Random Late Summer Notes: Blah Blah Blah - Page 4

A fair amount of the information about the movie's private equity fund, Manchurian Global, is provided in voice-over news reports, and among the sins ascribed to it only the accusation of price-gouging is at all plausible. (This could happen if the fund bought a large enough stake in a company to influence management decisions. All the same, overreaching in business is hardly a recent phenomenon.) My favorite nitwit bit in the movie is the reference to the private equity fund's operating through a "subsidiary partner," which is a phrase comparable to Faye Dunaway's "sister-daughter" in Chinatown except there's no possible situation in which it could be used. And how on earth would a private equity fund make money from capitalizing a private army? What's the nature of the income stream--interest? dividends?

The moviemakers have no inkling of how to approach these issues and neither do the mystified critics. The movie's nefarious private equity fund is referred to as "a huge corporation" in The New Republic, "a multinational corporation" in the Austin Chronicle and the Dallas Observer, "a Halliburton-like multinational corporation" in the Onion, a "global conglomerate" on FilmThreat.com, a "multinational conglomerate" in Slate, a "multinational defense conglomerate" in the New York Times, and a "multi-national corporate conglomerate" in the Oregonian. ("Why say 'gila monster' when you can say 'Godzilla'?" appears to be the operative theory.) Even the Wall Street Journal, for goodness' sake, calls it "a vast multinational corporation." (Isn't it odd that writers, of all people, wouldn't realize that different phrases have different meanings?)

Even sadder than the imprecision of the paranoia is the embracing of it: Slate finds compensation in the "dread that permeates" the movie, and of course all of the appreciative reviews could be keyed to the sentiment in Rolling Stone, that, with the villain changed into a "powerful corporation" "in the Halliburton-Tyco-Enron era," the climax "couldn't be timelier." Which is ironic, since, according to this Deal.com report, "Through the early part of the [current] decade returns had lagged and many [private equity] funds were in the red as valuations fell and it became increasingly difficult to exit investments." I take all this critical palaver simply to mean that the movie twitches with the same complacently ill-informed liberal anxiety that moves the critics. My point isn't that a writer should have to pass a course in business organizations to qualify as a movie critic, but that mainstream critics' field of endeavor is the art of narrative, not business or politics--if only they knew it!

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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