The Themester event I attended was the October 7th showing of Margin Call.
The basic plot of the movie details a single day at an investment firm
in New York as the employees of the firm decide to sell all their
worthless assets and essentially crash the economy so that they don't
lose their money. Overall I really enjoyed the movie
and thought it was an extremely interesting and entertaining movie. I
really can't compare this movie to anything we've read in class.
Throughout the film, all of the characters are aware that the end
decision is going to be to crash the economy so that they
can keep their money, and some of them grapple with the moral issue of
causing other people to lose money while they keep it, but there's never
really any internal conflict. There's no sudden and dramatic
realization of wrong doing like Lear has. All the employees
just kind of pass the responsibility onto their bosses to let the boss
make the decision, and each boss seems to have risen to their higher
place by being more and more self serving. There's a definite analysis
and observation into human nature that we see
in Shakespeare, but Margin Call doesn't
have that questioning tone towards the nastier portrayals of humanity.
It's more like sadly accepting its portrayal and
suggesting it won't change. This tone really gets driven home when at
the end, the main boss of the investment firm gives a big speech and
lists all the times that the world economies have crashed so that a
select group of people will save money. He starts
listing years in the 1600s and goes through maybe 20 times throughout
the history of capitalism that crashes like the one in the movie have
happened, and then says, "And
there have always been
and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers.
Happy foxes and sad sacks. Fat cats and starving dogs in this world.
Yeah, there may be more of us today than there's ever been. But the
percentages-they stay exactly the same." It kind of
makes me happy I'm not a business major.
Posted on behalf of Joseph Hegeman
Joseph, while difference is as valuable to note as similarity (and thus the distance between Shakespeare and Margin Call is an entirely worthy subject), I kept thinking of Timon as I read this, and of 1) the characters who repeatedly note that Timon's generosity is unsustainable, yet do nothing to curtail it and 2) the characters who let the bank fail, as it were, just to keep from forking over any support as Timon's finances collapse. In fact, the indifference and nonchalance of Timon's friends seems perfectly paralleled by the characters you describe defending their profit at the expense of the global economy (and especially its most fragile members). It's worth remembering, then, that the refusal to acknowledge faults and failings is no less Shakespearean than the anagnoresis of Lear. It is, however, much less satisfying. And that you clearly note.
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