; we hear his shovel cutting into the lush Westchester lawn where he is digging. There is no way out. This sleek picture dramatizes Zizek’s thesis – there is nothing outside or exterior to the system that the film indicts; the film is a symptom of the malaise that it portrays. (It’s curious that his film has proven enormously popular in DVD; like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the movie demonstrates that audiences are hungry for some kind of reasonably intelligent adult film – yet, the studios don’t give pictures like these anything like a general release; instead, they cram the multiplexes with garbage so awful that even teens and preteens despise it. What has happened to the confidence of the film industry? There certainly should be a market, for, at least, a week’s showing of Margin Call, in a city like Rochester. Several times, the Red Box at Walmart that I patronize was sold-out on DVDs of this film, demonstrating that even people who shop Walmart, like me, I admit, have an interest in a film like this. People want to know why the financial collapse occurred and are interested in realistic portrayals of that disaster. I should hasten to say that Margin Call, inhabited by supremely intelligent and confident actors, isn’t realistic – it gives the venal traders on Wall Street too much credit. I read the Wall Street Journal and none of these folks, even the most brilliant, saw the trainwreck approaching. And when the catastrophe arrived, they didn’t respond with courageous if wicked fortitude, as shown by the film; instead, they panicked, began whining like self-pitying children, and, far from exhibiting virtues of self-reliance, importuned the very government that they purported to despise for relief. Accordingly, the film is not at all realistic – it is stylized and makes the traders look better and smarter than they deserve.)