When did America start to go to hell? A decade-old film has the answer

Late on a Friday evening a good friend called. He’s a serious guy, a highly educated professional, and he needed to talk to someone about what he had seen.

His voice was filled with dread.

He had just watched a YouTube interview of a respected legal scholar, Richard Epstein, a New York University Law School professor and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Epstein, who began his teaching career in the late 1960s, told a YouTube audience that the Vietnam era that ripped this country apart “was child’s play” compared to what is happening to the United States today. His comment echoed what Henry Kissinger recently told a British newspaper when asked if the U.S. is more divided than back then. Kissinger said, “Yes, infinitely more.”

Lots of us feel America is in decline

In the video, Epstein goes on to say, “If you’re seeing what I’m seeing about this country, I’m more pessimistic about the fate of the United States than I have been in my entire professional life. I’m trying to look to see powerful signs in the opposite direction. There are many such signs. But, at this particular time, I think of Winston Churchill, who said, ‘Too little. Too late.’ ”

Epstein’s interviewer, John Anderson, the former deputy prime minister of Australia, told Epstein the view of America from Down Under is equally bleak. “We look (from) here and we see a country many of us admire deeply tearing itself apart politically. And to hear you say you have serious doubts about how this might land is very sobering stuff.”

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After my friend described this interview, I had to watch it. It was late. When I finished at 1:30 a.m., I, too, had to talk to someone. In the early hours of Saturday morning, I sat describing the interview to my wife. I’m sure she could hear the dread in my voice.

These whispered conversations at home, these secret doubts shared with friends, form the faint undertones of a nation in decline. Perhaps no other issue occupies the thoughts of Americans as relentlessly as this one.

I tell you this not to set you on edge, but to set the table for a discussion about art.

When did it begin? Art has an answer

I want to describe for you a motion picture 11 years old that has grown more important with each passing year as the country slides slowly downwards. I’ve watched it many times since its 2011 release and it is never the same movie.

It’s a film that couldn’t know the question it was answering at the time it was made.

But, wow, does it answer the question.

When did all of this madness begin?

All of this.

The smash-mouth politics, the tribal hatreds, the divided families, the street rage, the demagogues, the riots, the anarchist thugs, the raid on the Capitol.

The movie is “Margin Call,” an American masterpiece that enjoyed some praise upon its 2011 release for its screenplay and acting, but was pretty much overlooked by the Academy. It was nominated only for Best Original Screenplay.

“Margin Call” is the story of the first small circle of Americans to learn that the world was going to end.

The world in their case was the Wall Street investment banks that were about to be swallowed in what came to be called the Great Recession, the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

The crash that started our national downfall

If you’re looking for the starting point for today’s national agony, you would do well to look at the Great Recession. The financial crisis that destroyed some $20 trillion worth of financial assets owned by American households sent the United States hurtling toward sociopolitical upheaval from which we’ve yet to recover.

So bad were things at the time, that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told federal officials trying to save the U.S. economy that we were “three days away from ATMs not working.”

For nearly a decade we endured a jobless recovery in which governments had to cut back on vital services, such as less funding for K-12 schools and higher education. Soaring debt and the disintegration of wealth made Americans believe their lives would be less prosperous than their parents.

Economic decline rattled the culture, and the Great Recession begat Occupation Wall Street and the Tea Party movements. From there Americans turned to neosocialism and national populism, to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. We convulsed with moral panics that included #MeToo and radical social justice and a global pandemic made many times worse by our warring factions.

'Margin Call' was first to leap into the abyss

“Margin Call,” now the story of our first leap into the abyss, begins with a cold-eyed consultant firing risk-management supervisor Eric Dale (played by Stanley Tucci) after 19 years at his Wall Street bank. In the Dilbert logic that is corporate America, the firm has just fired the only indispensable man. It will spend the next frantic hours trying to get him back.

Dale is on to something, a problem in the money-making formula that sustains the corporation. In his hand he holds a thumb-drive he fears will prophesy the destroyer of worlds.

Before the elevator door closes on the way out, he hands the thumb-drive to a brilliant young analyst, Peter Sullivan (played by Zachary Quinto), and tells him, “Be careful.”

Sullivan works late that night cracking the code and figures out the firm’s business model is about to pancake like the Twin Towers. He alerts one of the floor managers, Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), who alerts executive Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey). They’ve got hours to react.

“Margin Call” is a masterpiece because the brilliant young screenwriter and director J.C. Chandor, then making his first major motion picture on a meager $3.5 million budget, wrote a screenplay so rich in character and the language and cadence of The Street that it attracted some of the very best actors in Hollywood.

This line isn't about mortages. It's about us

On a tight budget, he had to work quickly to finish in 17 days. (The average Hollywood shoot is 45-90 days, according to a 2011 ProPublica story.)

Most of the picture was filmed at One Penn Plaza, on an office floor left vacant by the crash. The tight deadline created an underlying tension that translates to film as characters straining to maintain their composure as they work feverishly to save their Wall Street firm.

In one scene, Peter Sullivan and a co-worker drive the nighttime streets of Manhattan watching the pedestrians. “Look at these people,” says Sullivan. “Walking around with absolutely no idea about what’s about to happen.”

With Wall Street and the firm in jeopardy, the corporation helicopters in the big guns. CEO John Tuld, played by Jeremy Irons and with a name play on Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, gathers everyone together to assess the damage.

“This is it!” says Tuld. This is the big one. This is the one when you throw principle and decency overboard and start selling off every piece of paper that is about to be worthless in 24 hours.

When Kevin Spacey’s character tells Jeremy Irons he wants out, Irons tries to lift his morale with a speech about markets and percentages and recurring crashes. It is both a magnificent defense and damning indictment of free market capitalism.

The words soar.

Spacey, who would later be eaten up in one of the moral panics of the age, delivers a line that speaks for our generation, a line no longer just about mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, but about a country that once sustained us all.

“I just don’t know how we f---ed this up quite so much.”

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: America is in decline. 'Margin Call' pinpoints when it all began