“The Big Short” movie poster – Source Link
“The Big Short” is a biographical and comedy-drama film based on Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and follows the stories of the few individuals who were able to predict the 2008 Great Recession through discovering the enormous magnitude of the United States housing bubble. Throughout the film, there are many intersecting identities between different cultural and socioeconomic classes and different personal identities.
The scene where FrontPoint Partners attempt to survey tenants in South Florida who are delinquent on their mortgages. YouTube Link
For instance, to investigate the magnitude of the housing bubble, the employees of FrontPoint Partners, a hedge fund from New York City, fly down to southern Florida, where they attempt to interview individuals who have been delinquent on paying their mortgages. While many of the houses are empty, often filled with stacks of past-due bills, one resident opens the door with his young child. When asked by the FrontPoint employees why he was delinquent on his mortgage, the man responded that he has been paying his rent on time and did not know that his landlord was not paying the mortgage on the house. Even worse, the man learns that his landlord took out the mortgage for his house in the name of his dog. Concerned about being evicted from his house, the FrontPoint employees left, with nothing they could do to remediate the situation. At the end of the film, when the severity of the economic crisis became widespread, there is a scene with the same man living out of a minivan with his son. There are many moments of socioeconomic disconnection throughout the film, as the FrontPoint hedge fund employees made trades to profit significantly off of the economic crisis. In contrast, the man they had surveyed had lost his home, and a systemic injustice had clearly occurred.
Additionally, another scene that I found to be particularly profound throughout “The Big Short” is when the two young investors from Brownfield Capital and their mentor make the trades that would allow them to profit from the collapse of the United States housing market, and the young investors start celebrating and high fiving. Ben Rickert, a retired trader, and Brownfield Capital mentor, instantly becomes extremely upset and says, “If we’re right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about f*****g banking? It reduces people to numbers — Every 1 percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die. Did you know that?” This disconnect that Ben Rickert points out is incredibly profound because, in many business-related fields, such as finance, you are constantly working with quantitative data, models and numbers. However, it is easy to forget the direct impact that these financial decisions have on the general population in the United States. Additionally, the understanding that the film provides regarding the origins of the U.S. housing bubble highlights the systemic injustices that low-income Americans faced, such as deceptive mortgages with 0% down but with interest payments that would eventually rise to over 100% a month. Overall, “The Big Short” highlights a multitude of disconnects between socioeconomic classes and stresses how profound of an unintended impact that individual decisions can have on socioeconomically disadvantaged groups while providing the audience with a comedic, entertaining, and enthralling look into how the 2008 Financial Crisis unfolded.
Quote Sources:
- https://nypost.com/2020/04/20/explaining-the-link-between-unemployment-deaths-amid-coronavirus/
- https://www.bustle.com/articles/136540-9-big-short-quotes-thatll-remind-you-how-tragic-this-comedy-really-is#:~:text=It%20reduces%20people%20to%20numbers,collapse%20of%20the%20world’s%20economy.