Money On Film: Margin Call

Summary

Slate Money – Money on Film: Margin Call (March 20, 2026)

Overview

In this special crossover episode of Slate Money, host Felix Salmon and culture writer Nadira Ghaf take a deep dive into the 2011 film Margin Call, using it as a prism to explore Wall Street, the mechanics of financial crises, and the ways in which movies—unlike real life—portray the world of high finance. The duo break down the film’s unique take on risk, ethics, personal ambition, and the human fallout of economic disaster, reflecting on its lasting resonance and realism. While Margin Call is set against the backdrop of the 2008 crash, Felix and Nadira emphasize that the film's brilliance comes from its tight, character-driven storytelling, and its refusal to glamorize or oversimplify Wall Street.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Introduction: Money On Film Series

• Felix and Nadira are launching a short series examining how money, finance, and economics play out on screen, starting with Margin Call ([00:05]–[01:36]).
• Felix frames the film as "one of those movies which only gets better the more you watch it," highlighting its enduring power and accuracy about the "gestalt of finance in New York" ([01:36]).

What Is Margin Call About?

• Felix explains the movie’s premise: a fictional investment bank discovers late at night that their holdings in seemingly safe, AAA mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are deeply underwater due to over-leverage, mirroring real events leading to the 2008 crisis ([03:34]–[05:10]).
  • The technicalities: MBS were considered safe, allowing banks to "lever them up," borrow more against them, and thus amplify risk ([03:47]).
  • The character who discovers the problem is a literal rocket scientist (Zachary Quinto), but as Felix dryly notes: "You do not need to be a rocket scientist to realize that if you have a lot of leverage things can blow up quickly. But apparently you do in this movie" ([05:08]).

Differing Perspectives on Money and Ethics

• Nadira observes the range of attitudes toward money among the film’s characters, from Jeremy Irons' detached CEO ("they’re just numbers, these are just people") ([06:24]), to the pragmatic, self-interested Kevin Spacey.
• Felix argues that only Spacey’s character, head of trading, shows any real sense of fiduciary duty or empathy, insisting: "Every good salesman looks after his clients. And you don’t fuck your clients basically because that is just bad for long term health of your firm and your reputation" ([07:21]).
• Nadira highlights how Penn Badgley’s junior analyst character acts as an audience surrogate—overwhelmed, obsessed with status, always asking "how much money do you make?"—but never able to grasp the larger moral consequences until he himself is threatened with job loss ([08:59], [09:58]).
  • Memorable line: "The first question that he has whenever he meets anyone involved in this whole thing…he’s just like, how much money do you make?" ([09:58])
  • Funny touch: Badgley’s character "starts crying in the bathroom" only when faced with his own unemployment ([10:34]).

The Ruthlessness of Finance: Layoffs and Loyalty

• The film opens with mass layoffs, including Stanley Tucci’s risk head, whose findings kick off the unfolding disaster ([13:32]–[14:20]).
• Nadira views Tucci's storyline as emblematic of exploitation: fired for cost-cutting, then desperately needed back in a crisis—"they have to sort of continue to exploit workers so that they can exploit other people so that they can keep themselves safe" ([15:30]).
• Felix counters: “I don’t think that bringing Stanley Tucci into a conference room for a day and paying him a million dollars to sit in a chair and do nothing all day is that exploitative, if anything” ([16:06]), but concedes there are “worse ways to be exploited” ([16:39]).

The Film’s Narrow, Claustrophobic Focus (and Why It Works)

• Margin Call restricts itself to the firm’s internal world—there are no scenes of homeowners or social chaos outside, unlike The Big Short ([17:05]–[17:32]).
• Felix praises this as both accurate to the mentality of Wall Street at the crisis’s onset, and as a narrative choice: “It really is quite contained within the small world of Wall Street. Rather than trying to open out the frame to all of America…and all of the devastation that ends up happening, it keeps it close… It’s a small story set at the beginning of the crisis, which is not trying to make a bigger point” ([18:14]).
• The emotional stakes are almost comically insular: “The human heart of the story is really just… Kevin Spacey losing his dog, you know” ([19:23]).

On Responsibility, Regret, and the Roads Not Taken

• Stanley Tucci’s “Did I ever tell you I built a bridge?” speech on the stoop is singled out: it symbolizes the “road not traveled”—how his talent could have improved lives instead of being used for profit ([20:37]).
  • Nadira: “He personally feels like he’s given so much and has gotten so little. Mind you, like you said earlier, he’s gotten millions of dollars, right?” ([21:04])
• Felix notes that warnings about excessive risk were known, but filtered out by profit-driven bosses: "They were so busy making money, they deliberately didn't listen to the risk people" ([22:36]).

Risk Management and Accountability

• The hosts discuss the dynamic where risk managers are sidelined in finance, existing as token “sacrificial lambs” when executives seek to avoid blame ([23:11]).
• Nadira appreciates that much of the film is conference room drama—not high-energy trading, but “people putting their heads together to discuss a problem” ([23:45]–[24:18]).
  • Felix: “...at the very end of the movie do we get the market open the following morning. We get some wonderful, wonderful…Paul Bettany trying to sell bonds to his counterparts at other banks. My loss is your gain. All this kind of stuff. But that comes at the end. It isn’t made sexy. It’s because we understand that all of these people are talking themselves out of their own jobs” ([24:18]).

The Unsexy Reality of Wall Street

• Contrasting with Wall Street (1987) and other dramatizations, Margin Call is praised for its bleak realism and inability to inspire anyone to “want to go onto Wall Street”: "No one is going to...take Margin Call unironically and go, yeah, that's the kind of institution that I want to work for" ([25:32]).
• Both agree the film’s confined settings (conference rooms, strip clubs) reinforce a suffocating atmosphere—making this vision of high finance deeply unappealing ([26:41]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Felix (on the necessity of a rocket scientist to identify the crisis):
  "You do not need to be a rocket scientist to realize that if you have a lot of leverage things can blow up quickly. But apparently you do in this movie." ([05:10])

• Nadira (on Penn Badgley obsessing over compensation):
  "The first question that he has whenever he meets anyone involved in this whole thing…he’s just like, how much money do you make?" ([09:58])

• Penn Badgley's character, after being told he’s about to be laid off, cries in the bathroom, telling the boss:
  "This is all I’ve ever wanted to do."
  Simon Baker responds, utterly disinterested, "Really?" and keeps shaving ([11:33]).

• On Wall Street ethics:
  "Every good salesman looks after his clients. And you don’t fuck your clients basically because that is just bad for long term health of your firm and your reputation."
  –Felix, summarizing Kevin Spacey’s philosophy ([07:21])

• Felix (framing the film's limited focus):
  “It’s a small story set at the beginning of the crisis, which is not trying to make a bigger point. And the emotional heart and the sort of, you know, the human heart of the story is really just, you know, Kevin Spacey losing his dog, you know.” ([19:23])

• On the “Did I ever tell you I built a bridge?” scene:
  Nadira: "He personally feels like he’s given so much and has gotten so little. Mind you…he’s gotten millions of dollars, right?" ([21:04])

• On the eeriness of the finance world:
  "It spends most of its time between four walls...so it feels really confining. And I think that that is a large part of the point. It also is so not tantalizing. There is not a single moment of this movie where I feel like I would want to live even a single iota of that life." –Nadira ([26:41])

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Important Timestamps

• [01:36] Felix explains why Margin Call improves with distance from the crisis
• [03:34] Movie premise explained; mechanics of leverage and MBS
• [07:21] Discussion of Kevin Spacey’s character’s ethics
• [09:58] Penn Badgley’s character as audience surrogate, obsessive about pay
• [11:33] Penn Badgley’s bathroom breakdown and Simon Baker’s cold response
• [13:32] The film’s opening layoffs and introduction of Stanley Tucci’s risk manager
• [17:05] On what the film avoids: the “mom and Pop getting evicted” narrative
• [19:23] The personal/insular focus: “Kevin Spacey losing his dog”
• [20:37] Stanley Tucci’s “I built a bridge” speech discussion
• [22:36] On risk managers being ignored and sidelined
• [24:18] The contrast between conference room drama and typical Wall Street movie frenzy
• [25:32] Why Margin Call doesn't glamorize finance

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Conclusion

Felix and Nadira agree that Margin Call's strength lies in its realism, its refusal to either lionize or demonize Wall Street through caricature, and its focus on the personal decisions, egos, and blind spots that can cause systemic catastrophe. The film eschews broad explanations or moralizing; instead, it presents a bleakly intimate portrait of greed, denial, and the limits of empathy at the heart of modern finance. For both finance obsessives and cultural critics, the film rewards repeat viewing with its sharp dialogue and psychological nuance.

Next episode: A discussion about "Materialists" and the intersection of personal finance and dating.

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(Summary skips ads and production credits; focuses solely on content.)

Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to Money on Film. I'm Felix Hammond of Slate Money and

[B]

I'm Nadira Ghaf, culture writer at Slate.

[A]

We're here because we watch movies and well, Slate Money has for a while done this sort of intermittent series called Slate Money Goes to the Movies. It turns out that there's a lot of money in a lot of movies. And so I thought that we could get together and talk about three in particular three movies which touch on money. We are going to be talking about Materialists, which is personal finance, dating, how much money you have and how that places you in the world. We are going to be talking about Spirited Way, which is an absolutely heart breakingly gorgeous fairy tale, but is also a very sophisticated economic allegory about Japan in the late 90s and the early 2000s. In this very special amazing crossover event episode, we are going to be talking about one of my favorite films, which is Margin Call. So we're gonna talk about Margin Call on video.

[B]

Yes, luckily, if you want to see my very confused face as Felix talks about mortgage backed securities. Mortgage backed securities, then you can do that because we are currently filming in Slate Studios where you can find all these episodes of Money on film on YouTube.

[A]

Margin Call, which I watched for, I think the fourth time for, to prepare for this. And every time I watch this movie, it gets better. This is one of those movies which only gets better the more you watch it. The first time I watched it, I think I was too caught up in the financial crisis, as many were. Well, I mean, I was, you know, blogging the financial crisis multiple times a day and I watched it as a financial crisis film and I got very annoyed at the. Whatever differences there were between the financial crisis and what was on film. And I kind of missed how good of a movie it is just as a movie. And the further away we get from the financial crisis, the more I appreciate how good of a movie it is and also amazingly, how true it is, if not to the financial crisis, but to the general gestalt of finance in New York.

[B]

Yeah, it's, it's a. You know, there's a lot of movies about money and specifically when they're talking about Wall street where money is like sexy and dangerous and a risk. It's always, it's that thing about risk,

[A]

the classic one being the eponymous Wall street by Oliver Stone, which is, you know, it's like. And in, in that one you get the protagonist of the film, Bud Fox, like going to jail at the end because it's all about the, how you know, it's so risky you wind up going to jail. Insider trading, that kind of stuff. The sexy bit of finance what we are dealing with in Margin Call is literally mortgage backed securities. The least sexy bit of finance. And that is one of the things I love about this.

[B]

Yeah, I was all up in that Wikipedia. I really had to search a lot of these terms. But we got there, we managed. Wait, so before we start talking about what money is doing in this movie, tell me. Well, why don't you explain actually what happens in the movie, explain the premise because I certainly can't.

[A]

So the premise is. Yeah, the premise is not that complicated if like me, you're a finance geek, which is basically that this investment bank, and this is very much a pre crisis investment bank going through something which is very similar to the big financial crisis of 2008 that you have this investment bank which like many investment banks back then was very levered up. So think Lehman Brothers, think Bear Stearns to some extent maybe think Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, but probably closer to the slightly smaller ones like Lehman or Bear. And they have this massive amount of MBS on their balance sheets, these mortgage backed securities. To get a little bit technical, these things were designed to be AAA rated very safe. Because they are designed to be very safe. You can what's known as lever them up. You can borrow a lot of money against them. So you can have more mortgage backed securities on your balance sheet than you have in market capitalization. And then if the value of those super, super safe AAA rated mortgage backed securities goes down by quite a big chunk in bond terms like 25% is the number they give in the movie is a huge move for a bond, not so big for the stocks. If stocks move that much, no one would blink. If bonds move that much, you can wipe out an entire bank. And so what happens is that the quant risk guy does a bunch of fancy mathematics, discovers that oh my God, we have a bunch of leverage which you would think require a bunch of fancy mathematics. We will allow that for the purpose.

[B]

He's quite literally a rocket scientist.

[A]

He's quite literally a rocket scientist.

[B]

I would like to point that out.

[A]

Yeah, you do not need to be a rocket scientist to realize that if you have a lot of leverage things can blow up quickly. But apparently you do in this movie. And then there's like an emergency like middle of the night meeting going up to sort of CEO level where the bank tries to destroy decide what to do. Now that it's been shock horror, discovers that it has A whole bunch of leverage and on the, on these NBSs. And the decision is made that what they are going to do is just dump all of these securities into the market first thing in the morning. And that is going to do terrible things for the bond market and it's going to do terrible things for Wall street as a whole. But it might save the bank. This is all again like against the backdrop of the financial crisis where people are getting laid off anyway and things are bad in. So that's sort of the premise of the movie.

[B]

And what about it makes it a good movie and I guess a good movie about money to you because I, I, I have some thoughts I feel like I've seen. There are certain things that are happening in this movie that I think are really interesting that I haven't quite seen in other movies about money. Mind you, I haven't watched many movies so explicitly about money. But I do think one thing that I sort of am really intrigued by are all of the different players that this movie has and their different perspectives on money, right? So you have the top dogs who, you know, you have Jeremy Irons in this movie who's very much like, they're just numbers. These are just people. He's like a multimillionaire, maybe even a billionaire. You know, he's the top dog of this investment bank and he's very blase. You know, he, when, whenever someone expresses concern about the fact that they are dumping all of this MBS onto other people, right? He's just kind of like, well, market goes through periods of instability. That's not our fault. Our, our job is to protect this company, right? And then you have all the way sort of at the lower totem pole, you have the Zachary Quinto character and the Penn Badgley character who are just like the grunt workers. And so Zachary Quinto is the rocket scientist. And I guess because he's a scientist, he's the only one who seems to care about other human beings.

[A]

You see, I don't think he does. I think weirdly the only person who cares about other human beings or who cares about the consequences of their actions in this movie is the Kevin Spacey character, right? So Kevin Spacey is like the head of the trading floor and he's the one who will tell everyone who will listen, look, you can't do this because we are, I'm a salesman. And every good salesman looks after his clients. And you don't fuck your clients basically because that is just bad for long term health of your firm and your reputation. And all the rest of it. And he is the one. Like, maybe he's being self interested about it, or maybe he's just putting it in terms that someone like Jeremy Irons, who is self interested, will understand. But either way, he's the one looking out for the broader ecosystem. I don't think anyone else is.

[B]

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

[A]

And I think to your point, there is a sort of natural intuition that the higher you float up the greasy pole, the less you care about the little guy. But in fact, I think one of the true to life parts of this movie is that it starts like our sort of everyman intern, Penn Badgley guy,

[B]

my love in this movie, who is

[A]

sort of the proxy for the viewer. Like, I don't really understand what's going on. I'm new to all of this. But he is. He doesn't evince any real empathy for anyone at the start.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then like two thirds of the way through, he feels sorry for himself.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Mainly because he's about to get fired.

[B]

Exactly. It's the first time that he. So yeah. So he's our sort of guinea pig in this whole scenario. And what I love about him is his sort of. His obsession with money. The first question that he has whenever he meets anyone involved in this whole thing, and they're freaking out, right? They're panicking. They're like, what do we do? And he's just like, how much money do you make? You know? The movie takes place over about 24 hours straight. And it starts from them finding out what happened to them to do this fire sale. And throughout it all, every single time, there's like a new thing and things turn for the worse. And Ben Badgley meets a new character he's never met before. He's just like, how much money do you make? And he's really obsessed with this, with. With this idea of money, with this idea of status and not even security, but I think just this lifestyle. And there are a few characters who try to impart upon him a number of times that this is bigger than just the back of this town car or this is bigger than just this conference room. Right. Like there are people walking down the street whose lives will be altered irrevocably after this. And he has no ability, he's incapable of even internalizing that idea or that message until he's in the. In the front seat of a convertible with Paul Bettany and he asks Paul Bettany if he's going to get fired. In Paul Bettany, he's like, yeah. And then he. And then he starts crying in the bathroom. And you're like, okay, well, you know, but. But I think in some ways that that is like, if you think about the sort of the section of the American dream that is supposed to be being a Wall street guy, right? Like, he is. He's the guinea pig for that imploding. And what that means.

[A]

The. The only bit of Penn Badgley's sort of understanding reality that ever really happens in this movie is. Is when he mentions towards the beginning of the movie that he's massively overpaid for just, like, moving money. My numbers around on the spreadsheet, which he is. And he's like, well, okay, you. At least you understand that much, little boy. But, like, you know, after that, there's levels.

[B]

There is a genius moment where when he's crying in the bathroom, Simon Baker walks into the bathroom. And Simon Baker is one of these, like, you know, he's higher up. I don't remember what his actual position is.

[A]

He. He's basically the head of the investment bank.

[B]

Okay, so, yeah, so he's much higher up, obviously. And he's shaving in the bathroom. He's getting ready for, like, this awful but massive momentous day that they're about to have. And Pim Badgley just sees him. He's, you know, Simon Baker shaving. And he just. He cries and he says, this is all I've ever wanted to do. And Simon Baker just goes, really?

[A]

And keeps on shaving.

[B]

And just keeps on shaving.

[A]

Yeah. Like, this is your moment, dude, to show a little bit of sympathy for one of your. No, no, I'm just gonna keep on shaving like, you are nothing to me. And that's how he gets to where he is. He's like the boy Wonder. He's, like 40 years old. He's in charge of everyone. He's the person who happily will throw Demi more under the bus if he needs to.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he also just, like, understands the reality. I think he probably as much or if. Or possibly even more than anyone else understands what's at stake, but then also just is sort of bloodless about it and being like, well, if this is what we need to do, this is what we need to do. This special crossover episode of Slate Money and Culture Gabfest is a paid partnership with Apple Card.

[B]

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[A]

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[A]

I look at this differently. For one thing, I don't think that bringing Stanley Tucci into a conference room for a day and paying him a million dollars to sit in a chair and do nothing all day is that exploitative of anything.

[B]

Well, what if the stakes were, you know, we're not going to pay you severance.

[A]

Right, Right. I mean, they are making him do it. Yeah, but he, but like, it's not like he is really being exploited or there's a lot of.

[B]

There are worse ways to be exploited.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. There are worse ways to be exploited than be paid a million dollars for a day's work. But also there was this thing that you were talking about, like the, the broader consequences and the little people and this kind of thing. And I think one of the things I really like about this film is that it doesn't do the thing that say the Big Short did, which was try to have seen Bomas in a bathtub.

[B]

No.

[A]

Well, yeah, but what it doesn't do is try to explain that this crisis that originated in Wall street has repercussions to mom and Pop and people are getting thrown out of their homes and, you know, people are losing everything. There's like none of that in this movie. And no one talks about that. No one can really see that coming yet. Where we are, Zachary Quinto just has

[B]

a one off line that's like these people don't know what's about to happen and that's it. That's all we get.

[A]

But, but like, even in his mind, he's like, you know, the markets are going to fall and the people with like, investments are going to lose money. Which, you know, which is sort of maybe. If you think back to when the financial crisis happened in, in 2008, what you remembered in 2008 was the stock market crash of 2000. Right. And the stock market crash of 2000 felt like a really big deal in sort of 2007. 2008, before we had the big crash of 2008. In hindsight, it was kind of a nothing burger. People had money and then they didn't have money and then it kept on going. But there was not the huge societal disruption that you saw from a financial crisis, because 2000 was not a financial crisis and 2008 was a financial crisis. So no one in 2008 going into the crisis, which is when this movie is set, really understands what happens in a financial crisis. Because no one has been through it. No one saw. No one. But no one saw what was going to happen. And all they could deal with was like the furthest they could look forward in time was like tomorrow or maybe like a week from now. They can't look forward six months from now. And evictions. And people don't even really talk about mortgages. They only talk about mortgage backed security. Yeah, Right. So there's. So it really is quite contained within the small world of Wall Street. Rather than trying to open out the frame to all of America and to all of the world and to all of the devastation that ends up happening. It keeps it close. It keeps it, as you said, within like 24 hours. It's a small story set at the beginning of the crisis, which is not trying to make a bigger point. And the emotional heart and the sort of like, you know, the human heart of the story is really just, you know, Kevin Spacey losing his dog, you know. Yeah.

[B]

What I really like about the movie is that very in line with what you're saying, it's just about people making decisions. Like it is really at the heart of it is just about people making decisions. And I think what I love about the Stanley Tucci character are the decisions that maybe he's coerced to make or maybe he makes on his own accord, but that he's making them once again, not considering other. This is the one character that you feel like would be like barn burning and be like, I Hate this place because you mistreat people. But he's just like, I hate this place cause you mistreated me.

[A]

Right?

[B]

And I. That layer, I think, is very, very specific. And I like that the movie doesn't try to shoot above that. And there's this great. I mean, Stanley Chuchu is just so good at a redirect, right? Like, he'll have a conversation with someone and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he'll just say some throwaway line that actually turns into a sort of, I don't know, a different story. And there's this moment on the stoop with Paul Bettany where he's just like, did I ever tell you I built a bridge?

[A]

And.

[B]

And then he starts talking about how he saved the members of these two towns, like, thousands of years off their life just by building this bridge. And so it cut down the time that they would have to spend in their cars. And he doesn't follow up on Paul Bettany, doesn't ask him why he said that. He doesn't follow up on why he said that. But I think it really portrays into this idea of how he personally feels like he's given so much and has gotten so little. Mind you, like you said earlier, he's gotten millions of dollars, right?

[A]

He's gotten millions. And he's well aware of that, which is why he doesn't immediately say yes to the offer of lots of money to go and sit in a room. He's like, I have plenty of money. He does obviously feel that he could have been making the world a better place. Did I tell you that I built a bridge? The bridge is clearly this symbol of the road not traveled. You can be improving people's lives or you can be destroying people's lives. And guess what? You wound up destroying people's lives instead of improving them. There was one other thing you said earlier, though, which I wanted to talk about, which was when you said that he was like the guy who could have stopped this from happening or that people should have listened to or if he found it out earlier, something, you know, not so much like he. Like, again, we have various throwaway lines. And not. Not like that bridge thing is actually a quite long, like two page monologue. Whereas, like, there are a little more throwaway lines that you're hearing from Kevin Spacey and from Demi Moore. Demi Moore saying, like, we warned about this, but I think it's everyone on the trading floor, most notably Kevin Spacey, has been acutely aware of the amount of leverage that They've been running and the whole problem of the originate to distribute model and all of the rest of it for a long time. And part of the problem is that they were so busy making money, they deliberately didn't listen to the risk people.

[B]

Yeah. And all he does, he just tips. He just tips Zachary Quinto off. Right. And I think the thing that he maybe specifically tips him off to isn't like, oh, I just found out that there was a problem, but I maybe we specifically figured out what exactly is wrong. Like that the model is wrong. And I. You know, and apparently you need a rocket scientist to then finish that model and actually run it and figure it out. But, yeah, I think, yeah, they make it very clear that whether it started with him or with anyone else, that people have been talking about the fact that they maybe had a problem on their hands for quite some time.

[A]

And this is one of the deep truths of Wall street which you see in this movie, is that. Is that ostensibly the job of the risk management function is to control the amount of risk that the bank is taking. But in reality, it's the people who are making the money, the traders and the CEO who determine that, rather than the risk managers who wind up being shunted off to the side and laid off in layoffs and generally being ignored until they're needed as a sacrificial lamb, as someone to blame when things go wrong.

[B]

Yeah, I loved that this movie didn't spend too much time on a trading floor or with traders trying to sell people things. I just. I like. We get sold things and pitched things all day, every day as consumers, as people just living. And I like that so much of this movie was actually about people putting their heads together in conference rooms to discuss a problem. And so little about, like, I don't know, 20 minutes of them actually trying to sell, like this, these MBS assets. Right.

[A]

Yeah, there's There's a. There's this a Wall street movie cliche of all of these guys with like two phones screaming at each other or, you know, the. The climactic scene in Trading Places where they're on the trading floor, you know, doing, you know, they're selling and then they're buying and, you know, and we open after the market's closed. This movie begins after the market closes and they do all the layoffs, like after 4pm after the market has closed. And then only at the very end of the movie do we get the. Open. The market open the following morning. We get some wonderful, wonderful D. Beautifully written dialogue of like, Paul Betney trying to sell bonds to his counterparts at other banks. My loss is your gain. All this kind of stuff. But that comes at the end. It isn't. It isn't made sexy. It's because we understand that all of these people are talking themselves out of their own jobs.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's more sort of heartbreaking than like, this is not one of those movies that is ever going to make someone want to go onto Wall Street. Right in the way I make a

[B]

bunch of Pentagon Wall Street.

[A]

The movie.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Was designed by Oliver Stone to be this sort of cautionary tale of don't go onto Wall Street. And then this greed is good speech that Michael Douglas gives becomes this sort of rallying cry for a whole generation of kids who then go on to Wall street and they're like, yeah, greed is good. And they take it unironically. No one is going to sort of take Margin Call unironically and go, yeah, that's the kind of institution that I want to work for.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. It's not, is it? I don't like that. No. I didn't like this. This vision of life for myself. In fact, it seemed really awful. And I think a part of it. A part of what is really effective about it is that it spends most of its time between four walls. Right. Like, there is so little time outside, and most of it is spent in conference rooms, strip clubs, you know, just like, in rooms. And so it feels really confining. And I think that that is a large part of the point. It also is so not tantalizing. There is not a single moment of this movie where I feel like I would want to live even a single iota of that life.

[A]

Which is why you're a culture writer. Mistake.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. That's why I'm not actually making millions of dollars.

[A]

But that's, I think, a good place to wrap it up. We're going to. This is not the last time we're going to talk about movies.

[B]

No, no.

[A]

We actually are going to talk about personal finance on the next episode of Money on Film. And so this one is where you're going to explain it all to me, because this is all going to be about, like, dating and shit, about which

[B]

I know nothing, unfortunately. I know maybe a little, little too much. I'd like to know less about dating. If anyone wants to help with that, that'd be great.

[A]

But for this one, I think that's it for Money on Film. Let's catch us next time.

[B]

Thanks for listening. Thanks for doing this with me. Felix. I can't wait for the next episode. I also want to thank Andrew Harding for arranging all of this, Micah Phillips for producing this video, Benjamin Frisch for producing the audio some of you might be hearing, and Merritt Jacobs for Engine.