Last evening I planned on seeing "Being Elmo" at the Sunset Five Theatre with my friend Len of Len Speaks. This is a documentary about the man who is the puppeteer for the little red ragamuffin character Elmo from "Sesame Street". We had been looking for something sweet, cheerful and uplifting to see and this seemed tailor made. It was of some interest to us to find out that the actual puppeteer might be present for the showing.
As we approached the window the tinny voiced cashier advised there was only one ticket left. So scanning the availablility on a split second and upon my hearsaid word that it was supposed to be a good movie, we decided on "Margin Call", although the subject matter, the beginning of the meltdown of the stock market in 2008 was less than cheery, and likely not much uplifting. In fact, I said to Len, "We are going from the feel good to the feel bad movie of the year!"
And this one, although it had more than one seat left, still had enough people gathered to put us in the virtual front where every facial expression of the actors, from Kevin Spacey, to Simon Baker, to Stanley Tucci and one of the producers, the theatrically and televisioncally zooming Zachary Quinto, playing the young rocket scientist turned Wall Street Junior Risk Analyst, could be viewed virtually microscopically. And given the subject matter, there was a lot of actor portrayal grimacing.
The movie began with a scene recently familiar to me, the termination and escorting out of a long time, mid level boss who was quite literally in the middle of a big something, noticing that the way the fictional firm was doing business had begun a statistical and market downtrend that would jettison the market gains of years before and leave lots of people bereft, financially speaking. As he is escorted out he gives the information, in a jump drive, to one of his young associates, the earnest Mr. Sullivan, played by the equally earnest Mr. Quinto. Now Len and I agree that this exchange of information would not have happened in a real life canning. There is no interaction with other employees or institutional property allowed upon one's severing. But ok, that was a necessary Maguffin. Our young anti-hero gets the drive and finishes the projections and realizes that something bad has already happened stock market wise. I shall refrain from trying to explain it; neither I nor Len of Len Speaks understood it. My effort tonight to get an simple definition of a margin call, led to this piece, which really explained little to me, except that the method of buying, if done by too many people under a statistical circumstance that happened in this movie, and in real life, means doom and gloom.
The company big wigs (Baker and the always compelling Jeremey Irons as the biggest wig), naturally want to salvage what they can for themselves before all hell breaks loose (as at that moment no one in the financial world has seen the grim trend in progress), and decide to sell everything and buy nothing and swap nothing in one market day. As every broker who does this, at the behest of Kevin Spacey, a 34 year veteran of market vagaries and his company's maneuvering, will become anathema to colleagues far and wide who were burned by the company, and as every person who buys will be damaged irrevocably by the move, a lot of people, young and old will be put out of business. And then there is the paying off of some of the fired players, which they must accept or find their severance packages challenged and compromised. What would you do? Blow the whistle or take your stock options and your $175,00 plus and go home? You can say I would do the right thing. I like to say that too. We know what the right thing is, but it's dangerous to do it, so often we do not.
The reactions of the players in this sad tale are mixed. The original mid level boss seems initially ready to fight and blow the whistle, but the grief he'd receive and the destruction of any chance of a future job anywhere ever in his life, chastens him. Even the jaded Spacey character (more interested in his dying dog than in the firings at the beginning of the movie of some 80 percent of the company's brokers and middle management), feels the taint and the immorality of his part in the action, but needing the money, he concedes to his part in the massacre. His solution to the ugliness is to bury his grief with his dog in the backyard of his old home, where his ex-wife now lives. The young Mr. Sullivan/Quinto is promoted, but he seems more to be caught on a wave. He did nothing more than his job and fell into the chasm. What he will be at age 40, we won't see. We probably shouldn't hope for the best. We are fragile things.
You might think that I might go out to downtown Los Angeles and set up my pup tent with the Occupy Wall Street Set. No. Not likely. Because as Quinto's character says in response to some precious comment from his junior colleague associate, Seth, things are a lot more complicated. I have two examples. One from our historical life, which we as a society choose to ignore in assigning blame to banks, for example for the woes of us common men and women and one from my own life.
We blame the banks for the mortgage crisis, but in fact in the 80s and 90s, the banks were forced by the political powers that be, among them people now blaming the banks, to make loans to people that they knew could not pay them back. I have recently begun to read a little about and of Schopenhauer and his belief that compassion is the highest virtue. Well, compassion without common sense is problematic and making banks loan to people who could not make the payments was not a particularly good exercise of value.
Years ago, I was a young lawyer in a traffic court when a guy turned around and started complaining that his lawyer wasn't engaging in some dishonest conduct to get him off. I said that if he did that he would be committing a crime and an ethical violation. "That's what I hired him for" said the man. Did he think that a dishonest lawyer (and alas I saw a number of them in my work travels) would spare that dishonesty for him? I saw a number of folks come to my former office complaining that their lawyer, whom they knew to be and hired for their short cuts, had short cut on them.
This movie wasn't to me just about Wall Street and the current craze for supplanting capitalism and voluntary giving back for everybody having the same (equal) nothing, except for those enterprising folks at the top of the heap who never believed in their drivel in the first place. It was about human rationalization, much like the Ides of March about which I wrote in these pages, for killing objectivity and Truth and justifying it with whatever nifty term is needed to sell it. But there is no objective truth as we have come to know, so these stories will continue until we destroy ourselves and have no one to blame and any place to occupy. I wish I were exempt, but alas I am not.
Len, next week, we have got to see "Being Elmo".
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