The two films: from 2011, Margin Call (on DVD); and from this year, shown on HBO on Sunday night, The Normal Heart.
Margin Call is set in a Wall Street investment bank, on the cusp of the 2007/8 financial crisis; The Normal Heart is set in the gay community of early 1980s New York City, when a crisis has arisen with a then unidentified disease killing off, at an alarming rate, a specific group of people: gay men; the film deals with the rise of HIV-AIDS, and founding of an advocacy group. It's a heart-rending story, difficult to watch at times.
On the surface of it "crisis" seems to be the only common denominator. Something extra occurred to me as I watched The Normal Heart on Sunday, remembering dialogue from Margin Call, seen a couple of evenings before. Time and again in Margin Call, as word spread up the investment bank's hierarchical ladder, the person on the next higher rung would say exactly what his colleagues on previous rungs of the ladder had said to the lowly employee who had stumbled across something darkly sinister in the statistics: "Explain this situation to me purely in layman's terms", or "Tell me exactly as you would explain it to a child, you know I don't understand this stuff". Gob-smacking! (I know the film is a work of fiction, but I suspect there is basis in real life). Even more gob-smacking was when another employee stated that, on several occasions, earlier warnings of something going wrong had been passed up the line, but all these had been routinely ignored.
In The Normal Heart (adapted from a play by Larry Kramer, partly autobiographical), warnings of a disastrous outcome to an unidentified plague were being ignored by those on high, ignorance was being spread, not a single person in a position of power would do anything to help finance proper research. They didn't understand, they didn't want to understand. Even some of the gay men objected to the one person who began fighting very hard for their cause.
What people in both films saw as their entitled way of life, pleasures, level of income, place in the world, was not going to be made available for change under any circumstances. Examples of people in the top layers of finance or governance not being of sufficient caliber to understand and act immediately on these extremely serious situations, and not having enough moral core to care, even though dire warnings were being passed to them.....And then it was too late.
Ring any bells? C-c-c-c-c-climate change?
