'Dumb Money' Ain't Bad, But This Culture of Instant Nostalgia is Terrible

A meme stock makes good, in a fun, forgettable romp that probably isn't anywhere near the whole story. Because how could it be?

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It’s jarring to see Dumb Money, a movie about the GameStop meme stock fiasco, already in theaters. Are we really so thirsty for nostalgia that we need to look back wistfully at things that just happened?

There’s sort of an uncanny valley that naturally takes shape between the two normal peaks of public interest in a news story: Thing That’s Happening Right Now and Hey Remember That Thing? In between those landmarks it’s mostly just old news. Maybe it’s not the “uncanny valley” we normally mean, but it is uncanny and a valley. The Depression of Disinterest, let’s call it. The more ubiquitous the story, the larger the depression. It took 20 years between the OJ Simpson trial and ESPN’s OJ: Made In America docuseries, which won an Oscar and spawned an entire separate, similarly successful scripted series from Ryan Murphy about David Schwimmer saying “Juice.”

20 years turned out to be just about the perfect amount of time for the OJ Simpson trial to climb out of the “old news” depression and reach “remember that” heights. In the process, it became almost as much of a media phenomenon as it was the first time around. The retelling offered the promise not only of nostalgia, but revisionism, reliving old events in such a way that maybe we’d understand what it was actually all about this time around, unencumbered by whatever the sensational news version of “the fog of war” is. Maybe the fog of war is really just the fog of the present. It takes time for a narrative to coalesce and for the characters to reveal their true selves.

And maybe that’s why mine and so many other people’s immediate reaction to the idea of Dumb Money was “too soon.”

We were already hearing about a bidding war for the rights to a GameStop movie less than two weeks after the Robin Hood app froze trades on the stock, which you imagine was one of the major developments in the story. It’d be like optioning the story of World War II a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Yet it’s easy to get swept away in Dumb Money, the first version of this story to hit theaters, starring Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, and America Ferrara, directed by Craig Gillespie from I, Tonya. Much easier still if you didn’t read anything about how it got made. For instance, the fact that there were, by one count, nine other competing GameStop projects in development at one point. So many, in fact, that Dumb Money co-writer Lauren Schuker Blum was contending with a competing project set to be produced by her own husband, Jason Blum.

In order to make the movie, producers needed, in the words of producer Aaron Ryder, “a piece of intellectual property.”

Which is to say a book, an article, a podcast, whatever. It was a case of the tail wagging the dog, the obvious public need for an insightful version of this story predating the story itself.

For that, Dumb Money had author Ben Mezrich, whose skill was and is not necessarily being an insightful storyteller, a bloodhound investigative journalist, or a financial expert, but rather speed, and commercial savvy. As Mezrich himself told NPR, “My dream was never to win a Pulitzer or win a National Book Award. My dream was always having a tie-in paperback that said, ‘now a major motion picture.’”

Weird flex, but you can’t deny the guy knows his niche. Mezrich had a book proposal, “The Antisocial Network,” based on a single day’s research, already out to publishers while the story was still very much ongoing. Nonetheless it was something that could be optioned, a valuable commodity for which he was paid at least seven figures. There’s still a great movie to be made about Mezrich himself, who also wrote the books that became The Social Network, 21, and The Last Casino. “The IP Merchant,” they could call it. I’ve read the Social Network book, and it isn’t particularly insightful or prescient, though it does have some delightfully lurid imagined sex scenes*.

Dumb Money then, exemplifies two related phenomena: the IP-created-solely-to-be-optioned, as perfected by Mezrich, and the Unlikely Business Success Story biopic. Just in the past few years, we’ve gotten movies about the licenser of Tetris, the co-inventor of Air Jordans, a Blackberry guy, a Beanie Babies guy, and of course our friend the guy who didn’t actually invent the Flamin Hot Cheeto, but got a biopic about himself made anyway and eventually had it screened at the White House (you have to respect the hustle, if not the lies about the hustle).

Dumb Money’s Keith Gill, played by Paul Dano, is sort of that, but at least there hasn’t been a high profile podcast about him (as in the case of The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes; Welcome to Chippendales**, starring Kumail Nanjiani as Steve Banerjee; and WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto as Adam Neumann). Gill, known on Reddit as Roaring Kitty, kicks off the famous GameStop “short squeeze” when he buys $50 grand worth of stock in GameStop just as the Wall Street big boys are shorting it and posts his portfolio on Reddit and YouTube.

Gill, a low-level analyst at Mass Mutual, pitches this move as a way to hit back at the big Wall Street guys, yet again trying to profit off killing a company, in this case a mall videogame retailer Gill still remembers fondly. These are essentially the twin appeals of the film, Fuck Wall Street and Remembering Fondly.

Gill taps into the public fury over vampire capital, becoming a viral sensation among retail investors (aka, “dumb money”), as personified by nurse Jenny (America Ferrara), who wants to pay off her mortgage and pay for her kid’s braces, UT students/lesbian partners Riri and Harmony (Myha'la Herrold and Talia Ryder), who want to pay off massive student loan debts, and Marcus (Anthony Ramos), a GameStop employee in Detroit mostly just fed up with his crappy job and annoying, creepy boss (Dane DeHaan).

“Jenny” is apparently based on a real nurse from LA, while Harmony and Riri seem to be composites, of a mother of three named Harmony Murphy, and of Jeremy Poe, a Duke student who borrowed $6,000 from his father to play the stonks (standard Reddit slang for stocks, in case you didn’t know). That they weren’t really an interracial student couple who meet during a hands-down-the-pants drinking game at a college party in Austin makes a lot of sense after the fact, but to Gillespie’s credit, their storyline doesn’t scream “WE MADE UP THIS PART” while you’re watching it either. At least not in the way that, say, the jeep-chasing-the-plane-down-the-runway scene in Argo does. It’s also in keeping with Mezrich’s general narrative strategy of “just stick a sex scene in there for color.” (There are worse storytelling devices).

With all these regular folk getting in on the action, a “short squeeze” ensues. The danger of a short bet is that there’s no limit to the amount of money the bettor can lose when the stock goes up (I can’t remember whether Margot Robbie in a bathtub or Anthony Bourdain cooking explained this during The Big Short***). The rich dicks who stand to lose in this arrangement are billionaire hedge fund guys Gabe Plotkin (a suitably drab Seth Rogen), who’s in the midst of trying to knock down an extra house in order to build a tennis court, and to a lesser extent, his sometime confidant and mentor, Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio), who we see feeding a full-sized pig in his kitchen, and his frenemy/rival Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman)****, who we see (and actually did) relocate his entire firm to a Palm Beach resort to get around COVID restrictions.

One of the strengths of the film is that you don’t have to work too hard or cut many corners to make these guys look like rich, detestable assholes. You can kind of just say “billionaire” and we can do the math. Ditto the Robin Hood trading platform founders Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), who take pains to play up their immigrant origins in interviews while downplaying how they actually make money — which was by directing trade on their platform to preferred sellers (like Ken Griffin’s firm), in something called “payment for order flow.” The movie mentions this several times without really explaining, but basically, they were in bed with the same institutional investors they claimed to be helping their users compete with.

There’s also a natural drama and heist movie tension to the story, which saw Roaring Kitty and his cohorts holding onto their stock even when they could’ve cashed out for millions. Plus the natural David-and-Goliath catharsis, in which this loosely-organized, culty group of retail investors really did sink Gabe Plotkin’s entire fund. That Craig Gillespie chose to illustrate this through a good ten minutes worth of “going viral” montages and stock clips of Barstool’s Dave Portnoy talking about it on podcasts (barf) is, at best, a necessary evil.

There was an obvious story here and Craig Gillespie can shoot an entertaining movie. He casts compelling actors, stages action that moves, and the jokes, written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, mostly all land (Pete Davidson has a winning turn as Keith’s, what else, dirtbag Brockton Mass brother, Kevin*****). This holds true even in scenes that don’t necessarily add much to our understanding of this story or futher the themes of its retelling.

For my money, the biggest crime of dramatic license comes in the movie’s epilogue text (and if you didn’t think Dumb Money would have epilogue text, you haven’t seen a movie in the last ten years). The movie certainly could’ve done a better job acknowledging that its happy ending was a bit of a false one. Gabe Plotkin’s firm may have gone under, but, as the film does actually note, no one has yet gotten in trouble for colluding to freeze trading on Robin Hood just as the Short Squeeze was setting in — essentially flipping over the game board because powerful entities didn’t like who was winning.

The biggest crime comes after that though, when the movie claims, in its final text, that “Wall Street can never ignore ‘dumb money’ again.”

Not only is that patently untrue even by the loosest standards, it seems to imply that this battle that played out on the stock market was actually about the stock market. If this movement had been solely about the right to make money on stocks, these characters would’ve just sold out the second they got rich. Instead they didn’t, maybe just in the hopes of getting even richer, but at least partly to punish people they thought were bad. They wanted to see those guys lose so much that they were willing to lose themselves. The obvious question of the story is, where did all that spite come from?

They weren’t fighting for the right to be investors, they were fighting for the right to live dignified lives, without being immiserated on a daily basis by do-nothing, rent-seeking capital — without the businesses that they patronize and work for and their public institutions being constantly enshittified by glorified gamblers. Why should the job of manipulating markets be worth billions while the job of taking care of sick people or making food requires living under crushing debt?

Now the investing might of the retail investor could no longer be ignored! Dumb Money triumphantly screams in its final seconds.

This note lands so sour because, like the horseshit Flamin Hot movie before it, it posits that the end goal of the everyman isn’t equity or extracting concessions from market makers, but merely recognition. Oh good, the guys who got me laid off and foreclosed on my father’s house gave us a shoutout! I guess we can go home now!

The moment stands out in a movie that’s otherwise pretty entertaining and cathartic, but as far as oopsies go, that one is kind of a doozy. With a few more months or years in development, I’m sure these talented filmmakers could’ve worked it out. But that would require a market for non-fiction storytelling that rewarded the most insightful, rather than merely the fastest and most connected.

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*From Accidental Billionaires:

Eduardo’s heart slammed in his chest as he careened into the bathroom stall, his Italian leather shoes skidding against the tiled linoleum floor. The tall, slender Asian girl was straddling him, her long bare legs wrapped around his waist, her skirt riding upward, her lithe body arching as he pressed her back against the stall. His hands roamed under her open white shirt, tracing the soft material of her red bra, his fingers lingering over her perky, round breasts, touching the silky texture of her perfect caramel skin. She gasped, her lips closing against the side of his neck, her tongue leaping out, tasting him. His entire body started to quiver, and he rocked forward, pushing her harder against the stall, feeling her writhe into him.

**Which actually stole from the high-profile podcast rather than optioning it, ALLEGEDLY, though that’s another story.

***Michael Burry, the short seller played by Christian Bale in the Big Short, actually bought a big position in GameStop but apparently sold before the Reddit surge.

****The real Ken Griffin tried to sicc his lawyers on the production, naturally.

*****I was pleased to discover that Keith and Kevin’s sister, Sara, dying in 2020 wasn’t just something that the movie invented for dramatic heft.