6 Masterpieces of Contemporary American Cinema: Neoliberalism through the Looking Glass

As transpired in Weimar Germany, cataclysmic times invariably induce great suffering, yet they can also serve as inspiration for poignant and moving works of art.

What follows is a discussion of six works of insightful and intellectually nuanced contemporary American cinema which explore this distressing age in all its viciousness and depravity, while engaging the anguish of the individual struggling to survive amidst a maelstrom of unprecedented corporate pillage and political and socio-economic chaos.

While I have tried to limit them as much as possible, these reviews may contain spoilers.

1. The East

Directed by Zal Batmanglij; starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgård, and Elliot Page (2013)

The East tells the gripping story of Jane, a young woman (played by Brit Marling) who is employed at a private intelligence company, and who is awarded the sought-after assignment of infiltrating a radical environmental organization called The East. Like many Americans who have “good jobs,” Jane is zealously devoted to her career and devoid of a moral compass. Her unbridled ambition is on full display when Jane is told by her boyfriend that she’s still a winner to him if she doesn’t get this coveted commission (the details of which are unbeknownst to him), to which she responds, “I’m only a winner if I get it.”

When Jane infiltrates the group, which she is able to do because of her youth and because of certain strategies she employs to gain the group’s trust, she realizes that she is unable to intellectually counter any of their arguments regarding ecological degradation caused by unfettered corporate power. Indeed, Jane is a conformist, and like many highly credentialed Americans has never learned to think for herself. This raises the possibility of her potentially becoming a double agent.

The environmentalists are exquisitely cast, and the leaders of the group possess remarkable depth. They are also well educated, having come from privileged families and having attended elite schools. Their dilemma is that they have managed to retain firm moral convictions making them unemployable.

In a more democratic and civilized society the leaders of The East would likely hold positions of power and influence. Instead, they live as outcasts. The time Jane spends with the radical collective forces her to reexamine her preconceived understanding of success. Is true success possible without principles and ideals?

The two worlds Jane navigates, the ruthless corporate world of violence and skulduggery and an America enraged at corporate malfeasance, shake the foundation of her identity and sense of reality. The East’s methods for combatting corporate villainy – actions they call “jams” – are extreme and of dubious legality, further straining the protagonist’s sense of right and wrong. What happens to the rule of law when what is legal and what is moral no longer coincide? 

Having never spent time around articulate people who value honor over money (in stark contrast with her pitiless boss and hard-driving colleagues), the time Jane spends with the collective catapults her into an existential crisis where her value system is upended and she is forced to make extremely difficult and life-altering choices.

2. Wendy and Lucy

Directed by Kelly Reichardt; starring Michelle Williams (2008)

No film in the post-New Deal era embodies the tragic destruction of the American working class more than Wendy and Lucy. In this harsh world millions have been left without jobs, health insurance; or in the case of the film’s protagonist, Wendy, even a family member to crash with. 

Caught up in a tempest of economic devastation, Wendy is left with nothing except a few hundred dollars, a jalopy which serves both as makeshift home and means of transportation, and her beloved dog Lucy – her only companion.

The grave circumstances of her situation are tragic and soulful cinema viewers will all feel a deep sense of compassion for her increasingly dire situation. As she passes through flyover country the lack of communities and economic life almost resemble that of a post-apocalyptic tale. Deindustrialization, the outsourcing and offshoring of countless jobs, and the financialization of the economy have cut millions of Americans adrift, of whom our suffering protagonist is one.

Wendy and Lucy is the antithesis of mass market Hollywood cinema where everyone seems to magically have friends and money. Wendy’s brother-in-law and an elderly security guard she meets feel pity for her plight, yet they are also “strapped” and are in no meaningful position to assist her.

How many trillions of dollars have been spent on wars, cannibalistic proxies, and on maintaining hundreds of bases around the world while destitute Americans drown in a sea of oligarchic avarice?

Having heard that there is work there, Wendy is headed to Alaska. Yet when her car breaks down and events threaten to separate her from Lucy her poverty, loneliness, and despair become almost unbearable. Instead of job opportunities, friends, and family she is enveloped by a shroud of silence.

3. Margin Call

Directed by JC Chandor; starring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore and Zachary Quinto (2011)

Perhaps the best movie ever made about Wall Street, Margin Call tells the story of the financial crash of 2008. The story, which unfolds over a 24-hour period, revolves around a powerful Wall Street investment bank, and one of the key motifs of the film is not only how these demonic corporations treat their fellow Americans, but how they treat their own workers.

When an entry-level analyst is covertly handed a flash drive by his recently fired boss, he discovers that the firm is in danger of going bankrupt due to having invested too heavily in unstable mortgage-backed securities whose value is rapidly deteriorating.  He alerts his superiors and senior management calls an emergency meeting in the dead of night. The firm’s CEO (brought to life in an unforgettable performance by Jeremy Irons), whose helicopter makes a dramatic landing on the roof of their skyscraper, reminds everyone that his motto is, “Be first, be smarter, or cheat.” Only concerned with self-preservation, he is prepared to do virtually anything to prevent the firm from going under, and this rabid tribalism supersedes loyalty to one’s country and even to the financial services industry itself whose fellow vultures they are preparing to swindle.

The firm is infested with sociopaths like New York City garbage is crawling with cockroaches. At one point a young analyst is found crying in the bathroom after being notified that he will shortly be let go, and one of the senior managers indifferently takes note of his distress while simultaneously shaving with a cold-blooded hauteur and likely pondering ways to unload “The biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism” (to quote their CEO). Here, apart from one’s ability to generate significant profits, human life has no value. There are only “winners” and “losers,” and the “winners” are the ones that continue to make the big bucks.

No less disturbing are instances where employees are not allowed to quit, such as one Kafkaesque situation where the firm sends its people scouring the bars of lower Manhattan to try and find the recently laid off and now distraught head of risk management, who they learn has important insights into how they ended up in this disastrous situation in the first place, yet who was cruelly fired after nineteen years of devoted service with even his phone being shut off. Despite his wife informing the firm that her husband doesn’t want to speak to them, he is eventually located and forced to return to work when threats are made to revoke his severance package.

There is a scene where one of the senior managers played by Kevin Spacey comes out of his office applauding after a huge number of the firm’s employees were just laid off. Participating in this death cult ritual, his obsequious subordinates mimic his behavior. Speaking of those recently sacked, he says, “They were good at their jobs. You were better.”

Spacey’s character is later treated in a similar fashion when he returns to his former home to bury his dog (whom he evidently cares for far more than the small business owners undoubtedly run into the ground by his firm), only to be told by his ex-wife that, “You don’t live here anymore,” and that, “The alarm is on so don’t try to break in.” In a mirroring of how he has long treated his employees, his wife has replaced him with another husband.

Margin Call vividly portrays a diseased America that is at war with the world and at war with itself.

4. Martha Marcy May Marlene

Directed by Sean Durkin; starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, and John Hawkes (2011)

Dying societies invariably become a field of lost souls, and no soul is more lost than the protagonist of Martha Marcy May Marlene, a profound examination into how a disintegrating society can facilitate the rise of cults that prey on, ensnare, and entrap vulnerable human beings. The lead character, Martha, is renamed Marcy May by the cult leader (who is reminiscent of Charles Manson), while Marlene is the name female cult members use when answering the phone and following a script designed to attract new followers.

In a neoliberal America where people increasingly no longer identify themselves as Americans but by their profession, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, Martha no longer has any idea who she is, thereby offering easy prey to the cult. All the ties that may have once bound her to an American history or a personal history have been severed, making her as impressionable as a small child.

Part of the cult’s seductive nature is how it makes use of a vaguely anti-capitalist language. However, its raison d’être is ultimately to annihilate all vestiges of privacy and individuality, resulting in a violent and authoritarian existence for the cult’s members who are taught to share their clothes, their beds; and ultimately, their bodies. The protagonist has many names, and yet no name. For her lack of a cultural value system has dissolved her sense of self.

Initiation into the cult is done by drugging a young woman so that she can be raped by the cult leader, yet the protagonist is told that this is actually a good thing, revealing a Tartarean world where ethics are amorphous and reality is something that can be invented. (To quote Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”)

Martha represents millions of young Americans who grow up without a loving family, a real community, and are denied a proper humanities education. Indeed, she is a shell of a human being, a cultural amnesiac devoid of reason, a sense of the past, and a sense of the sacred.

The only place Martha can seek refuge is with her sister and brother-in-law, shallow people concerned only with money and accumulating possessions. Their crass consumerism and indifference to serious socio-economic problems is cultlike in and of itself, offering Martha no clear way to escape from this existential crisis she finds herself in. 

The harrowing tale unfolds in a disjointed and fragmented manner, which mirrors the fragmented psyche of the suffering protagonist – and in many ways, of American society itself.

5. The Girlfriend Experience

Directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring Sasha Grey, Chris Santos, and Philip Eytan (2009)

Steven Soderbergh’s thought-provoking film The Girlfriend Experience (not to be confused with the mini-series) takes us on a journey through another dark circle of this second Gilded Age, where sexual relations have been rendered largely transactional and thereby stripped of tenderness and romance.

Chelsea (Sasha Grey), the film’s protagonist, works as a high-end prostitute for an affluent Manhattan clientele, while her boyfriend is employed as an honest athletic trainer earning a small fraction of what she makes – an all too common paradox, yet one which also serves as a metaphor for how incomes are typically doled out in 21st century America.

In this nihilistic culture that places profit-making over all other considerations, the protagonist has come to believe that one’s sex partner is no different than one’s tennis partner, and that her life as a prostitute for jet-setters will lead to freedom and liberation. 

Chelsea worships wealth and will do anything to be with those who have it. In a country where the masses are saddled with trillions of dollars of household debt while a small group of plutocrats enjoy unbridled power, there is virtually no moral barrier she won’t violate in order to spend time with the mega rich, even if it means becoming their plaything and forgoing all traces of dignity.

The film raises disturbing questions about the nature of a hyper-privatized America and its impact on social relations. If a society ceases to hold anything sacred, is it still a real society? Is it possible to retain one’s humanity when one regards people as mere commodities to be used and then discarded? Due to its adoration of materialism and emotionless sexual encounters, is contemporary Western feminism compatible with love?

Chelsea’s hapless and no less delusional boyfriend initially approves of her degenerate lifestyle, and only insists that she doesn’t go on any trips with her “clients,” which, during one heated quarrel, she condemns as “selfish.” Like his wayward would-be lover, he has been taught by the media and education system that his girlfriend can work as a prostitute and that this somehow won’t inevitably destroy their relationship.

The Girlfriend Experience depicts a dystopia where people are incessantly using one another for material gain and real communities have been eradicated under a deathly hand of relentless exploitation, job destruction, and hyper-consumerism which for many Americans have swept away all traces of trust and love.

6. Michael Clayton

Directed by Tony Gilroy; starring Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and George Clooney (2007)

There is a riveting scene in Michael Clayton that unfolds in a lower Manhattan neighborhood I know all too well, where Arthur Edens (in a role masterfully executed by Tom Wilkinson), one of his law firm’s lead litigators, is berating Michael Clayton (George Clooney) for continuing to blindly follow their firm’s orders, to which a defensive Clayton says, “I’m not the enemy.” To which Arthur replies, “Then who are you?”

Michael Clayton is a story about a society drowning in corporate savagery and two men who are consciously or subconsciously trying to reclaim their humanity.

Arthur represents U-North, an agricultural corporation that has polluted the environment with a carcinogenic weed killer. The problem – at least for his law firm and the corporation they are defending – is that Arthur knows that he has squandered years of his life defending diabolical corporations and, wracked with guilt, has decided that he is tired of fighting on the side of these dastardly forces. To the amazement of his colleagues, one day he suddenly snaps and goes rogue, turning on U-North, which his law firm has been hired to defend in a multibillion dollar class action lawsuit. While initially exasperated, Michael can’t help but be influenced by his friend’s strange behavior, and his amoral ethos is challenged. 

Of great significance are the unhappy private lives of Michael, Arthur (who lives alone in an enormous dimly lit Soho loft), and the loyal corporate soldier Karen Crowder (performed chillingly by Tilda Swinton), all of whom make significant six figure salaries yet live lonely lives devoid of meaning and a sense of purpose.

Michael Clayton underscores the catch-22 that many Americans find themselves in, where those who are able to break out of the ignominious cycle of debt slavery and modern serfdom often do so by selling their souls and relinquishing all semblance of morality and freedom of speech, while many of those who have “made it” don’t have time to think about anything other than their extremely demanding jobs which devour every waking moment. Leaving this information bubble by exploring alternative news sources in an attempt to search for answers to these troubling times can lead to thinking, thinking can lead to posting heretical thoughts, which in turn can only lead to being ostracized from elite circles, unemployment, and death – professional, or even literal. And so it pays not to think.

In one haunting scene Clayton is driving in a rural area in upstate New York when he suddenly exits his car to approach three mysterious and strikingly beautiful horses. Like the inversion of the three witches in Macbeth, the animals seem to be calling on him to abandon a life of ambition and to return to a simpler and more humane existence devoid of materialism, dissembling, and relentless competition.

The mysticism and primordial timelessness of this moment mesmerize the mind of a man who has lost his way in a brutal world, and serve as a clarion call to reclaim a life that is more dignified and honorable before it is too late.

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