There’s good reason to be wary of films that try to bring to life economic and financial events. They usually go too far in attempting to create a big human drama of a story that’s mostly about digits and balance sheets. And they do this with gratuitous eroticism or crude anti-capitalism designed to keep the viewer hooked on what would otherwise be boring.
Which is to say, they always seem to over-egg the pudding rather than allow the story to tell itself.
The film “Dumb Money” is something different. It’s a brilliant telling of true events. It sticks to the bracing reality about a period in our lives that was a major trauma for most of us. It’s the most interesting and engaging post-pandemic critique of pandemic-era policy, especially as concerns economics and social class, that I’ve yet seen.
It’s one of those movies that caused me to want to yell to the producers, “Thank you so much for making this.”
The backdrop is 2020, the weirdest year of our lives. The workforce was split like a log: essential and nonessential. This legal designation made what was mostly invisible extremely visible. The laptoppers luxuriated while the hands-on workers served them with deliveries of all sorts. Many others were stuck in the middle, unable to work, living on stimulus payments, bored out of their minds, and losing faith in the system and the functioning of life itself.
In the midst of this, in a year of demoralization and boredom but flush with cash falling from the heavens, one trader took to Reddit in a group called WallStreetBets and gave his stock recommendation for GameStop, which he dearly loved as a retail outlet. He also noticed that the big shots on Wall Street were all shorting it, which is to say that they had leveraged bets that it was going nowhere but down. And yet the store was allowed to stay open because they sold computer accessories.
Our friend thought otherwise and began to rally people in the message boards around the stock, not to pump and dump but to buy and hold, in part to make money but also to teach the big shots a thing or two. I’m not sure I realized it at the time, but this was a form of revolt against the real winners of lockdowns.
The stock began at $2.30 and moved fully up to an end-of-day closing of $83.00 with intraday trading in the hundreds, triggering flurries of margin calls that bankrupted big shots all over the floor.
The subreddit was banned, and the platform that processed the trades in this stock called Robinhood went from rags to riches to rags again, once having accepted a crooked deal from a hedge fund that demanded that the platform shut down trading in GameStop, which they did until they opened it again.
All of that is great drama and truly thrilling. From a personal point of view, I can recall all of this but wasn’t paying too much attention to the ins and outs of market bubbles during the main lockdown year. I was too busy fighting the big picture of lockdowns in general, inveighing daily against what governments the world over were doing to their populations.
For me at the time, this was all background static. I wish now that I had watched in real time more carefully.
The beauty of this film is to give us a more granular look at the grassroots. People stuck in school with masked professors. Workers standing behind plexiglass. Average people dealing with the Karens unleashed everywhere telling people to put their masks over their noses. Kids pretending to be schooled on Zoom and teachers pretending to teach them. The rich fleeing to Florida and island resorts. The middle class lost and confused.
All these pictures and experiences defined our lives. Most people would sooner forget. But this movie brings it all back home with deeply evocative scenes in schools, hospitals, retail shops, public spaces, and streets. The whole world was strangely isolated, afraid, and deeply creepy in ways that defied every expectation.
And all of this was for what? A virus. It was there. It’s still here. It came and nestled in as a fact of human existence, the same as every virus in the history of the world. Never before in history did society lock down like this, certainly not on this scale and to this extent. It was all so grim that it’s hard to think about, much less remember. It’s easier to block it all out.
This film perfectly portrays the insanity of it all and also the sheer fakeness of the social protocols. It was all performative. No one in the movie dies of COVID-19. No one even gets sick. And yet there everyone is, walking around in ridiculous masks, speaking in muffled voices, showing off their disease-free piety in front of others, and then taking it all off when others aren’t looking. It’s an amazing world of let’s pretend from everyone involved.
And in the backdrop of the amazing stock runup is, of course, stimulus payments combined with boredom and online access. It all seems inevitable, looking back at it now, that one stock would become an internet sensation and create instant millionaires out of the locked-down and extremely bitter working classes that Wall Street called “Dumb Money”: that is, the retail traders.
The upheavals ended in a congressional hearing that attempted to sort it all out. That failed and ended with no real results. Meanwhile, the mounds of evidence that the big players were ultimately behind both the banning of the WallStreetBets subreddit and the elite capture of the Robinhood trading platform (giving back to the rich what they took) were tossed out by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In other words, the populist revolt in the form of subverting short sellers was a short-lived victory but a satisfying one nonetheless. I’ve never seen the class conflict of pandemic policy better portrayed than in this film: the working classes forced to serve the laptop class because of wildly exaggerated fears of a bug that was known from early on to be a problem largely focused on the aged and infirm.
The spectacular feature of 2020 was the social upheaval, and one vantage point from which to observe this is the financial markets with the rise and fall of GameStop. This movie has to rank among the best financial and economic films ever made, and all the more meritorious for portraying the weirdest year of our lives in vivid if not deeply painful images of a society gone mad.
