Blaming Faces, Not Systems: How Cinema Makes Capitalism Palatable

On villains, visibility, and the stories we tell to avoid structural critique

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"Faces flicker. Systems persist."

Cinema has always helped audiences make sense of forces that are otherwise difficult to see. In moments of rising inequality and social unrest, films often step in to offer narratives to help audiences make sense of abstract systems. Love becomes a relationship, war becomes a battlefield, and power becomes a character. When it comes to economics, however, this translation comes with a cost. Capitalism is not easily dramatized. It has no single architect, no fixed location, no clear beginning or end. 

Cinema does not merely reflect economic reality; it frames it. But the way cinema assigns blame is very rarely neutral. Hollywood, in particular, has a tendency to personalize economic failure, turning structural dysfunction into stories about individual villains and, in doing so, it preserves the legitimacy of the system itself. Crises are blamed on greedy bankers, corrupt elites, or psychologically broken figures, while the structures that produce inequality remain largely untouched. This framing does not deny injustice outright; rather, it redirects anger away from systems and toward faces. In doing so, cinema makes capitalism legible, emotional, and ultimately survivable.

This pattern becomes especially clear when we examine films that explicitly engage with class, finance and power - The Big Short (2015), Joker (2019) and Parasite (2019). Together, they depict a striking divide between Western and non-Western cinematic approaches to capitalism. Where Hollywood often redeems the systems by isolating the “bad people”, Parasite, amongst other movies, presents inequality as an inescapable structural condition, one without a singular villain or easy moral resolution.

The Comfort of Individual Villains

Modern capitalism is complex, diffuse and difficult to visualise. Markets operate through abstractions - derivatives, algorithms, institutions and regulatory loopholes. Cinema, however, thrives on characters, conflict and causality. The result is a recurring narrative compromise; systems are simplified into people.

Hollywood’s preference for individual villains is not accidental. A system cannot be arrested, confronted or defeated in a climactic third-act. A banker, a corrupt official or a morally compromised billionaire, however, can be. This narrative choice allows audiences to experience outrage without destabilizing their belief in the broader economic order. 

The Big Short: Exposing the Scam Without Condemning the System

At first glance, The Big Short appears radically critical. It breaks the fourth wall, mocks financial jargon and openly declares that the 2008 financial crisis was driven by greed and fraud. Yet, its critique remains carefully contained.

The villains of The Big Short are specific and familiar - reckless bankers, complicit rating agencies and dishonest mortgage brokers, among others. The protagonists, however, are moral outsiders who recognize the rot and profit from it. They do not challenge the system; they outsmart it. The system itself is presented less as inherently flawed and more as corrupted by unethical participants. Its failures are moral, not structural.

By framing the crisis as the result of unethical individuals rather than perverse incentives, The Big Short preserves the legitimacy of finance as an institution. The audience is invited to feel informed rather than empowered, cynical rather than mobilized. Outrage is permitted, reform is not imagined. Capitalism emerges bruised but redeemable, capable of correction if only better people are in charge.

But, the system survives the story intact. 

Joker: Rage Without Structure

If The Big Short intellectualizes economic collapse, Joker emotionalizes it. It offers a more darker, more visceral portrayal of economic alienation. Gotham is a city defined by austerity, underfunded public services and extreme inequality. Arthur Fleck is abandoned by institutions meant to protect him, and his descent into violence is clearly linked to structural neglect.

And yet, Joker ultimately transforms systemic suffering into a personal psychological tragedy. 

Arthur’s rage is framed as pathological rather than political. His violence is not organized, strategic or collective; it is chaotic and individualized. The elite, represented by Thomas Wayne, are arrogant and dismissive, but they are not structurally interrogated. There is no exploration of policy, labor, housing, healthcare or governance. Class exists as a background texture, not as a system with rules and consequences.

The mass unrest that erupts in Gotham has no ideology and no direction. It is a spectacle of rage rather than a movement with demands. By centering the story on one man’s individual psychological collapse, Joker transforms structural violence into an origin story. Capitalism remains unnamed, unquestioned and unchallenged.

The system, once again, survives the narrative.

Parasite: A System Without a Face

Parasite takes a fundamentally different approach. There are no heroes and no villains, no moral stand-ins for systemic evil. The wealthy Park family is not cruel; they are courteous, generous and largely oblivious -  merely insulated. The poor Kim family is clever and adaptable, but also deceptive and exploitative when given the chance. Every character is both sympathetic and complicit, behaving rationally within their constraints.

The true antagonist of Parasite is the system itself, one that enforces hierarchy through space, architecture and invisibility. Wealth is elevated, literally, while poverty exists underground. Opportunity is zero-sum. Mobility is an illusion.

What makes Parasite unsettling is its refusal to offer catharsis. It arrives at no moral resolution. Violence erupts not because of individual evil, but because the system forces people into competition for survival. No character triumphs, no lesson restores moral balance. The system does not collapse; it simply absorbs the damage. 

Unlike Hollywood narratives, Parasite does not attempt to redeem capitalism by isolating its failures. It presents inequality as structural, persistent and self-reproducing; and aspiration as something that sustains the system rather than escapes it.

There is no external villain to defeat, because the villain is embedded everywhere.

Why Framing Matters

The contrast between Parasite and its Western counterparts reveals more than stylistic preference. It is not just aesthetic or cultural; these differences expose ideological framing. 

Hollywood’s storytelling often reflects societies where capitalism is treated as a baseline assumption, a background condition, rather than a subject of critique. Films can criticize excess, corruption or inequality, but it rarely questions the structure that produces them.

By assigning blame to individuals, it reassures audiences that the system itself can be saved.

Parasite, by contrast, reflects a willingness to confront systems as systems. Its critique does not depend on moral extremes or exceptional characters. It emerges from ordinary interactions, spatial arrangements, and economic pressures. No one is fully innocent, but no one is uniquely guilty either.

This distinction matters because stories shape political imagination. When economic crises are framed as the result of bad actors, solutions are imagined as punishment or replacement. They look for people to punish, not incentives to redesign. When inequality is framed as tragic but inevitable, it becomes naturalized. Cinema, in this way, becomes a subtle but powerful agent of ideological maintenance. 

Seeing Past the Distraction

Films do not simply tell stories; they teach audiences how to assign responsibility. When economic crises are framed as moral failures of individuals, systems escape scrutiny. The most powerful distraction in economic storytelling is the villain. Villains make stories coherent. They allow anger to be focused, morality to be clarified, and systems to remain unnamed. But they also limit what can be seen.

The question is not whether cinema addresses economic failure, but how. Does it teach audiences to look for someone to blame, or does it invite them to examine the structures they inhabit?

The Big Short, Joker, and Parasite offer three distinct answers to the same question: who is to blame when capitalism fails? Two look for faces. One looks at foundations.

In an era of recurring financial crises and widening inequality, the stories we tell about power and capital matter. Not because films dictate policy, but because they shape what we believe is possible, inevitable or worth challenging.

And perhaps, the most dangerous villain of all is the one we are never taught to see.

-Angela