The Big Short

The Big Short is Adam McKay's 2015 satirical comedy-drama about the 2008 global financial crisis, adapted from Michael Lewis's 2010 non-fiction book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. It follows the outsiders who saw the collapse coming and bet against the American housing market, and it is studied in HSC English Extension 1 as a study in appropriation.

Adapted from Michael Lewis's 2010 book about the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short follows the handful of outsiders who saw the collapse of the American housing market coming and bet against it. Michael Burry, a socially awkward hedge-fund manager, reads the individual mortgages inside the bonds Wall Street treats as safe, concludes the market is built on loans that will default, and designs a way to bet against it - the credit default swap. The bond salesman Jared Vennett catches wind of the trade and brings it to the angry hedge-fund manager Mark Baum, while two young investors, Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley, stumble on the same bet and recruit the retired banker Ben Rickert to help them make it.

As the mortgages start defaulting, the bonds refuse to fall, because the banks, the ratings agencies and the regulators all have an interest in pretending nothing is wrong. Baum's investigation in Florida and then Las Vegas uncovers the depth of the fraud, culminating in the revelation that synthetic CDOs have multiplied the bet many times over. When the market finally breaks and Lehman Brothers fails, the outsiders' bets pay off enormously, but the film refuses to let the payoff feel like a victory: Rickert rebukes the young investors for celebrating, Baum delays selling because he understands his profit is the country's ruin, and the closing captions record that almost no one went to jail. Told through fourth-wall breaks, celebrity cameo explainers and on-screen captions, the film turns a known outcome into suspense and an accusation.

For Extension 1, the film's deepest concern is its own method: it is an appropriation obsessively aware that it is translating one form into another. Lewis's book explains finance in dense expository prose; McKay's re-vision invents a new grammar for exposition instead - the fourth-wall break, the celebrity cameo, the on-screen caption. When Margot Robbie, in a bubble bath, tells the audience that "whenever you hear the word 'subprime,' think 'shit'", the film does in thirty seconds of cinema what the book does in pages, and the joke is the translation. Vennett's Jenga tower of rated blocks does the same work: pulled apart and toppled, it turns abstraction into spectacle and argues that the crisis was always graspable, its complexity a cover.

An appropriation reshapes its source as much as it draws upon it, and The Big Short is built to change how its audience understands the events it depicts. Arriving in 2015, into an America that had bailed out the banks and jailed almost no one, the film re-visions the culture's story of complexity and accident as a story of fraud. Recurring captions insisting "This is a true story." weld satire to documentary authority, Vennett's opening narration promises to explain how "a few outsiders and weirdos saw what no one else could", and the opening epigraph - "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - announces false certainty as the film's subject before a scene begins.

The film's most uncomfortable argument is that understanding the fraud is not the same as being innocent of it. McKay constructs the film to make the audience enjoy the bet, then catches them enjoying it: Rickert's rebuke to the celebrating young investors - "every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?" - converts the abstraction of the bet into a body count, and the rhetorical question turns on the audience as much as the characters. Vennett's cheerful "I never said I was the hero of this story." denies the viewer a clean protagonist to hide behind, while Baum's scatological "mortgage bonds are dog shit, and CDO's are dog shit wrapped in cat shit" weaponises plain speech against the euphemistic jargon the industry used to obscure the fraud.

Beneath the finance runs a concern with value itself - who decides what a thing is worth, and why we believe them. Baum's debate-hall speech pushes the diagnosis outward from banking to the whole culture: "We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball." Burry's closing letter names the crisis as a failure of trust rather than arithmetic, and the closing epigraph - "Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come." - ends the film on fatalism rather than resolution, a text assembled from other texts, closing the way it opened.

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• The Hare with Amber Eyes
• As I Lay Dying
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• Northanger Abbey
• Dropbear
• HSC English resources