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-  

Glengarry Glenn Ross

Work is hard. In case you didn't get the memo, you haven’t been working.

While one honestly can question the life decisions of all members of this cast of salesmen, who are peddling land to people who near-randomly divulge their private contact information, one must appreciate the sincerity of their efforts to survive.

Very few people today would be able to live a life on the brink as these sales-folk. To live off of commission, where if you don’t close you don’t eat, is no one’s choice of occupation. Stress is not something that is sought after, and if an easier job can be had, where even as meek as pushing papers puts food on the table, it will be taken over staring survival in the face.

Thus we can pity the life-choices of the characters, for choosing to live a life which leads to an Alec Baldwin diatribe. But in doing so, we would pity ourselves, for we lack the courage to live in a perpetual state of risk, or practical life and death.

There is perplexity in the current political economy of society, where no one enjoys the machine and participating as cogs within it. Yet what is unrealized is the appreciation that this machine shields the world of ancestral struggle, and enables an artificial reality for everyone. For the few marooned souls outside of the artifice, they are left with scraping by with any work they can get.

Unquestionably, they work because they have no choice. The leads delivered to each salesman by the front office are indeed weak. The business itself is near-fraudulent, feasting off of the meek emotions of decaying people who have a gluttonous surplus of money on their hands and nothing worth breathing it into. We can only imagine the owners of the enterprise and their origins in concocting such a scheme, where they can live off of the toil of those living off of the aimlessness of others.

The drama unfolds when this scheme stagnates, and a fire is felt by the salesmen from their feudal lords of Glengarry and Glenn Ross. Desperation out of fear for losing a lousy job touches each of them, except for the top salesmen. The distinction of the top-man from the others is clear in his philosophy. While the others are resentful of the lives they have lead, made clear with their disdain for their work, Romano celebrates his deceitfulness which creates his sales numbers and brand new Cadillac at the end of the month.

Is this entire play a critique of Capitalism? In this day and age, what isn’t? The entire order of nature can be blamed on that ambiguous word, which resembles more an attack on the despondence of nihilism which modern society indulges in, yet resents when asphyxiation sets in. The motion of money, like a matter of physics, directs itself where the individual members of society direct themselves. The invisible hand does not actually exist: what does exist are individual members of society and their individual relations to the world around them. If the world becomes alien to them, whereby the uncouth morality emerges as successful, we have a critique on human society.

A business which can subsist off of fools and their parted money can only subsist where fools live.

Grade: A-