Industry

Why are people so angry?  Maybe, it has to do with this political moment and the fractiousness in our Republic.  Perhaps, social media, offering anonymous opportunities for people to rage at one another is partially to blame.  Social media permits non-confrontational confrontations -- that is, you can insult someone over the internet without the risk of getting punched in the nose. Or, maybe, and I venture this hypothesis leavened with some skepticism, indignation is a mainstay of our culture.  We are schooled in rage by the TV programs that we watch.  In the old days, kids got into fights and beat one another up with dismaying regularity.  But, now, physical fights result in police intervention, expulsion from school, and, general consternation that may end up implicating social workers and therapists.  By and large, I suppose that we live in a less violent world, something that is all to the good -- people no longer thrash one another over minor points of personal privilege or engage in duels or entertain themselves by bar-fighting.  But, human aggression, probably, is hard-wired and impossible to ameliorate.  And, so, we now spend our time vicariously enjoying insults and verbal aggression and displays of vehement indignation and anger presented to us on TV.  Cable TV in particular has become the great institute, the university of rage.  This is true of Cable News which operates around the clock to stoke the fires of righteous indignation and outrage.  But it is also apparent in the dramas that are broadcast on cable services like HBO.  And this brings me to a British show, just now concluded on HBO (now called MAX), bearing the title Industry. 

I confess that I have no idea as to the overarching plot of Industry or what it's characters are supposed to be doing.  I don't know why they are always insulting and berating one another.  Ostensibly, these tirades have something to do with the high intensity work place featured in the show, the so-called "industry" on which the program is based.  The characters labor for some kind of investment bank or stock brokerage house, an enterprise called Pierpoint located in the financial district in London.  Everyone in the show is depicted stooping over computer screens glowing with columns of numbers and graphs that show inscrutable indices that go up precipitously and, then, plunge with equal alacrity.  When the graphs show an upward trend, the workers all are jubilant and they engage in ecstasies of florid greed.  When the graph lines plunge, people get suicidal, come to work drunk or stoned on hard drugs such as heroin, and shriek at one another producing interminable rants and tirades.  The show makes no effort to educate its watchers as to what is going on -- presumably, the lines on the computer graphs signify wealth and profit or loss and poverty, but it's totally unclear what is going on.  People speak in impenetrable jargon rendered even more incomprehensible by the English accents that are frequently impossible to decipher.  When they are not at work, the people in the show copulate with one another, go to decadent parties, and howl at one another in rage.  The program has something to do with a concept called "short selling" -- although from time to time, people have tried to explain to me what this means I have been impervious to these explanations.  As far as I can see, "short selling" is some species of quasi-criminal fraud that renders the casino of high finance even more speculative, perilous, and unpredictable.   

As it happens, the episode on which I am reporting as characteristic of this show was the program finale. This wasn't clear to me until the end but the cross-cutting between different characters was supposed to tie-up the plot strands developed in the show.  Hence, the program was fractured into a series of short scenes presented as parallel action -- although I have watched about five of these shows, I can't recall the names of most of the characters and, certainly, have no emotional (or other) investment in them.   In keeping with the program's aggressive anomie, the different plot strands are isolated and feature small groups of characters atomized by their greed into truculent couples or trios -- since the trading floor with the computer plotted profit and loss displays was not operable during this show, there was really no forum in which the different protagonists could interact.  

The episode opens with a conclave of British bankers and Saudi investors insulting one another.  The Saudis ask something like "Why is your imperialism better than ours?" Then, there's a fisherman who gets threatened for some reason by another character.  Two women exchange Baroque insults and, then, blackmail threats.  A tall twit of the kind featured in Monty Python sketches travels around the country with a girl with black-hair called Jasmine.  An Asian guy who is a boss at the enterprise, now owned by the Saudis, gives a pep talk to his workers.  At first, they shout and harass him making snarky comments but his eloquence wins them over -- he expostulates on how greed is good a bit like Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. We learn that a girl's father is some kind of predator.  The twit and the cute black-haired girl have driven to a extravagantly (and comically) huge country estate where someone important lives -- this turns out to be a hirsute tech-bro of some kind  The twit and the girl go for a stroll in the 100 acre garden by the mansion and end up having desperately urgent sex on a bench outdoors -- they claw off each other's clothing.  Then, the girl goes into the vast manor house with its walls covered in acres of medieval tapestry and a gallery of about a hundred Tudor and Elizabethan portraits.  The Tech-Bro, who admits to being a heroin addict, proposes marriage to the black-haired girl who is still, presumably, dripping with the twit's semen.  He's a wealthy guy and she agrees to marry him.  Meanwhile, the two women who have been alternately threatening one another and blackmailing others summon a Pakistani guy into a room and humiliate him with torrents of abuse.  (This is how people fire each other on this idiotic show.)  While the Pakistani pleads for his job, the women call him names including saying that he is a "punter" whatever that means.  Someone ends a conversation with the words:  "I hope you will enjoy feeling your flesh sear in the hell that you have made for yourself."  People get betrayed over some percentage of profits or REI (or some other inscrutable acronym) and hurl insults at one another.  The Asian guy who has given the pep talk and motivated the workers at the company is fired by his Arab masters, although it's not so bad because they give him 20 million dollars severance pay.  Some woman is involved in the Asian guy's firing and he accuses her of betraying him or betraying her own government -- she worked for Pierpoint and, also, for the regime at some point.  There are more tirades and harangues.  One of the two women who tormented the Pakistani (I think) hatches a criminal scheme to do more "short sales", conduct that seems reprehensible but, also, highly lucrative.  The Asian guy bursts into tears on the now-closed trading floor.  A bill collector insults the Pakistani and, then, pulls out a revolver and blows off his blonde girlfriend's head.  The black-haired girl who has agreed to marry the hirsute Tech-Bro is told that her husband-to-be is child molester who has raped 12 year old girls.  No worries -- he's a very wealthy man.  The twit is shown somewhere compromising himself by making another speech about greed.  The End.

As I hope you can see this is pure garbage, wholly unrelated to any kind of plausible social milieu or human psychology.  Everyone just screams at everyone else.  The dialogue is fifty percent threats and abuse.  The show is reasonably entertaining on the basis of its high-voltage charge of sheer, unmitigated rage and vitriol.  Industry is aggressively ugly, shot in shrill close-ups with an incessantly, and pointlessly, moving camera -- it has a soundtrack that sounds either like Mahler or a horror film or a  perky K-pop tune. The thing pushes all your buttons but I'm ashamed I spent so much of my increasingly short life watching this sort of thing.