Media Diet: American Casino
American Casino is a documentary that lacks focus, but the director's wandering eye helps it portray the huge scope of its subject: the subprime mortgage crisis. Produced by wife-and-husband team Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, the documentary is part of a steady stream of media works produced in the last year that examine the economic crash. It has significant flaws as a documentary, but they're forgivable in light of the necessity of relentless scrutiny of the subprime mortgage affair, the banks that caused it, and the ripple effects of the crisis. Very little in the documentary will be new to you if you've already made your way through Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine", Michael Lewis' "The End", or This American Life's "The Giant Pool Of Money". American Casino is a worthy addition to this list. Like the others, it could give you basic fluency on the issue by itself, but also like them, the effect is enhanced by exposing your brain to more than one work.
What American Casino particularly brings to the table is attention to the racial differences in the crisis and to the ripple effects. The documentary spends most of its time in Baltimore. At points, only the lack of Dominic West and Wendell Pierce kept me from mistaking it for moments from the sixth season of The Wire. The Cockburns use both affecting personal stories and abstract statistics to illuminate the racial dimensions of the problem. This is also where the documentary's weaknesses become apparent, though. The Baltimore segments have a tendency to drag, and scenes that want to build attachment to the documentary's subjects linger long enough to become filler. A better technique is the one the film follows for one of its subjects, a high school teacher: several times, the view moves back and forth between him speaking about his experiences, and a financial consultant for the movie showing the numbers behind the teacher's mortgage loan.
The Cockburns' camera spends time in New York and Washington DC as well as Baltimore. Naturally, we see replays of the footage of Paulson, Bernanke, Greenspan, and other notoriously lax regulators speaking to Congressional examiners. Three main interviewees provide most of the substance in these segments, and they provide solid explanations of the financial manuvering on Wall Street that created the crisis. Despite the complexity of the financial instruments, there's one phrase that sums up the crash: tragedy of the commons. Wall Street's wealthiest actors bribed Congress into deregulating them. Deregulated, they were able to pursue investments that shifted wealth upwards and risk downwards, socializing risk and privatizing profit. They plundered the pool of public resources after bribing the guardians of that pool to desert their posts. It's refreshing to see a documentary that admits this straightforwardly: in a sane world, the actions of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street actors would have been extremely criminal (and even in this world, prosecutions are slowly popping up for many of their actions).
The last act of the documentary shifts to California, where public health inspectors and the founder of forecloseureradar.com show the cascade of negative effects that come from the foreclosures and defaults sweeping through a suburb of Stockton. This is definitely valuable material, but seems somewhat tacked-on and abbreviated. It's strange that so much of the documentary seems rushed: the official web site says that filming started in January of 2008. The film ends with the first quarter of 2009, so perhaps editing and new developments in the situation contributed to its unfinished, underpolished feel.
Overall, while American Casino is a valuable addition to the works of media that examine the current depression, it's significantly flawed. It needs more time in the editing room. It clocks in at 90 minutes. I would suggest that the theater is not a good place for it. It could be edited into an excellent 60-minute TV documentary that hammers home the message that there is a significant racial disparity in the effects of the crisis, and that that disparity is not accidental. A Baltimore resident, indeed, gives the film's central message: "I didn't realize until it happened to me, how much these problems affect all of us together."
What American Casino particularly brings to the table is attention to the racial differences in the crisis and to the ripple effects. The documentary spends most of its time in Baltimore. At points, only the lack of Dominic West and Wendell Pierce kept me from mistaking it for moments from the sixth season of The Wire. The Cockburns use both affecting personal stories and abstract statistics to illuminate the racial dimensions of the problem. This is also where the documentary's weaknesses become apparent, though. The Baltimore segments have a tendency to drag, and scenes that want to build attachment to the documentary's subjects linger long enough to become filler. A better technique is the one the film follows for one of its subjects, a high school teacher: several times, the view moves back and forth between him speaking about his experiences, and a financial consultant for the movie showing the numbers behind the teacher's mortgage loan.
The Cockburns' camera spends time in New York and Washington DC as well as Baltimore. Naturally, we see replays of the footage of Paulson, Bernanke, Greenspan, and other notoriously lax regulators speaking to Congressional examiners. Three main interviewees provide most of the substance in these segments, and they provide solid explanations of the financial manuvering on Wall Street that created the crisis. Despite the complexity of the financial instruments, there's one phrase that sums up the crash: tragedy of the commons. Wall Street's wealthiest actors bribed Congress into deregulating them. Deregulated, they were able to pursue investments that shifted wealth upwards and risk downwards, socializing risk and privatizing profit. They plundered the pool of public resources after bribing the guardians of that pool to desert their posts. It's refreshing to see a documentary that admits this straightforwardly: in a sane world, the actions of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street actors would have been extremely criminal (and even in this world, prosecutions are slowly popping up for many of their actions).
The last act of the documentary shifts to California, where public health inspectors and the founder of forecloseureradar.com show the cascade of negative effects that come from the foreclosures and defaults sweeping through a suburb of Stockton. This is definitely valuable material, but seems somewhat tacked-on and abbreviated. It's strange that so much of the documentary seems rushed: the official web site says that filming started in January of 2008. The film ends with the first quarter of 2009, so perhaps editing and new developments in the situation contributed to its unfinished, underpolished feel.
Overall, while American Casino is a valuable addition to the works of media that examine the current depression, it's significantly flawed. It needs more time in the editing room. It clocks in at 90 minutes. I would suggest that the theater is not a good place for it. It could be edited into an excellent 60-minute TV documentary that hammers home the message that there is a significant racial disparity in the effects of the crisis, and that that disparity is not accidental. A Baltimore resident, indeed, gives the film's central message: "I didn't realize until it happened to me, how much these problems affect all of us together."