Movie Doubles - 'Spotlight' & 'The Big Short'

American Tragedies

It's cool when stars get together and appear in a morally righteous movie. The omnibus casting in both of these films is something to behold. The All-Star lineup in 'Spotlight' makes for an interesting ensemble while the split narrative of 'The Big Short' demands a distribution of war power across three narrative threads.

Both these films deal with a tragedy that came about because nobody thought to question a big institution. People had way too much faith in the Catholic Church, and they had too much trust in banks. Both the Catholic Church and the banks ended up making a lot of people look very foolish for their faith and trust; and delivered devastating consequences for that misplaced faith and trust.

We live in amazing times when you think about it. The revelation that the Catholic Church was covering up for paedophile priests was an apocryphal joke for a long time. The fact that we got any proper investigation that has led to global uncovering of such activities would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Similarly, the notion that banks through their greed and stupidity could manufacture the condition for the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was unthinkable right up until it happened. Both topics deserve some kind of narrative reconstruction to get a sense of how these things came about. These stories are at their core, remarkably alike.

And so... here's the usual spoiler alert. Don't read on if you hate spoilers.



The Tradition Of Investigation

Both these films have long roots that reach out from beyond the screen. 'Spotlight' actually has many echoes of the other great newspaper movie, 'All The President's Men' where Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodford and Bernstein went in hard against the authoritarian Nixon Administration which was trying to cover up its criminal tracks. Similarly, 'Spotlight' shows four news reporters going after the Catholic Church that indulges in systematic coverup of paedophile priests. If you are into even more interesting connections between these two films, the editor at The Washington Post who backed Woodford and Bernstein during the Watergate investigations was Ben Bradlee. The editor at The Boston Globe presiding over the Spotlight investigations into the Catholic Church was his son Ben Bradlee Jr. Rachel McAdam follows her performance from 'State of Play', another film that tried to capture the newspaper news room dynamic.

'The Big Short' is actually based on the book of the same title by Michael Lewis. Lewis was able to navigate the complex world of Wall Street banking because he himself was once a Wall Street banker and penned the great tome 'Liar's Poker' which explained the invention of mortgage bonds. We are enlightened of the strangeness and incongruous opacity of banking terminology thanks to Lewis' abilities as an investigative writer and part-insider to the world of Wall Street investment banking. The pedigree of this film carries previous Michael Lewis adaptations which include 'The Blind Side' and 'Moneyball', and we even have Brad Pitt playing a role in one of the narratives.

Both these films are thus built on accounts and testimonies from the very frontline of fact-collecting.  Because both these films go to great lengths to explain the problems of exposing or capitalising on the issue at hand, we are given tremendous insight into America as an immensely complicated society.

Too Big To Scrutinise

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, we were made to understand the term "too big to fail". It was a terrible thing that we had to suffer the GFC because of these big institutions. Once the crisis as underway, we discovered that they had racked such astronomical sums of money in debt, had we let them fail it would have taken the world economy with them. And so we let these bastards continue to just be these very same bastards. As it turns out in the telling of 'The Big Short', an alarming few people scrutinised the situation where there was a combination of subprime mortgage bonds, a property bubble, credit-rating agencies that simply rubber-stamped credit ratings, and very greedy and stupid people throwing money around.

The Catholic Church too is a monolithic entity. The closer one's faith resides with the Catholic Church, the more moral authority the church takes on to the point here it has absolute control over the discourse. This allows conditions of absolute unilateral power to be exercised against the faithful when needed - something that dates back to medieval thinking on authority - but also silence issues. Again, investigations revealed that the church had known it had a problem with paedophile priests as early as 1962, but opted to suppress the information and with it the scrutiny.

In both instances the lack of third party scrutiny allowed the problem to snowball. The lack of scrutiny came from the fact that the institutions - the Church and Financial institutions - were deemed too big to tackle. In most instances that would be factually correct, but also place these institutions in a space of utter moral hazard because of it. The fraudulence of the church covering up paedophile priests is in fact the same fraudulence of selling subprime outage bonds rubber-stamped as AAA. They're doing it because they can pull the wool over the average punter's eyes, and comes from a space of contempt so deep it's hard to contemplate the depth of that evil.

The Pompous Appeal To Normalcy

It's also interesting that in both films, the institutions resepctively resort to what can only be called the 'pompous defence'. When the Catholic Church is challenged and the defenders of the Church try to convince the investigators to drop the story, they mount a particularly pompous defence trying to categorise the victim's accusations as somehow a minor irritant or a minority crank position. At every turn, the people who want it not to be true put on the air that because the Catholic Church is too important an institution, the allegations can't possibly be credible.

Similarly, at the climactic moment of the Bears Sterns collapse during the GFC, a banker gets up at a conference and says everything is fine and any attempt to categorise the critical situation as exactly that, is somehow misguided and a crank. Of course in one of the great ironies, Bears Sterns bank collapsed that very day as he was speaking. In both instances the pompous appeal is made to the public to present and pretend that everything going on is normal.

Perhaps these responses are natural. It's a bit like being confronted by bad news and you go into the grief cycle. Given the horrible evidence presented, some go straight to the denial stage - and when doing so, do look stupid and pompous defending the indefensible in public. For the Church the allegations turned out to be all too real with repercussions around the world, and for banking too the repercussions became the Global Financial Crisis. Maybe when the scale of the problem is so huge, people have to pretend the threat is nothing and thus the pomposity comes to the fore.

Institutional Evil Is Institutional Stupidity

In each instance the films reveal something very interesting about institutional malfeasance, and it is that it relies greatly on the stupidity others not to notice what is going on. The people who uncover the great mass of subprime mortgages that are fed into high end mortgage bonds were the people who actually undertook proper due diligence. In a sense, the great fraud of the mortgage bonds based subprime loans relied on the stupidity of people not to admit they did not know what was going on and to go looking for facts. It seems simple enough, yet so many bankers and lawyers let these mortgage bonds written in complicated language, make them stupid and not do due diligence.

Equally, the Roman Catholic Church had insiders warning the Church for decades and instead of heeding the warnings, opted to go for the cover up. Once again, the coverup relied on people opting to be stupid by not noticing a pattern that was carried out in the roster of priests. The evidence was right there on public record if people could put the pieces together. Equally, the press failed to follow up when given evidence earlier because they too opted to be stupid and not look into the evidence being presented. The deep regret from the press in 'Spotlight' is the acknowledgment that it too forms part of the circle of institutional stupid that allowed the institutional evil to flourish.

The pairing of institutional stupidity with institutional evil is right around us. Take Australia's stance on asylum seekers. It relies entirely on making sure that people cannot carry out due diligence to make sure human rights are not violated. In the face of many allegations Peter Dutton pompously pretends that nothing untoward is going in places like Manus Island and Nauru. The middle part of the electorate is now opting to go with stupid silence and back both major parties because it cannot exercise the due diligence an discover the problems going on. Thus we're setting up the scenes for The Great Embarrassment that will surely follow the events on Manus Island and Nauru.

With Great Power Comes Great Corruption

At the end of the day both major institutions were avaricious to the point of disaster. The Roman Catholic Church sought to limit the financial damages as much as possible. The pattern we see in 'Spotlight' where they paid off people who alleged these crimes and sent them away with tens of thousands instead of incurring millions in damages was repeated elsewhere around the globe. We know this from the recent Royal Commission that Cardinal Pell himself was part of the institutional evil by playing the institutional stupid card very hard to secure his own promotion. In the mean time they sewed up the mouths of victims and lawyers with confidentiality clauses in these private settlements. Those in the public who sought public redress received a great amount of harassment and vitriol - another pattern that was repeated around the globe.

Banking, equally brought itself to the knees through excessive greed. Yet, the most telling part in 'The Big Short' is when Mark Baum realises that the banks knew fun well they would be bailed out because they were too big to fail, And so the moral hazard had always been there right form the beginning. The collusive nature of those who investigate banks and those who work for banks also made it very hard to stop the endemic fraudulence. And the scale of the fraudulence being so endemic was such that it looked like this situation was normal to many onlookers. This is the genuinely crazy part of the story. People like the Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke couldn't see the GFC coming. US Treasurer - and former Goldman Sachs banker - Hank Paulson couldn't understand what was unfolding and why. It gave rise to the massive effort known as Quantitative Easing to shore up asset prices, just to save the bacon of so many ordinary investors.

Worse still, in the wake of the GFC, none of the remedial actions had taken place and so it is clear we have set ourselves up for yet another GFC if only we could sell these subprime-pimped mortgage loans to a greater fool, for it is the greater fool who gives rise to the great power to corrupt so greatly.

As for the Vatican, things seem to have moved towards reforming their practices under Pope Francis; yet, if celibacy gives rise to 6% paedophile priests and only 50% who actually manage to practice the celibacy, then the biggest reform they could carry out might be to acknowledge celibacy is bullshit.