Beyond the Dialectic Between Wall Street and Main Street: A Materialist Analysis of The Big Short

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, we provide a materialist analysis of Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short. We contend that while, on one level, the film appears to be a celebration of several idiosyncratic traders on Wall Street who use rhetorical invention to outwit the industry, on another level, the film can be read as a genealogically informed account of the biopolitical relationship between the oikos and the polis and Main Street and Wall Street. We conclude by advocating for an account of the 2008 financial crisis that is sensitive to the historically overdetermined relationship among rhetoric, politics, and economic power.