A must-see documentary: Maxed Out

Last night we watched Maxed Out, a documentary by James Scurlock that examines the American debt crisis from both the angle of personal debt and the national debt situation. This one had been sitting in our Netflix queue for a while, until Joy moved it up the list a bit recently because she thought it would be especially interesting in light of the current debt bailout crisis.  It was one of those films I felt would be important to watch, but I had procrastinated because I felt it would be dry and preachy and tell me things I already knew. It was actually extremely interesting and very well-done, and we both learned a great deal from it.

We gave Maxed Out a five rating when we returned it (and I should point out that we’re pretty stingy with our fives) and I was surprised to see that the film didn’t have a higher average user rating on Netflix; I googled a bit this morning to see what sort of feedback it had generated from others… The criticisms I mainly saw from film critics were that the film’s style trivialized the situation and that it didn’t talk enough about how to solve the problem, or about why American society is so prone to incurring debt to bgin with. In answer to both points, I think that a big challenge for documentary filmmakers is the balance of getting as much information across as possible in a way that keeps the viewer engaged and doesn’t ‘beat them over the head’ with the subject matter, and I think they did a great job in this context. They certainly conveyed the gravity of the situation to me, and it seems to me that one would be naive to expect that the larger cultural reasons (and possible solutions to the mess) are something that can be summed up in an eighty-six minute documentary.

Several of the review sites also had a comments section where readers could post their own feedback, and reading some of these comments shed a bit more light on the lackluster rating on Netflix — as well as saying a lot about the nasty side of our culture. Most of the disparaging comments were from people who felt that the people in the film, who had racked up so much credit card debt that they wound up losing everything, (several even committed suicide) deserved what they got. I saw several references to the film being ‘one sided’ in it’s treatment of predatory lending, and the feeling from many people seemed to be that those who didn’t understand the details of their credit card contracts were much more at fault than the predatory lendors (who know exactly what they are doing) that targeted them. ‘If someone takes advantage of your stupidity, it’s your own fault for being stupid’ seems to be the prevailing attitude.

I had to wonder how many of the people who wrote those comments actually took the time to watch the movie, as I can’t imagine how they could be so callous and downright mean if they had. I am not saying that there is no personal responsibility involved here, that people shouldn’t be held accountable for bad decisions, but I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that people focus all their derision upon the individuals who got into bad situations through ignorance and poor financial planning, and let the corporations who preyed upon them off scott free?

To dumb the analogy down a bit, imagine you are living in a primitive society (yeah, even more so than now) and there’s this nasty little group in the tribe that has a racket going where they set traps for the other tribe members so that they can take all of their belongings. They dig pits and line them with sharp spikes, and then hang a piece of fruit over the trap. Along comes Ogg. Let’s suppose that Ogg is even less of a deep thinker than the other cavemen… Or perhaps Ogg has had really little success hunting lately and is starving… So Ogg makes a dive for the fruit, falls through the trap, and is impaled on the stakes. Now, maybe some of the tribe is thinking, when they see this, ‘those guys over on the hill that dug that pit, the ones with all the best huts and the most food, aren’t very nice’ but instead of doing anything about that, they all stand around the pit hopping up and down and laughing about how stupid Ogg was and it was his own fault for not looking where he was going.

OK, I guess that was a really dumb analogy, in fact (a) I just felt my own IQ drop at least 10 points and (b) MMM… a banana would be really tasty right now. But anyway, I see the same thing going on with this debt bailout. Are we helping the small businesses that are closing, the people who are in foreclosure? No. Why are we giving the money to the people who caused the mess? It’s easy for us to blame it on some couple who could only afford a hundred thousand dollar house and bought a four hundred and fifty thousand dollar house, but what about the company offering them the 450K with a bazillion-page fine print contract and the slick salesman smoothly telling them not to worry about reading all that, that they could really afford it, that this was a great idea?

I learned some things that shocked (but didn’t really surprise) me from this movie… like the fact that those payday loan companies are actually owned by major banks. That credit card companies pay colleges millions of dollars in deals that allow them to target college kids. That one of George Bush’s biggest campaign contributors was MBNA. Which reminds me, I was struck, listening to his big speech explaining the changes to the bankruptcy laws — which he said were because of all the irresponsible people who get in debt over their heads — with the irony that he could stand and make that statement, knowing that the country has emptied the social security trust just to pay the interest on the trillions of dollars we owe other countries.

Anyway, we’d really recommend this movie. The more people are aware of issues like this, the closer we are to solutions, and keeping more people from getting into these messes.