“How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation” (Lewis 222-3)? This question, asked by author Michael Lewis through the eyes of one of his subjects – Ben Hockett – appears to have an answer: with great difficulty. Lewis's book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, lays out the internal workings of the investment side of the mortgage crisis of 2007-8 which was instrumental to the global economic recession, and is riddled with deeply complex details necessary to telling the story. Even Lewis acknowledges this, yet takes great pains to attempt to make his book accessible. “Dear Reader: If you have followed the story this far, you deserve not only a gold star but an answer to a complicated question […],” (77) he writes in one of the book's footnotes. For the film adaptation, The Big Short (2015) director, Adam McKay, could have stripped down the details of the story to its most accessible elements. It could be argued that as screenwriters, Charles Randolph and McKay did so, in order to make a three-act narrative to draw stars and receive funding from a major studio. However, aesthetically, McKay convolutes and distracts from straightforward narrative elements, such as coherently integrated sound and image as well as traditional Hollywood methods of composition, to make a film that is almost as frustrating and difficult to follow as its source material. At one point in the film, the narrator – the character Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), who is the filmic counterpart for banker Greg Lippman from Lewis's book – identifies the complexity in accessing banking and investment concepts in voice over: “Mortgage Backed Securities, Sub-prime Loans, Tranches. It's pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored or stupid? Well, it's supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or even better, for you just to leave them the fuck alone.” The film relishes in these convoluted investment banking terms, yet uses them as significant points in the storytelling. The Big Short focuses on four groups of people who anticipated, and capitalized upon, the crash of the housing market by essentially betting that homeowners would begin to default on their mortgages in bulk simultaneously. This event sent banks and investment firms into a financial tailspin both, because large swaths of money was going unpaid toward them, which in turn meant they owed money to the people who bet that this would happen. Dr. Mike Burry (Christian Bale) who is based on the real person of the same name, was the first to anticipate these trends, and much to the chagrin and fear of his investors, took out insurance on, or ‘shorting,’ these Sub-prime (low-quality) loans. Vennett, who works for Deutsche Bank, finds out about Burry's deals, researches them, and tries selling the idea to investment companies that almost entirely do not believe him. He does convince investor for Morgan Stanley, Mark Baum (Steve Carrell, based upon real-life counterpart Steve Eisman), and his team that mortgage defaulting en masse will almost certainly happen, and Vennett profits from his sales on these shorts. Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), who are based on Charlie Ledley and James Mai, respectively, are low-level independent investors who discover Vennett's pitch portfolio, and after conducting their own research, decide to invest similarly. However, because the company does not have enough money to make such deals, they seek help from personal friend and former securities trader, Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt, who is based upon Hockett), who helps them get through the door to buy, and later sell. The film follows these transactions and the process of researching the likelihood of the bursting housing bubble to show the corruption, fraud, and arrogant cluelessness within the banking industry that leads to economic collapse. In the end, they all make a vast profit, grapple with their consciences, and comment on the effects the economic institutions' actions have on the general population. While this may be a long synopsis, it is reduced to the bare essentials, and considering its complexity, the film only runs 130 minutes making it dense, and with stylistics taken into account, it is a cognitively challenging experience. Exemplary of the unusual structural choices McKay makes, it is worth considering his application of a classical three-act structure in contrast to David Bordwell's model. While the film does retain the three-act division of the classical Hollywood film (see (Bordwell 28-9), McKay patterns a temporally unusual division of this structure. Where Bordwell cites research that roughly recommends acts be divided fractionally as Act 1: ¼, Act 2: ½, Act 3: ¼, The Big Short identifies act breaks through transitions accompanied by quotes at (0:01:05), (1:01:56), and (1:34:33) for a runtime of (2:10:15). This makes Act 1 approximately just under ½, Act 2 a little over ¼, and Act 3 a little over ¼ which is, to say the least, unconventional. This creates unusual pacing which is at odds with viewers' internal sense of narrative rhythm. A useful contemporary of this film that has narrative, thematic, and stylistic similarities – Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) – indulges then eschews such exploration of the ins and outs of investment. Reviewer Peter Bradshaw highlights one significant moment in Scorsese's film to explain its narrational strategy in relation to the density of detail in the world of the film (and frankly, the world of our world). Bradshaw writes that the character, Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and based on the real-life figure of the same name, who made a trading empire by selling low-cost (“penny”) stocks with a high rate of failure to poor people before being arrested for defrauding his clients, “will often stop in the middle of explaining a financial scam, and say that we don't want to hear about anything as boringly technical as this – surely what we want is the naked girls and the wild times, and that's what we get” (Bradshaw). Therefore, Scorsese doesn't let confusing terminology get in the way of a good time by overtly acknowledging that the terminology and explanations are being sidestepped. In contrast, McKay creates fun out of stylistically making “a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation” even more baffling and inaccessible, primarily by trying to distract the viewer from significant information that actually requires the most care, attention, and comprehension. The way The Big Short does this can be understood through a discussion of theories of incoherence, cognition, and form hybridity. This is strongly exemplified in the way that McKay uses direct address by narrators, secondary characters, and celebrity cameos to disorient the viewer and create cognitive distraction. Furthermore, the film frustrates clear cognitive processing through complicating the viewer's trust in whether what is being depicted is true or untrue, and ultimately, becomes a relevant and accurate meta-depiction of the difficulty in communicating and understanding the complicated processes by which the global economy crashed. Todd Berliner's work on incoherence provides a unique and useful metric for gauging aesthetic quality, and a much-needed vocabulary for the identification and discussion of significant aesthetic and narrative anomalies. In the consideration and analysis of particularly challenging or unusual texts, Berliner's work not only provides a precedent for understanding and speaking about the complexities of such works via an extensive exploration of “incoherence,” but also demonstrates how works with these kinds of incoherencies are often remembered, analyzed, critically praised, and widely revisited as sources of pleasure. Berliner's discussion of incoherent texts, specifically in the 1970s, differs from Robin Wood's understanding and use of the term. The former focuses on form and structure, whereas the latter is concerned with conceptual sensemaking. Whilst both Wood and Berliner focus on cinema from the 1970s, I contend that this should not detract from utilising similar analyses in other decades, past or present, to understand and determine structure, function, and value. In fact, Jason Mittell has shown that similar challenging story processes have been introduced in other media, namely television. Mittell's case studies primarily focus on the late 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s, periods when audiences showed a taste for more complex developments in storytelling within serialised, televised narratives, particularly with the rise of HBO's popular series such as The Sopranos (Chase) and The Wire (Simon). Mittell's “approach to comprehension is based on the cognitive poetic model developed primarily through David Bordwell's work on film narration” (164) similar to both Berliner and through me here. Ultimately, the concern surrounds cognitive processing, familiarity with tropes, and the subversion of expectation. It can be argued that trends in television have primed viewers for processing cognitively challenging and ludic films, like The Big Short, in ways that media have tempered out of mainstream media materials following similarly challenging products out of 1970s Hollywood in the way Berliner discusses. Wood's definition of incoherence, however, deviates from poetic models: “I am concerned with films that don't wish to be, or to appear, incoherent but are so nonetheless, works in which the drive toward the ordering of experience has been visibly defeated” (47). Berliner discusses a similar, but distinct, conceptualization of incoherent texts. He writes, “I use the word ‘incoherence’ here, and everywhere in this book, not in its common metaphoric sense of irrationality or meaninglessness but rather in the literal sense to mean a lack of connectedness or integration among different elements” (26). Here, we can see the distinction: Wood is concerned with a text's message and cultural critique, Berliner on its pleasures, which strikes at the heart of these two theorists’ ontological views of movies and their purpose. Berliner's incoherence, then, is structured by a range of what he calls “conceptual incongruities” (26). These are: “Moral or ideological incongruities, which denote a discrepancy between different ethical beliefs or belief systems” (26); “Factual contradictions, when story information contradicts other story information” (26); “Logical inconsistencies, which denote inconsistencies in a story's underlying system of principles or in the inferences one derives from them,” (26); and “Characterological inconsistencies, when characters behave in ways inconsistent with their previous characterizations” (26). Berliner's framework is fundamental to the pleasures of The Big Short, which is rife with the kinds of incongruities that he details. Moral incongruity and ideological incongruity are a central part of the film's narrative. The heroes, the characters we root for, only succeed if there is (and there was) large-scale economic devastation, which in some way affected most, if not everyone reading this. The film continues to remind us, whether in a monologue by Mark Baum or Ben Rickert, that what is being bet on will cost homes, jobs, and lives, and thus, the viewer still must struggle with who they want to be successful. That these characters know what is at stake makes it easier for us to root for them, which is still ultimately rooting against ourselves. Incoherencies, incongruities, and inconsistencies, while not the sole focus of my analysis, provide a starting point for understanding how the film functions. Furthermore, these key types of incoherence demonstrate how the film communicates, or rather frustrates communication, of narrative information. However, a major part of the film's aesthetic template for the delivery of such incoherencies and informational frustration is done through a significant approach to generic or modal hybridity, as the story is told using stylistic links to documentary filmmaking. The Big Short's incoherence is evident in how the movie addresses and utilizes genre, including generic incongruities, and genre deviation by incorporating some of the traditional and more unusual stylistic methods of the documentary format within a fictionalized account of a true story. The film has been identified generically as a comedy (albeit of the dark sort) by numerous critics such as Robbie Collin, Joanna Connors, and Mark Kermode, amongst others. However, it should be noted that the way documentary stylistics are applied throughout the narration that provides the strongest moments of cognitive shock and further frustrates understanding of an already complex narrative. “While not as elegant as tracking shots, handheld movements can provide a more effective response to unplanned events. And because they are determined less by premeditated design than by the contingencies of the situations documented, they can also help to authenticate the process of representation. In fact, there is such strong association between handheld movements and documentary aesthetics that fiction filmmakers have sometimes used them just to add a realistic quality to their images” (193). With respect to editing, The Big Short cuts for what Spence and Navarro identify as “Graphics, Tempo, and Rhythm”. (170) They write, “[c]ontinuities and discontinuities – similarities and contrasts – of light, texture, shape, movement, tone, and direction bind one shot to the next. And the duration of shots is often determined not simply by the amount of information contained in it but by the rhythmic possibilities” (170). Also, while Spence and Navarro (here writing with Carl Lewis), identify a multitude of strategies that can be used in documentary sound which can be seen in The Big Short, they make a key statement: “the sounds and images in most documentaries, are attempts to impose order on the discontinuity and otherness of the sociohistorical world” (263). The Big Short, as a fiction film made by a major studio, can recruit experienced craftspeople to create an inherent sense of order upon a story which may have historically been more discontinuous and other. However, McKay uses documentary stylistics and approaches to camerawork, editing, and sound to create both continuity and discontinuity, which is formulated to seem truthful, real, or authentic. However, stylistic efforts at communicating authenticity – which documentary stylistics cognitively assist – are undercut regularly. Stylistically, the film doesn't just adhere to concepts of documentary form, but of a specific type of popular, modern documentary form. A significant forerunner and influential documentary filmmaker whose style (and politics') is apparent in The Big Short is Michael Moore. Matthew Bernstein, analyzing the multimodal documentary approach of Moore in Roger and Me (1989), argues that, by combining Bill Nichols's typology of documentary modes explored in Nichols's 1983 article, “The Voice of Documentary” and his 1991 book, Representing Reality, particularly, the expository and the interactive, Moore not only creates a strongly uncompromising rhetorical strategy, but one in which the documentary doesn't feel like a documentary, but has more in common with fiction filmmaking. This is relevant because Moore has not only created some of the highest-grossing, popular, political documentaries such as Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which earned $58million according to Box Office Mojo (BoxOfficeMojo.com, Bowling for Columbine); and £222.4million according to Box Office Mojo, (BoxOfficeMojo.com, Fahrenheit 9/11) respectively, but has also been so influential that his multimodal style has become synonymous with modern documentary. “Through the work of these two filmmakers, documentary and mock documentary grow in popularity while the distinction between the two grows increasingly blurry; taken together, their work stands as a significant aesthetic influence on the subsequent wave of reality-based entertainments including offbeat portrait films, reality television shows, prank and hoax films, and other documentary/fiction hybrids” (23). It is not a far stretch to read The Big Short as one of the aesthetic progeny of the ‘reality-based entertainments’ identified by Middleton, with close links to Michael Moore. Furthermore, there is the fundamental similarity between Moore's films and McKay's movie, which can be extracted from Middleton's observation that “[o]ne goal of (Moore's) films, then, is to use humor and pointed rhetoric as forms of public shaming” (24). Middleton also notes that Moore attempts to use comedy (here applicable to The Big Short), as a method of “engaging viewers and enhancing his films’ rhetorical impact and effectivity” (28). Middleton later highlights Moore's “rhetorical editing techniques that humorously make his points without him having to state them directly” (39). Furthermore, McKay attempts similar editing techniques, incorporating archival footage, music videos, and still shots, all of which seem relevant in the moment, but ultimately confound any clear point. One such sequence comprised of techniques that can be seen in Michael Moore's films occurs when Michael Burry buys his first batch of credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities from Goldman Sachs for $100 million. The camerawork in the sequence is mainly smooth, with careful tracking shots that gradually incorporate small, unexpected movements such as short snap zooms and unsteady movements that come from the use of fluid-head tripod-mounted cameras, which are used for ease of quick movement to catch unexpected actions within or outside the frame. As Goldman Sachs and Burry agree on the deal, we hear the hook to “Money Maker” by Ludacris featuring Pharrell, a catchy hip-hop song wherein the narrator encourages someone to dance for his money. As Burry leaves the meeting room confident that he is going to make money off this deal, there is a rack in the focus showing the Goldman Sachs representatives smiling and celebrating amongst each other, confident they will be the ones making money from this deal. This shot cuts to a slick, well-lit, brightly colored shot of a group of scantily-clad women dancing, which comes directly from the “Money Maker” music video. This shot then cuts to a shot from McKay and Drew Antzis's 2007 short film, The Landlord, wherein comedian, Will Ferrell, is confronted by a vicious, money-hungry, alcoholic landlord played by McKay's two-year old daughter, Pearl McKay. In this shot, we see young Pearl McKay through subtitles translating the toddler-pronunced English saying to Ferrell's character, “I want my money,” with the word “bitch” covered by a black box. This cuts to a shot from the “Money Maker” video again with rap artist, Ludacris, sitting in front of a car with a scantily-clad model draped over its hood, and then another cut to dancers from the music video, before cutting back to the celebrations inside the Goldman Sachs office. We can see similar wry uses of multimedia materials in Moore's films. For example, he uses of the music video for Marilyn Manson's “Fight Song” in Bowling for Columbine to introduce the (now disgraced) singer's interview, and to show the image Manson projected that seemed to scare the public talking heads shown just previously in a montage. Additionally, Fahrenheit 9/11 uses the opening credits sequence from the television show, Bonanza (Dortort), with President George W. Bush and his cabinet members’ heads superimposed over the actors’ faces to suggest the U.S.'s escalation of military activity in Afghanistan was a result of a “wild-west,” invasive, colonialist policy. McKay, like Moore, uses multimedia montage to create subtle commentary unusual for narrative Hollywood film. Furthermore, despite creating challenges to traditional narrative comprehension, Randoph and McKay ensure clarity of the overarching points by directly stating, especially toward film's the end, all rhetorical messages. This is significant as it establishes the overarching aesthetic of The Big Short. Moore's films have become synonymous with modern documentary, while at the same time showing stylistic parallels with mockumentary. McKay uses these very same conventions to establish a rhetorical vision while at the same time undermining clear cohesion. The Big Short's multigeneric focus, with particular reliance on documentary, results in a viewing experience wherein the viewer is cognitively processing the style as both and neither truth and untruth, while the film diegetically acknowledges that the depictions of events are both and neither truth and untruth, often in simultaneously conflicting ways. This has been outlined, not because documentary aesthetics will be addressed here at length (though this would be a further useful area of discussion), but to highlight the way that this film systematically plays with truth and perceptions of truth. Furthermore, this particular philosophical foundation for understanding the truth of The Big Short can more clearly be identified through an analysis of the way it utilizes direct address. Direct address, in the context of this essay, refers to instances on film where an image subject, either fictional or actual, looks at the camera and, in some cases, speaks to the viewer. This is different from voice-over narration as the subject is on camera and addressing the camera, as well as the viewer beyond, directly while physically embodied onscreen. Tom Brown provides a beneficial introductory identification of “the most common functions and significations of direct address in film fictions” (13). These are useful insofar as we have a theoretical guide to understanding how we expect direct address to be used. Brown's first function is “Intimacy” with the viewer/audience, whilst the second is “Agency”, which suggests that “direct address will be the province of a single character and that character is often the protagonist or the principal agent of the narrative” (13). Third, Brown identifies “[s]uperior epistemic position within the fictional world,’ meaning that ‘the characters who perform direct address generally know more – or are in a position of greater knowledge within the fiction – than other characters” (14). Fourth is “Honesty” (15), which Brown identifies as “a gesture of open and ‘honest’ expression”, and fifth, is “Instanciation” (16). This is a particularly complex concept, which Brown uses to distinguish from the Brechtian concept of “distanciation.” Susan Hayward defines “distanciation” as a stylistic approach designed to “distance the audience, through numerous strategies, so that it could adopt a critical stance and perceive how theatre practices and characterization serve to reproduce society as it is ideologically and institutionally constructed” (105). “Alienation” is stated next by Brown with the proviso that “we restore Brecht's proper relationship with long-established entertainment strategies and see ‘alienation’ as consistent with the influences he drew from popular culture” (16). Finally, he highlights “(Sometimes) stillness” wherein the direct address “may occur as a narrative pause, a moment of reflection that arrests or stands apart from the forward motion of the narrative” (17). As I will demonstrate, as part of an incoherent aesthetic design mimicking documentary, McKay's multiple uses of direct address adheres to all of these functions, but manages to subvert them as well. The Big Short, as established, has been identified as adhering to the generic categorization of ‘comedy,’ and McKay's background supports the public expectation of comedy in his films. Therefore, it is also important to highlight that Brown explicitly states that “[c]omedy is the most common, the most ‘natural’ home for direct address within mainstream cinema” (41). This is further brought into theoretical relevance when one considers Brown's overt claims for the links between comedy and documentary via Godard (41-2). Therefore, while direct address doesn't often happen in documentary as a mode or genre – however one wishes to define it (unless you're watching an Errol Morris film) – according to Brown's research, The Big Short should be a clear and expected home for the use of direct address. Thus, McKay uses it extensively. To recount the narrative of The Big Short somewhat consistently from beginning to end, McKay uses a central narrator in both voice over and on camera in direct address, although other characters assume this narrative power regularly to contribute extra information, comedic moments, and ultimately moments of distraction. As stated, through most of the film, the narration is guided by ared Vennett, even before the character is seen. Jared is very concise, if vulgar, and at turns, is both detachedly cynical and, the rhetorical voice of morality. He is first heard over slowly moving, grainy, white and grey shots of old placid white men pleasantly greeting each other. “In the late 70s, banking wasn't a job you went into to make large sums of money. It was a fucking snooze, filled with losers. Like selling insurance, or…” and here, it/we cut/s to a long shot of Jared leaning back in his chair at a desk surrounded by others in his job. He is looking directly at the camera, and this difference along with the sudden change in the sound of his voice, to reflect him talking within diegetic film space as opposed to the clean, bass-heavy sound of the voice of god narration, provides the film's first overt cognitive shock. This change immediately provides a face to go with the voice, a process which Michel Chion names “de-acousmatization,” which removes some of the power of the omniscient voice (27-9). However, it also denotes an immediate shift in tone, from the slow-moving placidity of the previous shots backed by soothing, happy, ethereal music to a moderately paced moving shot and immediately engaging in direct address. Jared finishes his sentence, “…accounting.” This moment is extremely ambiguous and, apart from introducing us to Jared, doesn't clearly work in alignment with one of Brown's aforementioned functions. This emulates elements of stillness, but at the same time, marks a point where the speed of the narrative increases, as does the pace of the banking industry. From here, he identifies the changing of the industry, its increasingly fast pace, efforts at increasing capital, and how it developed until the crash in 2007. However, between Jared's varied depictions, we can see the way that he exemplifies Berliner's idea of characterological inconsistency as he is alternately trustworthy and untrustworthy, morally conscious and morally bereft. Jared discusses “The giant lie at the heart of the economy,” while simultaneously talking about how the people that foresaw the disaster as “weirdos” and makes sure the viewer knows he's “pretty fucking cool.” This latter concern resurfaces later in a scene in a club where he is first told about Burry's plan to short the housing market. Here, he again uses the direct address within the shot where he has just been informed about Burry's plan. The shot is filmed over his shoulder as he is talking to a colleague, and in white typeface, his name appears in the lower left-hand corner. He uses this address for the sole purpose of telling the viewer: “I told you we'd meet later. Unfortunately it's in a place like this which I would never be. I never hung out with these idiots after work, ever. I had fashion friends.” I will return to this line of dialogue later, but here it is sufficient to note that Gosling's delivery of this line comes across as disingenuous and comedic, therefore, suggesting that our narrator may not tell us the truth in order to make himself look more impressive. Whatever intimacy has been developed with the audience, this moment of discomfort from Jared alters the power dynamic between viewer and speaker intensifying Jared's vulnerability, which is established by Chion as a direct result of said de-acousmatization. Furthermore, with regards to Brown's functions, Jared has a significant amount of agency in the narrative. Although Jared, as an agent, works more like a catalyst, much like Iago in Shakespeare's Othello, he can act of his own volition, but is not the primary causal agent. Also, with this information, he is given, he now has a “[s]uperior epistemic position within the fictional world” which is verified by the diegesis. However, this also leaves unexplained why he knows so much about rest of the narrative in his voice over, and therefore creates logical inconsistency. This could also be seen as a moment of instanciation, wherein the viewer is taken out of the narrative, but brought emotionally into the moment. This occurs even as the moment is identified as distasteful to Jared as he suggests that the constructed scene is potentially untrue as he would never be in a place like this with these people. Here, we see the disconnect between Jared's voice over, which is sincere if a bit smarmy, and his direct address, where he is not entirely trustworthy due to his desire to look more impressive. This moment incorporates and complicates many of Brown's functions. This characterological inconsistency is enhanced by the third side of Jared, as a character involved in the narrative and the action, able to behave in an unflattering way, but with a significant amount of reflection in voice over and direct address. This can be seen particularly in the scene where he tries to sell Mark on the idea of buying housing shorts. Once it is explained, Mark's colleague Danny (Rafe S