Recently I watched the film, The Big Short. It was nominated for several awards for 2015 films.
At the core, this is a painful movie. In “shorting” the economy, betting on it’s failure, financial investors and bankers caused a loss of $5 trillion dollars, 8 million jobs, and 6 million homes. Yes, painful.
This movie is also thick. Thick enough that I feel that I need to watch it a few times with someone to help interpret it. There were a few times when I needed to stop to just think for a minute about the plot that was unfolding. How befuddling it was.
There were a couple of funny lines also that touch a truth about psyche and privilege, particularly in North America. One was on the “truth” of the market reality and what was happening and how people did not want to hear it. “The truth is like poetry. And most people hate fu*king poetry.” Ouch, right. To be clear, I’m a poetry lover, often for the truth it can tell.
The second line was about white privilege. As some of the characters arrived to an investment conference in Las Vegas, one notices that all of the room and all of the attendees are white. “This place looks like what spilled out of a piñata filled with white guys that suck at golf.”
I’m not sure how all of this leaves me feeling. Sort of sick. Sort of discouraged. Sort of entertained, but cracked open to some sorrowing / maddening / humbling reality.
It’s like this for many of us, isn’t it. Whether spurred on by movies, or the news, or life events. The story line that I most often carry in these realities is that the start is to turn to one another, to listen and to be curious together.
