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  • Neoliberalism, Magical Thinking, and Silver Linings Playbook
  • Alan Nadel (bio) and Diane Negra (bio)

A word-of-mouth hit in 2012, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook has been popularly discussed as successfully targeting an adult audience under-served in contemporary Hollywood, as “authentically” reflecting the parenting challenges of its star and director, and as portraying a “modern” romance about a sympathetic, deeply damaged protagonist couple.1 Less frequently recognized is how Silver Linings Playbook consolidates forms of social damage arising in neoliberal societies. Accordingly, we read the film as reflecting a postfeminist, post-recession narrative of social, familial, and economic pressures, and exposing the effect of those pressures on the struggle for intimacy in the twenty-first century. SLP engages a set of cultural narratives that produce a post-recession subject who restores his or her sense of self by re-narrating gender and family relationships. This re-narration reflects fictional control over psychological circumstances in order to compensate for uncontrollable material conditions. Specifically, the film, through a fantasy maneuver, invokes the compulsive nature of the current financial system in order to provide salvation for disenfranchised subjects by cathecting them to a flawed financialism. [End Page 312]

The film, moreover, links that salvation, foundationally and transparently, to nostalgia for narratives valorizing a patriarchal, single-earner, lower-middle-class family of the sort that has become increasingly unsustainable since the 1980s’ “Reagan Revolution,” and more emphatically so since the “Great Recession” of 2008, when the film is set.2 The nostalgic narrative—longing not only for an America populated by a stable, growing, upwardly mobile middle class, but also for the Hollywood films that proliferated narratives about such an America—diverts attention from the more troubling, repressed but uncontainable narrative that reminds us that post-recession America can no longer endorse such optimism. The success of the film, we argue, derives from representational strategies that allow the nostalgic narrative to triumph as the silver lining of a bleak economic story. That triumph relies, however, on a set of substitutive operations that are particularly germane to the fraught status of recessionary masculinities. As Deborah Tudor has argued, “The ideology of neoliberal capitalism operates through such diversionary tactics and the cultural products produced under neoliberalism narrativize these operations in ways that seem natural” (73).

Set in Philadelphia during the fall 2008 football season, SLP chronicles the rehabilitation of Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper), a thirty-something, bipolar man who has for eight months been in a mental institution, his confinement required in a plea bargain to avoid jail time after he severely beat the man whom he found taking a shower with his wife, Nikki (Brea Bee). Returning home in the custody of his parents, Pat discovers that his father, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro), has lost his job and is now supporting the family as a bookmaker while he tries to save enough money to open a restaurant. At a dinner party, Pat meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a young widow who has also lost her job and is living in her parents’ rehabbed garage. These equally injured people form a platonic relationship based on a verbal contract wherein Tiffany will help Pat win back his wife—with whom, because of a restraining order, he cannot communicate—if he will be Tiffany’s partner in a ballroom dance competition. This alliance puts Tiffany in direct competition with Pat Sr., who believes that the success of the Philadelphia Eagles football team depends on Pat’s watching the Eagles games with him. At a climactic moment, Tiffany, by rattling off a pattern of coincidence, convinces Pat Sr. that the Eagles’ luck improves when Pat is with her. In that scene, she also agrees to allow Pat Sr. to parlay the score in the upcoming dance competition with the outcome of the Eagles-Cowboys game, in a massive bet on which rides the entire financial security of the family. The success of the parlayed bet simultaneously cures the familial dysfunction, restores economic plenitude (Pat Sr. wins enough money to open the restaurant), and affirms the romance between Pat and Tiffany.

These developments, in the tradition of classical Hollywood romance, divert our attention away from any...

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