Cinematic Masculinity in the Age of Finance

Abstract

This essay shows how popular cinema represents financialization and finance capitalism by leveraging male stardom as an allegory for superannuated forms of productive labor in Cosmopolis (2012), Dark Knight Rises (2012), Magic Mike (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Lego Movie (2014), and The Big Short (2015). Building on recent film history and scholarship about financialization and the 2008 banking collapse, it illustrates that popular cinema remains committed to the representation of finance even as the credit crisis recedes from view in the mass media, and that it recalls large-scale productive industry while contributing to racialized and gendered myths of labor and value.