Transnational representation of a gendered recession in corporate dramas

Abstract

The cinematic depiction of the financial crisis has centred on the explanation of the causes and consequences of the global recessionary scenario in which gender acquires special relevance. My aim in this article is to carry out a hitherto unaddressed transnational analysis of corporate dramas. More specifically, I elicit the commonalities as well as local specificities that different Western cinematographies show when tackling gendered recessionary discourses on ‘mancession’ and ‘austerity’. Films such as The Last Days of Lehman Brothers (Samuels, 2009, BBC), Money Never Sleeps (Stone, 2010), The Company Men (J. Wells, 2010) and The Big Short (McKay, 2015) have, on the one hand, aligned with nostalgic and retro-sexist discourses by focusing on male suffering to confront the recession while relegating female characters as emotional companions of the male hero. On the other hand, the representation of female characters in these films has also put to the test the inconsistencies of neoliberal discourses when analysed from the perspective of genre. To illustrate the transnational dimension of the ‘narrated’ impact of the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ in different scenarios, I compare a US Wall Street film and a Spanish corporate drama of the Great Recession: Margin Call (J Chandor, 2011, USA) and The Tip of the Iceberg (La punta del iceberg, D Cánovas, 2016, Spain).