The Great Recession was a devastating series of economic events for most Americans; its effects continue to be felt today and will persist into the future. The Big Short (2015), a Hollywood film adaptation of Michael Lewis's 2010 eponymous book, provides a discerning look into the opaque world of high finance that caused the financial downturn. Film critics and economists have noted both the film's accuracy and its ability to distill complex financial concepts for a mass audience. New York Times Senior Economics Correspondent Neil Irwin, for instance, called it "the strongest film explanation of the global financial crisis." Grossing over $133 million in worldwide box-office revenues, garnering five Academy Award nominations, and winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, The Big Short was the most visible and highly acclaimed film to examine the 2008 U.S. housing market crash and serves as a cinematic example of public pedagogy that challenges and critiques the financial practices that helped create the conditions for the crisis (boxofficemojo.com).

The film centers on intersecting plotlines driven by an array of renegade investors who concurrently rely on a combination of astute insight and luck to "short" (bet against) the housing market. These investors include Scion Capital founder Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), Deutsche Bank's Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), Marc Baum (Steve Carell) and his Front Point Partners team, as well as upstart Brownfield Fund's Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Whitrock) with the help of their mentor Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt). Despite being a mix of personality types, these characters each share an ability to see that the conventional wisdom that "housing is always stable" had become untrue. That is, while most Americans — financial experts included — operated under the unchecked assumption that the housing market was an infinitely safe investment and a secure support system for the entire economy, the film's protagonists strategized ways to profit from broader ignorance of an imminent market crash. Although these characters are perhaps antiheroes in the fight for economic justice, The Big Short nonetheless uses them to advance a sharp critique of the financial services industry's destructive actions, the U.S. government's lack of response to the subprime mortgage crisis, and the American people for allowing it to happen. Thus, the film is a complex text that tells the story of the Great Recession in an entertaining way, with flawed-yet-heroic characters, while simultaneously offering a mainstream critique that explains the conditions for collapse and translates the arcane and complex technical discourse of financial elites for a broad audience.

This essay offers a critique of the film aimed at better understanding how it challenges problematic, entrenched norms of representing the economy in ways that are accessible to a mass audience. As a result, our work is predicated on the premise, as bell hooks theorizes, that "cinema assumes a pedagogical role in the lives of many people," irrespective of whether or not "it is the intent of a filmmaker to teach the audience anything" (2-3). Such a perspective aligns with foundational notions of the ways that media shapes and is shaped by culture. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, for example, refer to the mutually constitutive links between cinema and ideology as "discursive transcoding" to describe "the connections between the representations operative in film and the operations which give shape and structure to social life" (12). John Fiske echoes this conception by deploying the metaphor of mass media as a "discursive relay station" to explain filmmakers' capacity to magnify or ignore broader cultural conditions in their depictions (24). According to both of these and other similar formulations, Hollywood films have a potentially powerful pedagogical function because they selectively recirculate certain discourses and, at the same time, neglect others in helping to construct the always contested terrain of culture. Whether they acknowledge it or not, filmmakers play a key role in educating the public by amplifying, contextualizing, and challenging or supporting dominant ideologies in their audiovisual representations, including those pertaining to the causes and results of the 2008 U.S. housing market collapse.

Henry A. Giroux's notion of mass media as a form of public pedagogy offers an appropriate and precise way to describe a film's specific links to its particular cultural contexts. For Giroux, traditional conceptions of the classroom as the exclusive or even primary space for education are misguided because "culture now plays a central role in producing narratives, metaphors, and images that exercise a powerful pedagogical force over how people think of themselves and their relationship to others" ("Cultural" 62), which has been recently compounded by the ubiquity of moving images readily accessible on diverse new technologies in the digital era. Such circumstances, Giroux writes, have created "new modes of public pedagogy," which now means that "the major sites of education lie outside the schools and reside in the larger screen culture" ("Hollywood" 7). In fact, Giroux argues that amid declining "opportunities for civic education and public engagement" film becomes a veritable pedagogical alternative that increasingly "enables conversations that connect politics, personal experiences, and public life to larger social issues" ("Hollywood" 10). Of course, in order to package Hollywood films as harmless fun, producers typically downplay this pedagogical dimension, which is exemplified by frequent disclaimers that frame depictions related to actual events and individuals as accidental or fictional. In contrast to this standard denial, though, The Big Short's filmmakers embrace its teaching function by emphasizing the film's explicit didacticism, particularly during its frequent instances of direct audience address.  

The Big Short is notable in this regard largely because its instructional aspirations are foregrounded rather than concealed behind the veneer of pure entertainment, rendering it an interesting case study for the viability of public pedagogy at a moment when mass education is increasingly under siege. This fact is complicated, though, by the film's presentation of the greedy abuses of big business. In other words, The Big Short does not substantially defy the hegemony of neoliberalism, which David Harvey summarizes as the belief that "human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within a framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade" (22). Rather than interrogate this ideology thoroughly, the film valorizes those whose keen insights allow them to exploit the system. Despite this tension, The Big Short nonetheless serves as an important example of public pedagogy regarding a convoluted financial system that affects everyone in some way. Thus, our primary aim is to chart how this popular film text uncharacteristically facilitates critical reflection for those interested in diagnosing and troubling discourses that contribute to an economic culture habitually oriented towards the proclivities of elites at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. As Alexander Long posits in defense of The Big Short's often contradictory expression of the neoliberal ideology that it appears to want to condemn, "the film provides an example in popular culture of an effective critique of the system within which it operates and is seemingly unable to escape" (339). Consequently, we approach the plotline as a rhetorically and cinematically complex reading of the events that caused the Great Recession.

We advance our argument in three sections, focusing specifically on three interrelated modes of critique offered by The Big Short. First, we discuss the ways in which the film invites contemplation of the dominant markers of cultural common sense, specifically habits of language that maintain acceptance of anti-democratic capitalist discourses. Economics functions discursively as well as materially, and the film offers strategies for rhetorical invention aimed at challenging or otherwise shifting discourses that work to maintain neoliberal hegemony. Next, we examine the cinematic properties of the film, concentrating especially on how it troubles traditionally accepted notions of contemporary American capitalism through its formal aspects. In keeping one foot in Hollywood conventions while also breaking from those principles, The Big Short's formal aspects are an ideal expression of its larger and atypical challenging of the dominant ideologies of contemporary American capitalism. Third, we critique the film's use of metaphor to translate the difficult language of finance. Part of the reason that financial elites are able to gamble on supposedly bedrock elements of the economy is the barrier between expert and layperson created by the highly technical language of economics; the film offers useful examples that illustrate ways to simplify specialist jargon for a mass audience. In what follows, then, we explore the ways in which The Big Short functions as an example of public pedagogy about high stakes finance, offering an incisive critique of the system within the confines of a major Hollywood film.


Conventional Wisdom: Housing Is Always Stable

The Big Short is in many ways an examination of the operation and power of "narrative economics," which posits that individual economic behavior is often influenced more by "simple stor[ies] or easily expressed explanation[s] of events" than by logical reasoning or rigorous analysis (Shiller 4). As Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller notes, most people come to understand political, social, and/or economic practices through bits of random information, repeated often, which conform to larger narratives or stories (3). Narrative economics thus reflects the role of popular culture in shaping beliefs and actions related to economic practices. People learn conventions of thinking and communicating from the world around them, and these widely held ideas form cultural truths, such as the belief that the housing market was infinitely stable and safe. Shiller's analysis recalls an argument advanced in 1958 by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who in offering an explanation of the Great Depression coined the term "conventional wisdom" to describe how economic theories become hegemonic and sustain influence even as they lose their explanatory and/or predictive power (11). For Galbraith, conventional wisdom has more to do with habit than with rational thought; economic practices are typically seen as legitimate primarily because they already exist. As he states, "the conventional wisdom accommodates itself not to the world that it is meant to interpret, but to the audience's view of the world" (Galbraith 11). Conventional wisdom is "comfortable and familiar"; it is by definition normal and therefore discourages critical thought (Galbraith 11). For both Galbraith and Shiller, major economic catastrophes can be explained in part by understanding how dominant narratives supported faith in the economic practices that were likely based more in habit and familiarity than by rational analysis.

The Big Short provides to viewers a clear and dramatic reading of how one narrative in particular — the widespread belief that the housing market was indestructible — helped to foment reckless behavior that would collapse the entire economy. In other words, the conventional wisdom of both mainstream and specialized economic thought was that, of all economic elements, mortgage lending was among the safest and virtually risk free, a view that encouraged irresponsible and dangerous gambling precisely because people did not see it as uncertain. Indeed, the film draws attention to the conventions and narratives that were otherwise difficult to see precisely because they were so normalized and taken for granted. One primary contribution of The Big Short as public pedagogy about the Great Recession, then, is its adeptness at showing the operations of conventional wisdom leading up to the crash.

The characters in the movie who practice full faith in the housing market — essentially everyone except the main protagonists — operate under the reassuring and familiar assumption, oft-repeated in the film, that "housing is always stable." A key aspect of the film's dramatic structure, therefore, is rife ignorance about the housing market and the sense of complacency (or exuberance) that existed in society even as it began to fall apart; nobody looked at the mortgage industry critically, except for the main protagonists. In fact, as the audience hears in Vennett's opening voiceover, "These outsiders saw the giant lie at the heart of the economy. And they saw it by doing something the rest of the suckers never thought to do: they looked." The phrase "housing is always stable" operated as a sort of credo for both professional and lay investors, and it signalled a pervasive form of conventional wisdom that guided the body politic leading up to the crash. As an unchecked assumption, it provided ideal conditions for crafty investors to game the system before others noticed.  

Conventional wisdom is a key element of the film's plot, which imbues the rebel main characters with a pseudo-heroic status for their ability to see through it. Burry, for example, views the world more astutely and skeptically as a result of a childhood injury that gave him a glass eye. In contrast, the rest of society is characterized pejoratively as essentially sleepwalking while the housing market implosion occurred. This unaware, dream-like state that expresses most citizens' relationship to the economy is represented especially well early in the film as Baum's character is introduced. Like Burry and the other main characters, Baum has the ability to see something wrong with the current system; he notices cracks in the conventional wisdom that housing is always stable. As he reveals in a telling conversation with his wife, "You have no idea the crap people are pulling and the average person just walks around like they're in a[n] [...] Enya video." This statement is visualized in the next scene, a slow-motion rendition of everyday life in New York City. The screenplay describes the scene as follows: "We see SLO MO people walking down the street. Some laughing. Some stressed about work. Some eating hot dogs" (Randolph and McKay 24). The visual is a highly effective means of arresting the conventional wisdom as an abstracted version of time — it offers a snapshot of routinized, everyday life. As Baum explains it, "They're all getting screwed...Credit cards, payday lenders, car financing, fees, fees, and more fees. And what do they care about? The ball game or which actress went into rehab?" Baum's reading is cynical, but the larger point is clear: most citizens are worse off because they are unaware of highly problematic elements of their democracy and economy.

Although this depiction of citizens as mindless dupes is warranted to some extent, it also is one of the film's flaws. Pervasive public ignorance of the precarious state of the housing market did contribute to the eventual crash; however, as the film also contradictorily illustrates, citizens were largely powerless to counter the contemporaneous deregulation of and consequent abuses by the financial services industry, which were ultimately the primary culprits of the crisis. In particular, near the film's conclusion, there is explicit reference to the fact that only one comparatively small-time player in the entire financial services sector was sentenced to jail for helping to facilitate the Great Recession. More disconcertingly, in the years since the film's release, the consequent restrictions enacted by the U.S. government to rein in the industry's abuses have been persistently eroded, culminating in the 2018 Senate generated bill (the first significant bipartisan legislation of the Trump presidency) to repeal many of the regulations from the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Werner and Merle). In short, the film evidences a democratic crisis of sorts: although a lack of critical attention allows for widespread manipulation by elites, it is difficult to know what such scrutiny could accomplish in terms of meaningful change by citizens to defy that power, especially in light of subsequent across-the-aisle deregulations that jeopardize the welfare of even the savviest and most informed individuals.

The public is not the only victim of uncritical thinking regarding the economy. The Big Short portrays ways in which financial elites, too, were oblivious to the growing housing bubble. Burry, for instance, is rebuffed early on by his bosses and investors for his risky short bet; they think he has lost all common sense. As he interviews a potential employee, to take another example, he finds himself explaining a theory of contrary investing that the candidate cannot understand because the interviewee "knows" that housing is stable. Later, Burry finds himself in the same situation when trying to persuade the banks to create and sell him the requisite financial instruments to short the market. Even before meeting with bankers, he waits in a lobby as the television displays celebrity financial advisor Jim Cramer saying, "Folks, this market ain't dropping! It's like the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Either get out of the way or invest, invest, invest!" Blind faith in the housing market was in the public consciousness at the time, expressed in popular news and entertainment programs. As the scene moves to the boardroom, the supposed experts — the bankers — reflect the deep-seated nature of this economic common sense as they repeat the mantra that housing is fundamentally stable and low risk while responding with thinly veiled incredulity to Burry's claims that his gambit would fail. He counters with an answer keyed in to the persuasive power of the popular narrative: "Based on prevailing sentiment in the banks and popular culture, it's a foolish investment, but everyone's wrong." The bankers are taken aback, and one of them, Deeb Winston (Rajeev Jacob), notes that "these bonds will only fail if millions of Americans don't pay their mortgages. That's never happened in history." Regardless, the profit motive governs the transaction, and the bankers happily accede to his request. They make money if Burry fails.

"Housing is always stable" functions as a blinding force to ordinary citizens, which is demonstrated effectively when the Front Point team travels to Florida to explore a community propped up by risky mortgages. There, Baum finds that virtually nobody is aware of the coming reality check. The exotic dancer he interviews has mortgages on several houses, which she does not find strange despite her volatile income. Additionally, she does not understand the structure of the adjustable rate loans (the predatory variety with interest rates that grow considerably after a low, introductory "teaser rate") that will soon increase her monthly payments exponentially. She is portrayed as a typical participant in the mortgage market at the time. The mortgage brokers Baum speaks to are similarly ignorant, even as they become wealthy selling subprime mortgages to people with bad credit and risky profiles. While the Florida brokers are portrayed to have some idea that they are engaging in unethical behavior (and do not seem to be bothered by it), they appear to have no inclination that they are part of a ballooning problem that will soon collapse the entire economy. Further, they reveal the various ways that the financial system incentivizes reckless behavior in the pursuit of endless profit. As Baum probes the brokers for information, he finds that they now authorize about sixty mortgages per month, up from around ten just four years prior. When Baum's associate Danny Moses (Rafe Spall) asks how many are predatory adjustable rate mortgages, one of the brokers replies, "Most. Ninety percent. The bonuses on those skyrocketed a few years ago. Adjustable is our bread and honey." When asked if anybody ever gets turned down, the broker replies, "Dude, if they get rejected, I suck at my job." Even unemployed applicants are accepted: "My firm offers NINJA loans. No Income. No Job. I just leave the income section blank if I want, corporate doesn't care. And the people just want a house. So they go with the flow." Representative of a system that incentivizes predatory behavior at multiple levels, the brokers appear both unethical and strategic.

The scene in Florida highlights normal lending practices engaged in by all interested parties before the crash. The conventional wisdom warranted people to apply for (sometimes multiple) unaffordable mortgages just as it incentivized those selling the mortgages to engage in reckless and greedy behavior; it encouraged and concealed risky behavior by banks, which were also blind to the gambles that would cause their downfall; and it helped an entire industry not to notice its own collapse as it occurred in real time. The narrative related to the strength of housing was, in this case, stronger than the warning signs that accompanied it, and it guided and impacted both professionals and everyday citizens alike.

Early in the film, Burry speaks of "mania" that has overtaken the housing market. Mania is another way to imagine conventional wisdom, which encourages people to interpret meaning in a particular fashion that tracks more towards inertia or groupthink (i.e., they persist because they are normalized) than careful analysis. Dominant narratives such as "housing is always stable" are not typically acted upon critically by most people. Rather, as Roger C. Shank and Roger P. Abelson argue, narratives produce cultural scripts, which guide how people act and contribute to larger societal norms that influence ideologies and behaviors (36-41). The Big Short is effective at communicating the intoxicating effect of conventional wisdom. It demonstrates the perils of critical apathy toward economic conventional wisdom and also valorizes the individuals who saw past the dominant ways of thinking and transformed that knowledge into profit. The viewer is thus encouraged to see and learn about conventional wisdom's role in the crash from the perspectives of both those negatively affected and those who ultimately profited. The film directs audiences to think more critically about accepted economic practices.


Shorting Classical Hollywood Conventions

The disruption that the protagonists produce within economic common sense is mirrored by the film's analogous challenges to the traditions of classical Hollywood cinema. In this regard, The Big Short offers a compelling and uncommon example of how to defy conventional wisdom in its cinematic structure as a self-aware, yet commercially produced feature film. In playing with classical Hollywood film principles, it provokes and teaches the audience to reckon with the normalcy of the dominant economic order through atypical compositional choices. Therefore, we contend that the formal elements deployed in The Big Short are integral to understanding how it encourages audiences to think critically about economics and finance.

The Big Short both depends on and flouts recognizable cinematic conventions to encourage viewers to perceive purportedly self-evident messages as ideological constructions. Hollywood film audiences are often unaware that the way in which the industry tells stories as well as depicts sounds and images typically remains within a limited set of artistic decisions that were codified in the silent and early sound eras and continue to elide alternatives. Accordingly, Hollywood film has been a synecdoche for a "normal" movie ever since the industry's global distribution network made it world cinema's dominant player in the 1920s. For approximately a century, Hollywood film has been a majority discourse that Miriam Hansen influentially equates to a global "industrially produced, mass-based, vernacular modernism," which transcended literacy barriers and became "an idiom, or idioms, that travelled more easily than its national-popular rivals" (331-33). The industry's remarkable success since then at packaging its products as primarily for harmless fun has buttressed its capacity to convey hegemonic ways of thinking surreptitiously. In particular, even though all modes of cinematic expression represent reality to some extent, Hollywood films are most often positioned as mere leisure time diversions that prioritize entertainment in relation to alternatives, like documentary, that privilege soberly informing spectators about key social issues. On the one hand, by mobilizing Hollywood's narrative and formal principles, The Big Short effectively appeals to a mass audience in this recognizable fashion. On the other hand, it also troubles that tradition and its associated escapism by inspiring a kind of active viewer engagement that atypically interrogates the meanings of those very representations and teaches spectators to engage critically with dominant discourses.

The combination of conventional and unconventional cinematic properties raises awareness of how Hollywood film and the hegemonic messages it most often transmits are constructed without alienating its core audience. This strategy is wise because the historical dominance of Hollywood film makes it difficult for most viewers to notice its definitive textual elements and corresponding ideological consequences unless there is deviation from the paradigm. For David Bordwell, Hollywood film's privileging of a distinct narrative logic differentiates it from other cinematic modes. In contrast to non-narrative alternatives, such as some documentary and experimental film, Hollywood cinema is fundamentally about a discrete brand of storytelling. As Bordwell notes, it "presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals" (Narration 157). Specifically, it generally features a dual plot structure identifiable to mass audiences that is causally connected to the actions of a sole protagonist, who strives to achieve a quest and a heteronormative romance. The heterosexual coupling subplot's virtual absence (and more general dearth of primary women characters) in The Big Short highlights both its tenuous links to mainstream Hollywood film and how its rejection of conventions affects its cultural politics. Hollywood's repetition of the formula is not apolitical, then, and consequent artistic choices have ideological ramifications, as the historically disproportionate casting of white males as exceptional protagonists further demonstrates.

The valorization of sole, goal-oriented heroes exemplifies how textual properties in Hollywood film are not ideologically neutral because they are partly a product of socio-cultural conditions that favor, for instance, individualism over the collective. Such tendencies also separate it from "art-cinema," which Bordwell defines as an alternative similarly invested in storytelling that instead focuses on "loosening cause and effect," a more "episodic construction," and an "emphasis on the fluctuations of character psychology" (Narration 206). Whereas ambiguity and creative flexibility are privileged in art-cinema, formal choices in Hollywood films are narratively subservient and have associated ideological consequences. Bordwell theorizes that cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, and sound design decisions are "compositionally motivated" in Hollywood cinema, as they function exclusively to aid the viewer's unambiguous comprehension of the story in one viewing, rendering them largely imperceptible to familiarized spectators (Narration 162). Noticeable formal innovations unrelated to narrative development are common in experimental and art-cinema; however, they are rare in Hollywood film because of their potential to frustrate audiences habituated to its conventional means of storytelling. The profit motive incentivizes Hollywood filmmakers to avoid formal devices that draw attention to a film's design by instead disguising them with techniques, like continuity editing, in which spatiotemporal cuts appear driven by story demands. The global predominance of this "canonic narrative" and its associated "invisible style" prompts Bordwell to label it as "classical" because it is so recognizable that most viewers uncritically accept it as natural and resist films that depart drastically from it (Narration 156-57).

At first blush, The Big Short is difficult to categorize as a classical film and, by extension, to assess in relation to its associated ideological tendencies even though it was domestically distributed theatrically by Paramount, a subsidiary of Viacom, one of the media conglomerates that comprises contemporary Hollywood (imdb.com). After all, it does not focus on an individual protagonist and contains other elements widely hailed as unconventional, especially the didactic celebrity cameos that break the fourth wall. Film critic Stephen Whitty epitomizes this response by noting "with so many characters on screen, and almost all of them annoying, there is no one to focus on," which is only compounded by their status as morally suspect protagonists greedily betting on the U.S. economy's implosion. Leah Pickett of The Chicago Reader makes similar observations by asserting that formally The Big Short incorporates "a random jump cut or freeze frame, as if to say 'Pay Attention!'"; she refers to this as a "method of pedagogy" that "may be too acerbic for some tastes, but [is] maybe what people need in this instance: to be rudely shaken awake." However, some critics counter that the film might not be received as unconventional because of the increasing frequency in Hollywood of tactics once deemed radical, such as the use of characters who directly address the camera. This iteration might mean "devices that used to be confrontational or postmodern have now been completely mainstreamed." The tension between sameness and difference pervades the film, appealing both to broad tastes and viewers wanting something more as well as complicating its relationship to classical cinema. Thus, as a mode of public pedagogy, the film draws in and satisfies mass audiences with conventional techniques and an all-star, white, male cast while also challenging viewers by playing with those very norms.

According to Bordwell, a main reason for the classical film's enduring supremacy is its capacity to confine such narrative and formal innovations within its larger storytelling and representational framework, potentially blunting the ideological impact of such deviations. To counter declarations that the recent spate of multi-protagonist films exhibits a fundamental storytelling shift in Hollywood, for instance, Bordwell argues that most remain classical because the main characters usually aim concurrently to accomplish the same quest narrative goal, which is true of The Big Short (The Way 97). Although most main characters never interact directly, they are all linked by their simultaneous attempt to profit from the otherwise unforeseen housing market collapse.

Due to its familiarity, Bordwell contends that the classical film typically fosters suspense by employing deadlines and obstacles that retard the inevitable quest outcome, exemplifying how its privileging of narrative can divert audiences from attending to form and ideology (Narration 165). To wit, even though viewers already know that the mortgage crisis eventually occurs, the film still generates anticipation about the main characters’ surmounting the ensuing hurdles in time. As Bordwell also explains, many recent storytelling and formal devices heralded for defying classical logic, such as narrative complexity or rapid MTV-style editing, actually provide "legible variants on well-entrenched strategies for presenting time, space, goal achievement, causal connection, and the like" (The Way 75). In The Way Hollywood Tells It, he even declares that the most narratively and formally experimental Hollywood films paradoxically rely heaviest on classical techniques, like redundancy, to remain easily intelligible as well as to avoid both confusing audiences and making them more attentive to its construction than to the story (Bordwell 78). It remains unsurprising, then, that the first cameo, Margot Robbie’s explanation of terms, including subprime loans and mortgage-backed securities, is coupled with Vennett's fourth wall breaking voiceover in which he explicitly prepares audiences narratively for the formal disruption of the celebrity direct address.

Such redundancy is actually a prototypical classical device, according to Bordwell, largely because Hollywood is afraid of ostracizing viewers and losing revenues (Narration 161). As a result, The Big Short sometimes deploys repetitive tactics, like those that orient viewers in time and space during unconventional edits, to mitigate bewilderment arising from formal devices that are difficult for classically trained audiences to understand. A quintessential example of this technique occurs when most of the main characters simultaneously decide to attend the American Securitization Forum in Las Vegas despite being in separate locales and unaware of each other's similar objective. Specifically, continuity editing makes the transitions narratively subservient by employing cross-cutting while the Brownfield Fund and Front Point teams separately inquire redundantly about why Vegas is relevant immediately before the film abruptly moves to scenes in that city. When the Vegas edit actually transpires, the soundtrack shifts dramatically, as ominous organ music suddenly blares to signal the change, which is paired with a superimposed title that informs viewers that they are now in the city and about to witness the characters at the convention. The sequence, therefore, showcases how the film relies on compositionally motivated classical conventions, such as the screenplay's dialogue hooks, non-diegetic titles, and associated continuity editing decisions, to amplify narrative comprehensibility in the face of potentially non-classical devices, including multiple protagonists, frenetic parallel editing, as well as rapid switches in time and space.

This delicate balance between classical and non-classical tendencies is no longer rare in Hollywood cinema and is accordingly received as increasingly conventional by some audiences; however, The Big Short's particular combination of the two untraditionally provokes spectators to view it as a construction more blatantly than most of the industry's contemporaneous fare and bolsters its pedagogical function. The Big Short is not, then, a standard mainstream film because of the ways in which its non-classical aspects promote critical engagement as well as draw attention to its design and corresponding ideological messages. This feature allows the movie to continue to appeal to mass audiences while it also encourages those spectators to abandon Hollywood escapism and actively interrogate the meanings of aesthetic choices. On the one hand, the film's atypical formal elements are classical; the innovations can be read as compositionally motivated. Some non-classical formal aspects, for instance, are subservient to the film's most redundant plot point: how supposedly commonsense notions, most notably unwavering belief in the housing market's stability, actually blind people to the awful truth. This relates to its formal construction, which mirrors how the classical film occludes the audience's capacity to see it as a rigid paradigm that exists amid virtually infinite alternatives. Examples of this blissful ignorance are manifold, including the film's opening epigraph, which warns that the biggest trouble derives from "what you know for sure that just ain't so," an SEC representative who claims they "don't investigate much" while trying to get hired by banks she should be scrutinizing, a corrupt Standard and Poor's rating representative who literally cannot see after an eye doctor visit, and so on. On the other hand, there are times when non-classical formal components have the opposite impact, as they encourage viewers to emulate the protagonists by inspecting evidence closely to question its veracity and significance rather than simply accepting or disregarding it.

As with willful ignorance and blindness, the ability to see what others cannot is a central theme that recurs throughout the film, offering recognizable compositional motivation to viewers familiar with Hollywood conventions. The motif of searching for hidden information buried in plain sight is continually reiterated after Vennett's opening voiceover articulates its narrative prominence, including a flashback of a Rabbi's allegation that young Baum looks for inconsistencies in the word of God, Burry's discovery of the thousands of otherwise ignored risky home loans that actually comprise mortgage-backed securities, Brownfield's investment strategy of betting against bad things that are overvalued because others generally prefer not to think about them, and so on. Although this theme can also be deemed narratively subservient by how it is linked to the protagonists' most exceptional shared trait, it is ultimately difficult to reconcile completely in that manner. In contrast to the blindness trope that imitates how Hollywood teaches spectators to consume classical cinema uncritically, the theme of dogged investigation reflects how some of the film's formal attributes have the inverse impact on audiences by alerting them to its status as a construction. These formal devices heighten the film's artifice instead of concealing it, irregularly provoking spectators to perceive it as something other than just harmless entertainment.

This active viewer engagement connects to the film's larger vision, which depicts the 2008 recession as part of a broader and ongoing period of wittingly overlooked corruption in U.S. history that is underscored by the dominant ideologies of contemporary American capitalism. This theme comes to an apotheosis in Baum's climactic debate with "bullish investor" and staunch capitalist, Bruce Miller (Tony Bentley), during which Bear Stearns's stock plummets. Speaking to the diegetic audience of financial services professionals and by extension to the film's spectators, Baum portrays the contemporary moment in U.S. history as an unprecedented "era of fraud" that he maintains is "not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball." Not coincidentally, when the film previously showed a television news report detailing the start of the mortgage crisis, prior to the channel being changed to that program, the set briefly displayed images of Barry Bonds, who belatedly became a pariah from steroid use after helping to resurrect Major League Baseball's popularity. This fleeting inclusion is emblematic of the film's uncharacteristic subtlety and the viewer attention it requires, as Baum's dramatic soliloquy in which he mentions baseball is itself occasionally drowned out by alerts attendees receive about the shocking fate of the investment banking giant. To hear the entire contents of Baum's speech clearly, viewers thus must listen carefully and likely repeatedly to his muffled monologue. These are not typical actions expected of Hollywood spectators, who are trained by the classical film to grasp key narrative information easily in one viewing. Yet, this sound design moment epitomizes how the film's non-classical elements urge viewers to wrestle with its construction and ideological significance in unconventional ways.

The examples of non-classical formal attributes prompting uncommon viewer inspection are numerous, including a similarly dramatic sound design moment when Baum finally confides in his wife about his brother's suicide and the dialogue is obscured by an even more muted soundtrack. Despite the consistent presence of nontraditional formal devices, most befuddled reviewers echoed The Christian Science Monitor's Peter Rainer, who claims that he "can't fathom" why the "actors are wearing unsightly hairpieces." The hair and make-up decisions, like Bale's and Carell's often noticeably bad wigs as well as Gosling's awful hair dye job and spray tan, were designed to deglamorize the stars by drawing attention to how Hollywood pretense obfuscates reality, which parallels the ugliness and obfuscation present in the financial sector.

Perhaps most importantly, this non-classical construction extends beyond sound design and mise-en-scène by also violating the most sacred classical formal aspect: continuity editing. Some cuts are not accompanied by aforementioned conventions — such as dialogue hooks and superimposed titles — that anchor the viewer in time and space. Instead, as the abrupt edit that transitions inexplicably from Burry's extended character introduction to the group therapy session that Baum interrupts before the audience even knows who he is exemplifies, there are some cuts that disorient because their classical, protagonist-driven narrative relevance is unclear.

These techniques collectively encourage viewers to exchange their passive consuming habits for an analytical perspective that incites them to confront how Hollywood films are constructed. This atypical mode of spectator address in Hollywood cinema aligns with The Big Short's core message and public pedagogy aims. In terms of formal design, the movie relies on classical conventions to appease mass audiences; however, it ultimately combines that technique with many non-classical devices to show audiences how a failure to question the dominant ideologies of unfettered neoliberal capitalism, such as corporate deregulation, the evisceration of consumer protection, rampant privatization, and so on, contribute to the detriment of the downtrodden masses for the benefit of the privileged few.


Metaphor, Civic Participation, and Technical Complexity

As with the select Hollywood filmmakers who have extraordinary capacity to shape the mass audience's conceptions of reality, political and economic elites in neoliberal American democracy have incredible power to make decisions and implement policies on the polity's behalf, a relationship that is often predicated on a knowledge gap between the two groups. This expertise disparity is significant because it can obstruct public judgment during crises, at which time citizens find themselves without the necessary rhetorical resources to intervene effectively in the decision-making process. In challenging conventional wisdom through argument and formal construction, The Big Short directly grapples with a key barrier to citizen participation in economic and political spheres: technical discourse and the byzantine terminology of finance. As a rhetorical text, the film engages in an important act of public pedagogy that explains complex financial terminology through an array of cinematic and literary devices, such as dialogue, voiceover narration, superimposed titles, and, crucially, metaphor. Consequently, the film provides viewers, addressed here in their role as citizens, with a framework for better understanding the economic mechanisms that caused the Great Recession.

The language of high finance is an example of what Thomas Farrell and G. Thomas Goodnight term "technical reason," which comprises "modes of inference that are characteristic of specialized forums, wherein discourse is coded to fit functional demands of particular information fields [and] evaluated according to an array of state-of-the-art techniques" (273). Technical reason — found in fields such as engineering, economics, and medicine — exists out of a necessity to understand, predict, and control complex phenomena. Its specialized nature, however, can also severely limit the range of civic deliberation in response to crises since it inhibits public participation in arenas dominated by experts. For Farrell and Goodnight, there is a risk that "technical reasoning" might usurp "the role of social reasoning" within debates about technical matters, as public deliberation increasingly defers to the specialized knowledge of experts (273). As a result, there is a weakening of the resources available to citizens when making public judgments in the face of disasters, which can produce a "rhetorical crisis" (272). Such a rhetorical crisis not only applies to the particular nuclear energy failure that Farrell and Goodnight examine in their case study. Instead, it refers to the broader inability of the public to develop an effective response to a rhetorical situation in instances that are similarly characterized by excessive technical reasoning.

As a rhetorical crisis in which experts and political leaders struggled for an appropriate response to the exigence, the Great Recession invites scholars to identify and analyze rhetorically innovative efforts to bridge the gap between technical reasoning and public judgment. The Big Short is one such attempt as it both carefully defines key financial terms while also translating economic logic into everyday language through a series of metaphors (often explained by celebrity cameos) that help viewers understand some of the complex processes behind the 2008 collapse. As "a device for seeing something in terms of something else," Kenneth Burke writes, metaphors are particularly useful in explaining abstract notions and difficult ideas within the context of public deliberation (Grammar 503-4). The reason for this is that they are able to use concepts that the public already knows, or that are at the very least intuitively apparent, as vehicles for understanding that which is abstract, unknown, or unfamiliar. Metaphors are "efficient," in Burke's sense, insofar as they "throw strong light upon something, and in the process cast other things into shadow," which allows them to simplify and/or make tangible information that is complex and/or abstract (Attitudes 248). However, metaphor's efficiency is not only a means of simplification because it also provides perspective by granting salience to the attributes it emphasizes (in detriment of those that it does not). The selective process of metaphorical language strongly influences how often convoluted concepts are ultimately interpreted in highly specific ways (Lakoff and Johnson 4-6). Metaphors thus provide both knowledge and perspective as well as are valuable resources for shaping and understanding public deliberation and collective judgment. 

In the case of The Big Short, metaphor both simplifies technical reason and articulates a strategic framework for comprehending the financial crisis as a set of tangible problems with possible actionable solutions. The filmmakers, who critique the barriers brought by technical discourse for financial gain, use metaphor as a means to translate arcane terminology that contributes to a culture of disengagement. Metaphor, then, is another way in which The Big Short departs from the Hollywood model of escapism; whereas the film offers an engaging and entertaining plot, it also takes up a didactic function more commonly associated with documentary. The film uses metaphors ubiquitously — visually, in the dialogue, and particularly when characters break the fourth wall. Broadly speaking, the film's metaphors emphasize two key points for understanding the Great Recession in a way that enriches public judgment: the inevitability of the housing market's collapse as well as the existence of widespread negligence and deception on the part of the financial services industry and its regulators.  

A representative instance of the film's multifaceted use of metaphor occurs when Vennett presents the opportunity to short the housing market to Baum and his team. This pitch essentially entails two things: it predicts that the housing market will collapse and it elucidates why it will happen. To illustrate, Vennett's assistant unveils a Jenga tower that represents "your basic mortgage bond," with the individual "blocks" representing the "tranches." Just as the word "tranches" is uttered, a superimposed title appears that defines it as "a French word meaning 'a portion of something,'" which in this case are mortgages (or mortgage bonds). Vennett proceeds to explain that these tranches were once the solid investments that their ratings indicated, but that without people realizing it and because of rating agencies' complicity, many had gone "from a little risky" to garbage. To display the increasing defaults on mortgages, and the corresponding failing of the mortgage bonds, his assistant removes blocks from the Jenga tower to represent each default. Vennett dramatically throws these blocks into the garbage, reinforcing that they are indeed trash. When the tower eventually collapses, Vennett tells the Front Point team, and by extension the viewer, that this is about to happen to the U.S. housing market. Through this metaphor, Vennett simplifies the complex workings of the "average mortgage bond" for both the Front Point team and the film's audience through a vehicle (the Jenga tower) that is familiar to most spectators, or at the very least obvious in how it works. Furthermore, through this metaphor, he explains the nature of the chain reaction seen through the interdependence of the individual blocks and its inevitability because the tower's inexorable collapse in Jenga is always only a matter of time.

This scene is cross-cut with another visual metaphor featuring the late celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain, who, looking directly at the audience, compares the risky mortgage bond to old fish put in a stew — a common trick for repackaging food that is about to spoil. The stew represents the "collateralized debt obligation" (CDO) securities that Vennett has eyed to fail. CDOs are deemed "diversified" and thus highly-rated as a whole collection (rather than for their individual components). In the same way that a stew masks its ingredients from the customer, the CDO misdirects investors who do not know what it actually contains.

The stew metaphor plays on the familiar vulnerability that consumers experience when they go to a restaurant and place their trust in its staff. Diners believe that they will not be deceived for the sake of profit. Whereas the Jenga comparison emphasizes the fragility and inevitable collapse of the housing market, the stew metaphor describes the misleading practices of the financial services industry. Moreover, this scene's dialogue, like the film's screenplay as a whole, provides inconspicuous metaphoric language that, while not easily noticed, nonetheless helps render economic knowledge intelligible to the audience. For example, when Vennett offers the Front Point team a credit default swap, he describes it to them as "like insurance on the bond" that will allow them to profit when the mortgages begin to fail. This simile sets up a subsequent claim that he is "standing in front of a burning house" and offering Front Point "fire insurance on it," thereby completing the simplified but effective metaphor that once again emphasizes the inevitability of the economic meltdown. More commonplace metaphoric language is contained in the dialogue that portrays the "whores" at the ratings agency, members of the financial services sector being "asleep at the wheel," the existence of feces in the form of irresponsible subprime and adjustable rate mortgages, as well as the general presence of a "housing bubble."

Deployed in various forms, these metaphors teach the audience by transforming technical reason into terminology more amenable to public judgment. While the film certainly does not turn its audience into experts on the economy, it does provide strategies for living within it by using metaphors to help explain technical language while also placing it within a neoliberal economic context of instability, irrationality, and greed. The film also features the aforementioned overarching metaphor related to vision, which structures the narrative and serves to explain how the diegetic characters came to predict the collapse of the housing market simply by "looking." By granting them the ability to look at what is in front of them as well as to see the future, the film establishes the protagonists' credibility through their competence in technical reasoning. This feature allows the text to work as a form of democratic dissent whereby it undertakes "a sharp rhetorical thrust against governing opinion and policy balanced by an equally firm footing in the underlying culture of values, beliefs, and accepted ways of acting" (Ivie 277-8). Since technical reason holds a privileged position within U.S. public culture, the protagonists' vision, and their corresponding ability to "predict and control," allows each of them to challenge "conventional wisdom on its own terms" by realigning "prevailing formations of common sense" (Ivie 277). The metaphor of vision thus becomes a key lesson to understand the stakes of not paying attention and the benefits of looking where others have not.      

However, the vision metaphor suggests that expert knowledge is, in some way, available to everybody, provided they take the time to look. The film operates according to a simplified logic by placing much of the blame for the crisis on unaware citizens. We find this fact problematic — that the victims of the crisis, who are shown only briefly in the film, are in a sense made culpable for trusting in a system that is widely regarded as a bedrock of U.S. capitalism and the American dream, which are both partly conflated with individual home and property ownership (Hanan and St. Onge 165). Simply put, the financial crisis was caused by bad actors, reckless deregulation, and a culture of fraudulent greed. In a democracy, citizen oversight (or lack thereof) always plays a role in the type of economic system in place, but The Big Short perhaps romanticizes how much power the people actually have in contemporary American capitalism. In spite of that drawback, the film is right to illustrate how citizens, industry professionals, and regulators were blind to the impending crash as well as the ways in which specialist knowledge inhibits laypeople's capacity to participate meaningfully in the financial services sector. Further, it is successful in its approach to representing the kinds of technical language and reason that produce an ill-informed public. The diverse metaphors employed in The Big Short grant access to insider knowledge and provide a socio-political framework through which to see the world more clearly. These metaphors help to make expertise accessible to laypeople and can thus facilitate public judgment and provide resources for critique and dissent. In that way, the film makes a meaningful contribution as a mode of public pedagogy that employs metaphor and cinematic technique to elucidate and challenge troublesome economic conventional wisdom.  


Conclusion

The Big Short sought to simplify and dramatize America's complex, multifaceted financial system, with specific attention paid to the habits and actions leading to the 2008 economic collapse. The film's fundamental argument is that the U.S. federal government's lax regulations created an environment that encouraged risky speculation and dangerous investing by the financial services industry. Indeed, it concludes by noting that these problems have not been fixed, leaving the U.S. open to another similar collapse that has been further enabled by the aforementioned subsequent deregulation of the financial services sector, which is epitomized by the 2018 legislative weakening of the Dodd-Frank Act. An equally important argument, though flawed in some ways, is that people are simply not paying enough attention to the political and economic system of which they are a part. When it comes to understanding financial markets, housing loans, economic bubbles, and the like, most Americans are essentially operating uncritically due to a number of factors, some of which are difficult to blame primarily on citizens. First, the economic system is marked by arcane, technical discourse that is out of reach for most individuals, and much economic maneuvering happens behind closed doors, both literally and metaphorically. Second, the United States has an ill-informed political culture, where many citizens have very low political knowledge and an equally low desire to learn.¹ Third, many people simply neither have the time nor the inclination to study a vast, complicated economic system, and, further, are not in a financial position to invest in the first place. These are not the only reasons for general disconnectedness to the economy, but they illustrate the myriad elements of contemporary society that allow financial markets to operate largely independent of the majority of citizens, even as each person is affected by them in numerous ways. These conditions are breeding grounds for greedy actors willing to abuse the public trust for the sake of profit.
           
The Big Short addresses these various elements of economic life and suitably warns of the likelihood of another crisis. Through creative use of metaphor, a persistent tension with classical Hollywood style, and its effective dramatization of uncritical awareness of the economy, the film provides lessons for communicating economic discourse on a mass scale. Irrespective of its weaknesses, the film should be lauded for boldly fostering heightened audience engagement over escapist entertainment and for directly interrogating the dominant ideologies of contemporary American capitalism. Although it does not challenge neoliberalism more broadly — and arguably reinforces a culture of ruthless competition by crafting heroes out of those who best exploited it — The Big Short nonetheless serves as a valuable form of public pedagogy for its ability to promote both deeper understanding and more critical awareness of the operations of high finance.

Note

1. Although "political knowledge" is difficult to measure largely because it can be interpreted in multiple ways, historical scholarship and contemporary poll data both clearly express a trend that Americans lack basic knowledge about government and civics. For a landmark study, see Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters; for contemporary assessments, see the Pew Research Center's periodic polls of public knowledge:
http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/public-knowledge/.

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