“The Big Short” was the artifact of interest in this project. We aimed to analyze this film through a lense tinted with theory and thought. Our goal was to break down this film, clearly and concisely laying out the terms the theories used. The movie was directed towards the average American, aiming to educate and inform about the causes of the housing crash with accentuation on how to avoid something like this happening again.
The main purpose of our analysis is to help inform the viewer of the true value and takeaways of what they watched in “The Big Short”. Our analysis will help mediate the problem of people only seeing the movie for its entertainment value, and not its educational and informative value.
We chose a podcast for the very reason of ease of accessibility. A podcast will be easy to listen to while mobile or sedentary, and one can arguably listen rather than read more easily in today’s more technologically advanced world. With our intended audience being people who have viewed “The Big Short”, we felt that this would be a preferred medium, rather than an academic paper or article. We described and elaborated on terms used throughout the movie, allowing nearly anyone to understand it.
The most helpful supplemental materials in our work were the side readings that greatly expanded and layed out the ideologies with which we subscribed. Lanham, Bitzer, Selzer, and Bourdieu were excellent additions and gave us multiple thoughts, economics/social/capital systems, and different versions of rhetoric to consider during the project.
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