A fine job

The film's portrait of the hollowing out of Middle America in the aftermath of the crisis provides a consummate precursor to the election of a man who promised to 'make America great again'

Ten years after the event that caused global financial markets to tumble, the 2010 documentary Inside Job, streaming on Netflix, remains the definitive account of the run-up to and the fallout of the demise of Lehman Brothers. 

The film’s success — it won the Oscar for Best Documentary — endures eight years after its release. Directed by Charles Ferguson, it simplified terms like credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations for the lay audience at a time when even their creators had little idea of the risks these instruments carried.

But its greatest moment was in capturing how a clutch of Wall Street firms and the men who ran them overrode repeated warnings about the threats to the system, and in so doing, risked not just global finance but the livelihoods of tens of thousands of ordinary workers. None of these executives paid for their duplicity, even as the crisis reverberated through western economies.

The film also showed how the reforms of the incoming Obama administration were too weak to effect a change in the prevalent culture of Wall Street. While risk-taking was temporarily suspended, the unholy alliance between rating agencies and Wall Street firms was never expressly probed, much less broken.

The rise of Donald Trump is often portrayed as part of a populist revolt that includes Brexit and the electoral success of far-right parties in countries like France and Hungary. Inside Job puts paid to such easy generalisations. It presents the financial crisis as the unique outcome of an amalgam of factors that stretched back to the 1980s when the era of American deregulation was in full force, leading to the creation of Wall Street behemoths.

The film’s portrait of the hollowing out of Middle America in the aftermath of the crisis — a phenomenon linked with other societal shifts such as automation — provides a consummate precursor to the election of a man who promised to “make America great again”.

The period since 2010 also saw the ballooning of the opioid crisis in America, which too mostly affected territories between the coasts. Inside Job does not cover the crisis but its careful rendering of the real trauma caused by the financial crisis serves as a cautionary tale that ultimately came true.

The film thus serves as a barometer of the prevalent public mood far better than traditional media outlets. Mr Trump’s war against the media is often mocked as an expression of his boorishness. But his diatribes are eagerly lapped up by a support base that has seen traditional institutions in government and media unable or unwilling to spot systemic shifts and respond adequately to them.

This feeling is reinforced by the continued attack on the administration in the press. Last week, The New York Times ran an unsigned oped from a member of the administration that painted a poor picture of the White House. Bob “Watergate” Woodward’s book, Fear: Trump in the White House, which showcases the Trump presidency as lurching from one crisis to another, was released recently. 

To be sure, the administration has been beset by real crises of its own making, most notably in the successes notched up by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential polls. Even if no Trump aide has been charged with helping Russia interfere in the polls, the proceedings against the likes of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn are sheer bad optics.

But all such issues carry little weight when the economy is on a rebound and wages among the working class are on an upswing. To Trump supporters, the Russia investigation is white noise emerging from the pigsties of Washington, a continuation of the games that reinforce the distance between the elites and the rest.

Momentous events like 9/11 and the financial crisis engender much outpouring in the arts. Yet, few films are able to define a historic moment with as much precision and economy as Inside Job does. Narrated by Matt Damon and divided into five parts, it’s a lesson in lean filmmaking and the power of a good documentary to investigate a multidimensional issue.

Mr Ferguson could not have known that the events he was documenting would have such far-reaching repercussions on politics, economy and society. A clamorous cohort would have us believe that end times are here with Mr Trump at the helm. The benefit of hindsight furnished by Inside Job not just tempers such claims but also exposes them for their ringing hypocrisy.

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