Seven Red

Poor Hank Paulson. That’s the lesson we are to take away from the Frontline special on the meltdown that was so hyped even I bought into it here. (Don’t be fooled: I buy into 70% of That-Which-Is-Hyped). But sheesh. The doc set up a conflict between systemic risk and moral hazard, which were apparently the code words for Keynesian and Friedmanite responses to the financial crisis, where systemic risk required government intervention, while moral hazard resists seemingly incentivizing bad actors by removing the punishment for their bad behavior. Tra la la. These categories are typical enough, I suppose, and the way they played out in the doc was more typical still, with a fairly detailed discussion and definition of moral hazard, but only the vaguest notion of sudden, unforeseen “interconnection” between the big banks as a pseudo-explanation for systemic risk. The result is predictable enough: a notion of market actors comes through clear as day, while the systemic dynamics of finance capital are relegated to the hazy background of near total mystification. Would that any of us could understand such things! Silly me thought it was the purpose of the documentary to do just such explaining. Instead, the whole thing turns into some weird passion play around the yellow-toothed personage of Hank Paulson, caught in the grips of a struggle between his Free Market God and damnable exigencies of the crisis.   Despite the bad effects, I must admit that it was funny to re-live the moment (hilarious at the time) when Paulson is forced to nationalize Fannie and Freddie, then returns to the Friedmanite fold long enough to send Lehman Brothers to hell, only to have to reclaim the mantle of the apostate by saving the sorry default swapped asses of AIG. Oh, the sorrows of Hank Paulson! I remember a conversation I had with a friend some years ago in which I derided all war movies for being too personalized. He’d name a movie and I’d say, no, no! No fucking characters! A real war movie would have characters at the large unit level, the company and battalion level, and would show flashes, movement: hammer and anvil sweeps in the Mekong Delta, not little morality plays about individual soldiers and their two fathers (yes, Oliver Stone only ever made one movie, which involves a guy choosing between his two fathers: Catholicism never gives up).  No characters! It is the anti-Private Ryan, I said, where the trajectory of that film takes you from the utterly anonymous large unit level (undoubtedly the best part of the film as a war film), down and down until we learn Tom Hanks’ back story, and finally, with Matt Damon in the rubble, we reach the individual, the character. No. Not a good war movie, I said, except the first two minutes. I want the anti-Ken Burns style, where everybody gets to confess: I was there, and this is what happened. No! None of that. No characters. No personalities. Try, for once, to do pathos without the individual. Can we try? My friend said, sensibly, “But then it wouldn’t be a story.” Maybe not. Maybe that’s a good thing. And I’d apply the same logic to Inside the Meltdown. No goddamn characters! I don’t want to see a silly movie about Hank Paulson choosing between his two fathers, tortured by his choice. I would rather have watched a simulation of the money transfers flickering on screens in Luxembourg clearing houses, anonymous traders, the flow of documents through Lehman, through Goldman. No. We get stories about Hank Paulson and his personal struggle with his faith. Pointless.

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