Men Behaving Badly: Representations of Masculinity in Post-Global Financial Crisis Cinema

Films about finance often deploy masculinity as a key locus of critique, most recently in post-global financial crisis (GFC) cinema. While feminist IPE can direct attention to certain heteronormative limitations in the gendered critique of finance – i.e. it relays stereotypes of “reckless” risky men who need to be reined in by “responsible” “prudent” women – this paper discerns important nuances in the representation of masculinity in post-GFC cinema. Beyond moralizing binaries of stable, responsible husbands vs. greedy, predatory bankers, we argue that post-GFC cinema has augmented the gendered critique of crisis by focusing on “multiple masculinities”, the “outsiders and the weirdos”, as well as the working class “gangs” of finance in films like Inside Job, Margin Call, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short. Instead of turning to women as the naturalized redeemers of “testosterone capitalism”, these films use humor and irony to create a reflexive distance, while celebrating the potential of emotional and geeky masculinities. Gone are the ‘redemptive women’ of embedded liberal finance, to reveal a vision of adaptable financial man that both naturalizes complexity and constricts the scope of financial critique to a moral valorization of resilience.