Margin Call

Banks are filled with bad people who don’t care about anyone. I understand that is the cultural impression and thus cathartic release undertook in Margin Call. Yet its gross generalization is gross.

The theme of the work accentuates the antipathy of making money found in the minds of movie-makers. The reckless yearning for capital insinuates this animal spirit thirst as the cause of the banking disaster of 2008. With the film we are left with the taste of bitterness of the collusion of the banking firm’s decision to screw everyone to preserve their own skin. This is iconic Christian morality.

Never mind the nuanced dilemma of such a decision – the point the film makes is the world really is as black-and-white and crude as depicted. It’s quite simple: if people did not want money, bad things would not happen.

Nietzche’s consternation with the Christian paradigm of the world is in how perverse it reveals itself. For with the same zealotry for greed springs the yearning for achievement. In the Capitalist economy, motivations, and therefore emotional intent, are of no concern to anyone but those who own them. Humorously of course, The Great Transformation, would deem this impersonality of the market also as a flaw of the spontaneous flow of human action into an uncontrollable order-of-things, which has produced the greatest economic abundance in written history. Capitalism simply cannot win the more it wins.

The apex of the film then is highly disqualified. The momentum of the actions of the bank, alongside the actions of the social order, is itself castigated. As almost karmic, Margin Call contends that the devil is in the natural tendency for humanity to want more.

This is very much akin to the stain of sin found in every human. Yet as indicated beforehand, the lust for greed has in its origination the same lust for heroism. Christianity blinds the distinction, formulating corrective self-mutilation of those who are incubated in its moral paradigm.

We deserved this. While agreeable, it is not for the thesis presented. And the thesis of Margin Call exemplifies the exhaustion of the inconsistencies of the Christian religion, giving way to the nihilism of the day. Earning money is profitable. It is performed out of contributing value to a society. The church historically had a difficult time in this allowance in much the same way it has had difficulty in allowing humans to choose what they please. In the Christian religion, the freedom to please is tied to sin. Thus the infrastructure of virtue in Christianity will perennially find calamity as caused by the inception of free will.

The calamity is not meditated upon as a testimony to the misguidance of the values of the society: namely, entitlement indebted by others towards you. Instead, it is a recycling of a tattered myth which only distorts meaning in the world even more. Fitting.

Grade: C-