Another in the long list of Showtime's attempts to create a conservative ideological counter-point to HBO's progressivism. This film pulls out every trick in the book to re-cast corporate profiteers as inherently honest, decent people.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If you turned to Showtime's new show Billions hoping to find an incisive critique of Wall Street investment, of the hedge funds and big money that led to the 2008 Financial Crisis, then you will be sorely disappointed. Sure, in the first two episodes, it does seem to be heading in that direction: there's a dogged U.S. Attorney (Paul Giamatti) who's focused all his attention and the resources of his office towards building a prosecution of Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) of Axe Capital, what seems to be at this early point of the series the representative of all that's evil and wrong with hedge-funds and the financial sector. Initially, we see critically the endless parade of empty juvenile behavior at the hedge fund itself, its reliance on a therapist/counselor for all its major decisions (you'd really think she should run the thing), and the secret dark alley, basement transactions with some guy with a goatee. But the negative image surely almost every person on earth outside of finance has today, in 2016, slowly starts to lose its grip as the series begins to mount a counter-critique: while conforming mostly to our pre-conceptions of this theme in the first two episodes, it begins to diverge from it in subtle and very clearly planned and orchestrated ways in the subsequent three.

Initially, its impressive and also interesting the way these people talk to each-other: everyone always knows the limits of the others knowledge, knows themselves so well that dialogue is an endless stream of: 'I know you like this idea, that's why I'm considering it even though I'm in an uncomfortable spot because of it, but you already know that, and since you know me so well and that I could never go against you, I guess I'm just going to have to do it' (wink-wink, smug-smile-shrug). Clearly, there is something in this self-awareness that is characteristic of an idealized version of inter-personal interactions: that certain kinds of big personalities are able to transcend the messy, irreconcilability of the normal form of a social interaction, that quickly and predictably descends into opinion, political or personal disagreement. This is the dialogue of Aaron Sorkin, what made The Newsroom, Jobs, and The Social Network interesting. This is also characteristic of Eric Rohmer, whose French films almost always show us individuals taking their inescapable logic to its extreme (the person who, at lunch, defends her vegetarianism and just about every other specific 'lifestyle choice'). And its also the logic of the Western rugged individualist character of the HBO series Deadwood, in the swearing and idiosyncratic language used to overcome and preserve the distance between strangers in a wild, open territory.
However, as the series progresses contradictions begin to appear: suddenly the U.S. Attorney is gripped by an inexplicable sexual desire to park his SUV outside a 'seedy' sex-club (it has a sex-pink neon light, so we know), call his wife and then enter the club under extreme duress while continuing to speak to his wife with an earphone in his ear while she orders him to kneel on the floor to participate in a club so full of absurdly contrived and sanitized bondage scenes it boggles the mind that it could be taken seriously. Then, there is the situation where the U.S. Attorney refuses to recuse himself from the case he's building against Axe Capital despite that his wife works there, goes to Idaho to interview a wholesome husband and wife farming couple about leaking insider information on some genetically modified grain or pesticide to a trader at Axe Capital, where they are dishonestly compelled to sign an affidavit testifying to their involvement in the scheme that then implicates them in the prosecutions case and that subjects them to the criminal charges that the U.S. Attorney had just finished promising them would not happen if they were honest. So, the U.S. Attorney turns out to be a dishonest opportunist with strange, abnormal desires already by the end of the fifth episode, rather than the fearless pit bull for justice he appeared to be initially.

At the same time, Bobby Axelrod is getting a humanizing treatment: sitting down with the head of the policeman's union, he's told how the union only chose Axe Capital because of how Axelrod understood the market not as something abstract, but as a 'living organism', how he 'lights up' when he talks about it (the show is suddenly profoundly poetic on these points). We are shown an interaction between two people who have deep expert knowledge of the market, no asymmetry of knowledge, where the police union representative is testing Axelrod on detailed knowledge and Axelrod displays his deep and intimate knowledge of the trades he's made, and both confirm that their relationship, this banter between experts, is precisely what is so important above all else. This is the opposite image of union and pension funds interaction with the world of high finance. Usually, and more appropriately and truthfully, the scenario is that unsuspecting unions and pension funds have given over the life savings and retirement funds workers will count on for years into old age to risky hedge fund managers who care nothing for them, who have in fact duped them into committing this money in the hope of getting easy returns.
And so, when this transformation starts to happen its apparent that whatever congruence there was in the early episodes between the reality of the finance industry and this representation of it was nothing more than a ruse to draw its audience in before turning the tables and constructing an alternate version on top of it, one much more sympathetic to finance. This is precisely the same thing Homeland did, in almost exactly the same way and according to the same timeline and tempo for the defense of the tactics used by Intelligence agencies post-9/11 to fight terrorism. In that case you had the rehabilitation of these spying agencies and their incredible and illegal over-reach, their warrantless wiretapping, boundless mobile-phone data collection, the spying on allies; here, we get the attempted rehabilitation of the finance industry, their greed, illegal conduct, and voracious appetite for unimagineable profits re-framed as simply human, as just the product of the informal knowledge any true leader and visionary has at the peak of their power. Rather, suspicion is cast on the real enemy of the public defender, the U.S. Attorney who will break laws and commit real crimes against common decency for the sake of his own career and political ambitions.
Both of these shows are, quite frankly, nasty and devious attempts to market a defunct ideology, to wrap it up in something that shines and looks and feels cool and edgy so as to slide the ideology into the mental back-door, which is its vulnerable emotional underbelly. Whereas Homeland was permeated with Jazz music and a kind of creativity that emanated from it that suffused the criminal activities of the government agencies with coolness that worked to legitimize it; here, we are faced with smooth talking, clean, shining examples of reasonable people who treat each-other according to a principle of the 'honesty of self-interest', who trade expensive racing bikes for old, retro beach-cruisers (but somehow get the best of the deal), who jump on private jets to see a Metallica show, who are instantly the most desirable people backstage despite being the oldest and most boring, who get a private audience with the band for no reason other than money, but whose Vegas-style guys-weekend is strictly limited by honest, moral social commitments that prevent them from going too far.
In short, we should not accept the weird bondage club that masquerades as something taboo: there is nothing taboo about this clean-looking museum of strange sex acts and there is nothing strange about these sex-acts at all, in fact. Simply put, this show, and Homeland before it, are empty, soulless, superficial attempts to market ideology, nothing more. And they reek of dishonesty and pathetic ignorance because of it, which is all the more unfortunate because we have come to expect great things from the revolution taking place now on television, that arose from out of HBO series like The Sopranos or Six Feet Under. In this context, it really does appear that Showtime's role in the premium pay-channel quality programming space is being exploited as a political intervention into a domain that has been clearly dominated by a more liberal and progressive politics, in order to market its owners' or investors' own 'conservative' (but which is really radically liberal and individualist) Ayn Rand-like philosophy.