Maxed Out, James Scurlock’s documentary about the
American way of debt, suffers from the usual problem with political
documentaries these days: a surfeit of targets. The explosion of
consumer credit would have been a subject well worth looking at on
its own, but Mr. Scurlock piles on political corruption, corporate
greed, bad accounting practices, the bankruptcy laws, credit
reporting bureaus, the religious right, campaign finance, deficit
spending, and income inequality. Even the Iraq war comes in for a
mention or two. In other words, if you look at it in strictly
political terms, the film also has too few targets. In
fact, only one. Like Michael Moore and many others on the
bumper-sticker left — including, most recently, David Remnick of
the New Yorker — it too often succumbs to the temptation
of assuming that, if only George W. Bush was not president, a world
of problems would simply disappear.
This assumption is the infallible mark of political
unseriousness, whether in a politician, a journalist, or a
film-maker. However poor his performance in office, the President
has much less power over events than his enemies give him credit
for, and the debt problem is like most of the others we face —
including even Iraq — in having roots that long antedate the 2000
election. Not only is Mr. Scurlock guilty of political
over-simplification, but his political agenda blinds him to some of
the real and much more interesting social causes of the phenomena
he adumbrates. He never mentions, for example, the subject of
shame.
Within living memory, loan sharks were classed in the popular
imagination with pimps, prostitutes, pornographers, drug dealers,
gamblers and others who made their living out of preying upon the
weakest in society. Now such people, with the possible and only
partial exception of drug dealers, are glorified by the popular
culture instead of being made to feel ashamed. State governments
have taken over from the numbers racket as the chief purveyors of
gambling opportunities to the poorest and most vulnerable. Could
this have anything to do with the fact that, as Maxed Out
demonstrates, so many of the most respectable banks and other good
corporate citizens now depend on something close to loan-sharking
for the lion’s share of their profits — and that they are quite
brazen about admitting it?
In all the many tales of woe that it seeks to milk for their
undeniable pathos, never once does Maxed Out breathe a
word of censure against those who have got themselves into serious
debt trouble. Its model is the therapeutic one that also now
applies to alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling and an ever lengthening
list of other human frailties. Debt is a form of addiction. Fair
enough, we may say. It would probably have been foolish to have
expected the film to take any other view of the matter. But if you
say A you must also say B. If there is no moral dimension to
becoming a debtor, why should we suddenly suppose that there is one
to becoming a creditor, even a predatory one? It’s a two-way
transaction, after all. Just like prostitution. If, in other words,
it’s morally unproblematic to supply the susceptible with such
other instruments of self-harm, or even self-destruction, as
alcohol, drugs, sex and games of chance, why not credit too?
At one point Mr. Scurlock appears to think he has coaxed a
damaging admission from a couple of raffish debt-buyers — or duns,
as they used to be called — who compare themselves to pirates,
walking their hapless victims out to the edge of the plank until
they cough up, then walking them back. He even provides a humorous
illustration of the process with a clip from an old pirate movie.
Yet he never notices what would have seemed to almost anyone only a
few years ago the most striking thing about the comparison: the
fact that the pirates are proud of being pirates. Well,
why shouldn’t they be? Haven’t two of the most profitable movies
for the family-friendly Disney corporation in the past few years
been called Pirates of the Caribbean? Who’s ever taught
them that being a pirate, any more than being a debtor, is wrong or
shameful?
Another of Mr. Scurlock’s touches of humor comes with periodic
clips from an educational film of the 1950s in which a
respectable-looking, white-haired old gent called “Mr. Money”
instructs two clean-cut high-school-aged kids of the period about
responsible attitudes to assuming debt. As with any similar filmic
reference to people who look like these and talk in that stilted
way they had in1950s-era documentaries, the subtext is one of
ridicule for their up-tightness and artificiality. Yet what has
Maxed Out got to offer instead of such old-fashioned
moralism? Nothing but, by implication, the exhortation to vote
Democratic. If he thinks that’s going to solve the problem, Mr.
Scurlock is as gullible as the pathetic creatures he showcases in
his film.
