1) The film The Big Short breaks the fourth wall and uses episodic sequences to tell the story of the 2008 financial crisis in a way that viewers can relate to as lived experience rather than just history. 2) It uses techniques like voiceovers, stock footage from the mid-2000s, and celebrity explanations to educate viewers about complicated economic concepts in an accessible way. 3) The film invites viewers to participate in constructing a public memory and understanding of the crisis through the narration of Ryan Gosling, who directly addresses the audience and acknowledges fictional elements.

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“I Lived It”: Fourth-Wall Breaking and Episodic Sequences in The Big Short
In a review of Adam McKay’s 2015 film, The Big Short, Gwen Moritz illustrates the
unique challenge of creating an appealing and lucrative film about the 2008 financial crisis:
“As I walked out of the theater, I overheard two men who had just watched the same movie. ‘Did you read
the book?’ one asked. ‘Didn't have to,’ his friend responded.‘I lived it.’”
In 2008, the American economy crashed in unexpectedly violent and sudden fashion. I
vaguely recall blips in my Facebook newsfeed about Wall Street while killing time during a ten-
minute break as a barista. ‘How does this concern me?’ I remember musing. Having graduated
from a top-tier private research university two years prior, still struggling with
underemployment, working two part-time jobs just to make ends meet (while not making rent)
and pay the monthly premiums on my student loans, Wall Street felt like twenty-five worlds
away. But, then, again, I was struggling with underemployment just to make ends meet after
having graduated from a top-tier research university. I came into adulthood as the housing crisis
was beginning to coalesce, unbeknownst to me and just about every other American. Wrapped
up in relationship drama, figuring out T9 texting, obsessively curating my mp3 collection, and
running amok with fellow camp counselors, I failed to see the writing on the wall of the
impending bank collapse. I just surmised that I had chosen a useless undergraduate major, and
nobody wanted to hire me, fancy pedigree or not. I lived through the economic downturn
waiting, paying dues, biding my time for a well-paying full-time job in my field...which did not
come until 2012. Meanwhile, I watched family friends lose their small businesses, their jobs,
their houses. I, too, opted not to read Michael Lewis’ bestselling book, The Big Short, before
viewing the 2015 film adaptation because, like the two men overheard in the theater, I lived it. I
lived during that time, and really had no idea what happened and why it happened. I went to the
movies in hopes of reaching an understanding of why I was so poor for years, why I couldn’t get
a job, and why my friends’ parents suffered financial ruin. I wanted a visual depiction of an
invisible disaster.
Unlike most historical films, The Big Short narrativizes a disaster that the majority of its
viewers understand as lived experience, not just as public memory. This complicates the
principle of identification that Blakesley names as a crucial element of the movie-going
experience. He writes: “We desire to become the other, to inhabit that psychological and physical
space, to take ownership of some kind, to walk in someone else’s shoes for awhile” (Blakesley
117). With The Big Short, however, viewers walk in their own shoes, returning to potentially
painful memories of ten years past. In order to navigate this tenuous situation, director McKay
intentionally breaks the fourth wall, unsuturing viewers from his cinematic reality when it comes
too close to their reality. In an interview for the New York Times, he quips: “You have to feel
the world. . . . What were we thinking about? I didn’t see the collapse coming. What was I busy
with? What were we all busy with?” (Ryzik AR18). Rather than feeling-with a particular
character in the film, McKay creates a film in which viewers feel the whole world (or rather, the

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American ‘world’) at the time of the biggest financial crisis since 1929. Using dizzying episodic
sequences of stock photos, news footage, sound bites, and time-lapse photography of
construction, director McKay and editor Hank Corwin call upon the seemingly endless vault of
Americans’ public memory of mass culture—largely comprised of technology, entertainment,
and advertising—an assertion that the material of late capitalism has unseated politics and
finance from its privileged place in public memory. Images send the viewer hurtling back in time
and compel the viewer to both recall personal experiences and participate in a project of public
memory. Consubstantiality, a term that Blakesley utilizes from Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of
Motives, is actually familiar to me by way of theological studies. An ancient and common creed
of belief states that Jesus is “consubstantial with the Father.” To put it less metaphysically,
Jonathan Cohen writes: “Identification means that the knowledge of the audience members is
processed from the character’s perspective and is transformed into empathic emotions” (Cohen
251). McKay takes a different tack, inviting viewers to retain their own stories, their own
identities as Americans wounded by Wall Street, watching a film that answers the frequently-
asked question: ‘What the hell happened to the economy in 2008? He creates a unique history of
the collapse of the housing market through direct narration, episodic sequences and non-diegetic
pop music from the mid-00s, and by completely breaking the film’s narrative with celebrity
economics lessons as a palliative against the pain of remembering a past that viewers at once
don’t understand and can’t seem to forget.
Ryan Gosling’s Double-Duty as Both Actor and Tour Guide
McKay invites viewers to see and be seen by using Ryan Gosling as an on-screen
narrator, as well as an active participant in the film’s narrative. Viewers are invited to engage in
a conversation about the financial crisis. As Kendall Phillips posits, “It is to speak of a
remembrance together, indeed, of remembrance together as a crucial aspect of our togetherness,
our existence as a public”(4). In other words, participating in a collective remembrance of the
events of the mid-00s financial crisis not only educates, but functions as an opportunity for the
shaping of one’s identity as an American. The Big Short is a complicated historical narrative
object of public memory insofar as it recounts and interprets events that the vast majority of
Americans were unaware of, both as they were taking place and also after the fact. Due to the
cavalier mentality of the immortality of the American economy, we did not see the writing on the
wall, blindsided by financial ruin. McKay’s extensive use of voice-over—a filmic technique
more common to documentary, provides much-needed guidance through the jungle of Wall
Street, mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, tranches, investment banking. The narration in The
Big Short is rendered more effective due to its colloquial, confessional tone. Ryan Gosling
comments: “In the late 80s, 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 accounting. And if banking
was boring, then the bond department at the bank was straight-up comatose.” The use of
expletives—vernacular language, rather than academic discourse—compels us to treat the

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narrator as a friend, rather than an instructor. This builds rapport. As a rather unkempt,
overweight Italian man with mustard on his shirt enters the frame, the narrator introduces him:
Lewis Ranieri, the man behind mortage-backed securities. Gosling explains: “You might not
know who he is, but he changed your life, more than Michael Jordan, the iPod, and YouTube put
together.” The narration sets up the presentation of a coherent narrative in place of the average
viewer’s jumble of memories of the mid 00s: a disorganized mess of sound bites, news coverage,
personal memories of lost savings or disappeared investments, with the promise that the film will
make sense of it all, if we—the viewers—place our trust in Gosling, and in The Big Short.
Hayden White asserts: “narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general
human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling” (1). In the case of
the financial collapse of 2008, only a few experts KNEW what was going on, and even fewer of
those keepers-of-knowledge TOLD anything about what was about to happen. The use of direct
narration—breaking the fourth wall, directly addressing the viewer, and interrupting the
traditional filmic narrative, serves to directly tell the story. While this technique is necessary with
other objects of public memory, such as 9/11 and the Vietnam War, the smoke and mirrors and
willful denial of the power-players on Wall Street render Ryan Gosling’s narration thoroughly
necessary. Given the topic, I cannot imagine The Big Short as a successful film without
Gosling’s narration. While other historical topics may allow for what White refers to as “the
artificiality of the notion that real events could ‘speak themselves or be represented as ‘telling
their own story,’” the confusing nature of the banking and housing industries renders the direct
historiography absolutely necessary (3).
After an episodic sequence that visually assaults viewers with images and video of
objects of mass culture, housing Gosling then directs his commentary straight at the viewer as
they presumably sit sobered by the images of foreclosed-upon houses and homeless shelter lines:
“I’m guessing most of you still don’t really know what happened.” This highlights the
heightened importance and impact of The Big Short: namely, that the public be educated on
precisely what happened, and to invite conversation and remembrance on the topic. This
elevates the discourse from recollection of personal memories to the construction of a public
memory of the financial crisis. As Phillips writes, the distinction between the former and the
latter are that “these public memories are those about which we can interact, deliberate, share”
(4). Ryan Gosling’s dual function as both essential character in the narrative, as Jared Vennett,
and as the film’s narrator, actively invite viewers to interact and deliberate on the topic at hand.
McKay also uses the breaking-the-fourth wall moments to openly acknowledge elements
that are technically inaccurate, having been modified for the sake of smoothness of narrative.
The viewer is not stupid, so the movie affirms that self-confidence by explicitly stating when the
film has breached that trust. At the end of the Jenga illustration of the shoddy, unstable nature of
many Mortgage securities, “the math guy” turns to the audience. “Actually, my name is Jung,
and I do speak English. Jarred likes to say I don’t because he thinks it makes me seem more
authentic. And actually, I got second in that national math competition.” The use of humor serves
as a palliative against the residual pain from the largest financial crisis since the Great

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Depression. This acknowledgement of dishonesty in the name of the construction of a coherent
narrative also maintains trust between the filmmaker and the viewer. By breaking the narrative in
order to explicitly admit the artificiality of the historical reconstruction of the financial crisis,
viewers are lulled into the suspension of disbelief on other matters. Do I know for sure whether
the other events preceding and following Jung’s interruption are historically accurate? No. But
do I care to expend energy on fact-checking? Also, no: because I trust that the film tells the truth
about its lies, and otherwise, it tells the truth of the events it chronicles and interprets.