Ultimately, Margin Call is structured like a horror-monster movie.

Semafor has a short essay exploring why the 2011 financial meltdown film Margin Call is so beloved by a Wall Street culture it partly condemns.

(Spoilers to come.) The overall answer is that it’s the quality of the film. First, it’s the cast: Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore. Perhaps best of all was Paul Bettany, who gives an absolutely note-perfect performance as an ambitious but chastened trader. Second, it’s the concise nature of the film, in which you witness a trading firm that is letting people go at the start of a recession. One character discovers that the firm’s trading model no longer fits financial reality, and within 24 hours, as that notion lands on one tranche of decision makers after another, the same firm finds itself selling off its position in an attempt to live another day and thereby initiating a global financial meltdown, from which the survivors — we are assured — will profit. Third, the writing. J. C. Chandor grew up the son of a finance man and understood the language and rhythms of this world, and how to introduce people to them:

Ultimately, Margin Call is structured like a horror-monster movie. The monster is lurking in the spreadsheet that Quinto’s character solves. It’s the number that would wipe out the firm entirely if trading just goes sideways. The audience never sees the monster, we just see people reacting to it. And what is their reaction? They never want to meet this thing in real life, and so they transform their firm — overnight, into something so sleek and lightweight that the monster can never find them. Doing so makes them something of the monster to the wider financial world — they’re selling assets to counterparties when they know the values are going down so fast that whoever is holding them will be tagged a loser forever. And there is a moral sophistication to it, too. Paul Bettany’s character, Will Emerson, gives a speech to an underling defending the system, and implicating the rest of us:

Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you’re necessary and you are. People wanna live like this with their cars and big f***in’ houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary. The only reason they all get to continue living like kings is because we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really f***in’ fair really f***in’ quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well, that’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow, so f*** ’em. F*** normal people. You know, the funny thing is, tomorrow if all of this goes t**s up they’re gonna crucify us for being too reckless, but if we’re wrong, and everything gets back on track? Well then, the same people are gonna laugh till they piss their pants cause we’re gonna all look like the biggest pussies God ever let through the door.

This is a lot better than the almost equally entertaining The Big Short, which casts Mark Baum as a moralizing and sympathetic scold of greed, who gets vengeance on the bad banks.

Bettany’s Emerson says, in effect: Why do we have credit cards with these interest rates? Why do we have a student loan pile we’ll never get out from under? Why are our houses overvalued investment vehicles? Because normal people want them that way. Emerson’s moral realism provokes the audience. If you don’t like what we’re doing, you have to examine what you’re doing.