Giving Form to Finance Culture: Neoliberal Denizens in Wall Street (1987), Boiler Room (2000), and Margin Call (2011)

a great market euphoria swept through the United States by the 1990s, with two deregulatory bills signposting a neoliberal triumphalism. President Bill Clinton’s advocacy to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act (1936) and replace it with the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act in 1995 was greeted with near unanimous support by both the Washington political establishment and Wall Street, each seeking further deregulation after the Reagan era. In close succession was the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which dissolved the legal barriers that once had separated media industries and ushered in the right for multinational conglomerates to own and vertically integrate television, news, and film companies. It is no coincidence that this unprecedented expansion of the financial and media industries marked a new logic in the development of capitalist life in the 1990s. Yet something else in this decade needs further reflection—that is, the financialization of daily life, a far more ephemeral thing to couch within these two congressional bills.

For many, this neoliberal triumphalism is directly tied not just to the deregulation of markets in media and finance but also to the deregulation of the human capacity to resist or comprehend these market forces on culture. In the words of David Held and Anthony McGrew, neoliberalism includes

the extension of market to more and more areas of life; the creation of a state unburdened by “excessive” intervention in the economy and social life; and the curtailment of the power of certain groups (for instance, trade unions) to press their aims and goals. A free order, in this view, is incompatible with the enactment of rules which specify how people should use the means at their disposal.

(186)

Along with the incursion of market into the cultural sphere (Kapur and Wagner), there is also a psychological aspect to neoliberalism. As Walkerdine and Bansel’s pioneering chapter has demonstrated, identity produced in relation to work has yielded subjects that “self-actualize through their own labor. The terms of this self-actualization are tautly strung between discourses of freedom and enterprise on one hand, and the regulatory and punitive practices of government on the other, with work positioned and promoted as the best way to improve one’s situation” (3). In other words, identity politics takes on a decidedly market formation and rationale for conducting tasks, evaluating productivity, viewing colleagues and coworkers as competition, and seeing every decision as economical and as a social determinant to success.

What I see as specific to Walkerdine and Bansel’s notion of government work is also specific to private-sector employment, in particular the type of work being done on and off Wall Street that self-actualizes: financialization. Conceived along the lines of the money markets, banking institutions, brokers’ houses, and deregulation in the 1990s, financialization came to erode the regulatory measures in order to replace them with far more abstract capitalextracting processes, and these processes motivated those working in the finance industry to believe they could attain fantastical levels of profit as well as positions of prominence. Such financialization rides on the crest of corporate culture, in what Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker call “the vaporization of public resources, the rupturing of the social contract, and the disappearance of forms of health and safety protection long understood to be intrinsic to the working lives of citizens in Western democracies”; these developments “have accompanied the emergence of extraordinary new protocols of preference for corporations” (10).

Through financialization and corporate culture, the labor force has increasingly sought riskier modes of doing work that can be attributed to behavior brought on by an inexhaustible set of financial instruments and money-making schemes endorsed under neoliberalism. Rey Chow has recently pondered what she and others have called “data capitalism,” where “algorithms, altogether bypassing more traditional agencies that are bound to the human sensorium, human perception, and human subjectivity,” overwhelm many working with these finite formulas and exchanges of capital. Such transformations to economic practices are also attributable to financialization becoming a type of ephemera, and increasingly many filmmakers have tried to visualize this financially invoked...