The Descendants

December 11, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

Children in American movies are typically superior to adults. The kids are not only all right, they are wiser, less corrupt, and more competent. “Home Alone” is a classic example, where the plucky, resourceful kid triumphs over both the vindictiveness of the burglars and the mindlessness of his parents. (An earlier post on children in films is here.)

 “The Descendants,” the recent film with George Clooney (I saw it last night), starts more like a French film, where children are, well, children, and it’s the parents who must endure and learn to cope with the kids’ immaturity and thoughtlessness.

Clooney is Matt King, and the name is a deliberate irony. Kinglike, he must decide the fate of a huge tract of pristine Kauai land that his family has owned for many generations. The money from the sale will make him and his many cousins and their families rich. Which developer will he sell the land to?

But as a husband and father he is far being monarch of all he surveys. His wife has been in an accident and lies in a coma. His two daughters are unapologetically impudent and insufferable. As the film starts, Scottie, age ten, has sent a nasty, obscene text to a classmate. Alex, seventeen, now at an expensive private rehab/therapeutic school, first appears on screen drunk, having sneaked out of her room at night with another girl. Then there’s Sid, Alex’s friend, a slightly older boy, all stupidity and insensitivity, a chubby incarnation of Beavis and Butthead.

Then the film magically transforms the kids. Each has been introduced as obtuse, obscene, or obnoxious. But now Alex, it turns out, knows more than her father does, at least in one crucial area – that his wife, now on life support, had been cheating on him.

The kids change from being French, a burden for the grown-up, to becoming almost classically American, not superior but equal. They are now his partners. Teens and adult are a team trying to discover the identity and location of the seducer so that King can confront him. The teenagers are suddenly much less difficult and much more helpful, while King sometimes appears uncertain and even silly, peering over hedges to spy on his wife’s lover. He asks his daughter for advice. He even asks Sid what he should do.

(You can get some sense of this transformation in the trailers here and here, which also outline the rest of the story.) Still, the movie doesn’t go pure Hollywood. It does not present the world as a character contest where good faces evil, where the right action is clear and the only question is how the hero will come to make it. Instead, it shows a grown-up trying to understand and cope with problems and people he cannot really control.

And nobody blows up a helicopter.

Loan Sharks

December 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Back when I knew about such things, a typical arrangement with a loan shark was the standard $100 knock-down loan.  The shylock gave you $100; you paid him back $20 a week for six weeks.  It works out to something like 175% interest a year, maybe more since in the sixth week you’re paying $20 vig even though you’ve paid off the $100 principle. I think Sudhir Vankatesh found that Chicago loansharks were offering more extended payback periods, hence a lower rate.   Still, when you consider that usury laws used to set the limit at less than 50%, 175% a year looks pretty steep.

I’m an upstanding professor, and I do not deal with loan sharks.  Instead, I have a credit card with a highly respectable bank, J.P. Morgan Chase. Last month, I must have missed their e-mail alerting me to my bill, and I didn’t pay it. It was only $175. How much could my neglect possibly cost me?  I mean, after all, I wasn’t dealing with some mobbed-up shylock. This was JP Morgan. 

Here is what my bill for this month looks like.

In effect, the bank was lending me the $175 for a month.  In return, they charged me $2.66 interest plus a $25 fee.  That works out to nearly 190% a year. 

In the great bank bailout, JP Morgan got  about $25 billion (or was it $50 billion?) in government money.  I don’t know the details of the deal. I don’t know what interest rate they settled on. But in my bill-induced reverie, I imagine Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson saying to Jamie Dimon, “You got a nice bank here, and I’d hate to see it go under.  So what do you say I fix you up with a $25 billion knockdown loan?  Only 175%. By your standards, that’s a bargain.”