Margot Robbie in a bubble bath is attention grabbing, that’s obvious enough. Her sudden and fourth wall breaking appearance in Adam Mckay’s The Big Short would likely be enough to pull your focus away from whatever secondary screen you may be scrolling on. What does an Australian actress sipping champagne have to do with the 2008 financial crisis? …Not much. However, her inclusion makes one thing clear: this movie is not background noise and demands your engagement.

Although a potentially naked woman could likely distract audience members from focusing on her articulate explanation of sub-prime mortgage bonds, editor Hank Corwin remedies this by purposely breaking continuity multiple times. The effect of her repeating or changing a motion between shots is jarring to say the least, but it effectively draws your attention away from the provocative scenario. In Post Cinematic Affect, Steven Shaviro explains that “multiplication and fragmentation of visual sources leads to a certain destitution of the eye, and a consequent shift of emphasis towards the ear.” (p.52, 2010) Consequently, the unexpected non-diegetic storytelling device, paired with rapid editing that purposely breaks continuity, results in the viewer having to actually focus on what is being said. According to Mckay in an interview, it was a ” conscious choice to get that frenetic energy in there, and at the same time we didn’t want it to be stuck in offices the whole time.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apVKoBrWvHk

The imagery of people in suits is equally broken up by the film’s repeated use of collage elements, which takes the audience out of the scene while still temporally orienting them. For instance, the above clip interrupts a slow and quiet scene of Christian Bale’s character attempting to short mortgage bonds, with a 2006 rap music video, clips of interviews, and advertisements. Rather than using post-cinematic editing similarly to action films, which forgo continuity for a chaotic and disorienting effect, it is here used to condense banker jargon into an easily digestible concept: money is being made.

By Lily Thetford (33659272)

References:

Shaviro, S. (2010) Post Cinematic Affect, John Hunt Publishing Limited

McKay, A. (2015) The Big Short. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures. Film.

St.James, E. (2016) Big Short director Adam McKay talks about finding the humor in the financial collapse. Vox. Interview.