Hyper-Masculinity, Limitless Wealth, and Systemic Collapse: the Great Recession in The Wolf of Wall Street, Margin Call, and The Company Men

This thesis investigates hyper-masculinity and limitless wealth in significant films portraying the Great Recession, showing the connections between gender, economy, and systemic collapse. The analysis focuses on three films: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Margin Call (2011) and The Company Men (2010). In these films, finance capitalist culture shapes the masculine identity of the protagonists and their collapse. The thesis reveals how cinema both reflects and questions prevailing ideals of success, gender identity and economic power. The Great Recession has been extensively analyzed from an economic or political point of view, but fewer scholars have regarded cinema as a translator of the recession anxieties into cultural narratives. Linking the analysis of the recession with current discussions, it becomes evident that these myths endure in contemporary America. The thesis finds that masculinity is a construct in continuous crisis, closely connected to economic instability. The films criticize the myth of limitless wealth by exposing wealth and its risks. Through dramatization of hyper-masculine finance culture and its collapse, the films uncover neoliberalism and its contradictions, while also revealing widespread cultural anxieties about masculinity, failure and economic fragility. Conclusively this research argues that cinema mirrors cultural anxieties by pointing out the problematic factors of neoliberal capitalism. Nowadays the hyper-masculine finance culture portrayed in these films has only shifted and not disappeared; it has evolved into new forms such as hustle culture. This thesis contributes to research on the discussion about the cultural dimension of economic systems and the continual influence of masculine ideals in shaping society.