Hacker Cinema
Fun with Dick and Jane
2005 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Dean Parisot
After Dick Harper loses his job at Globodyne in an Enron-esque collapse, he and his wife, Jane, turn to crime in order to handle the massive debt they now face. Two intelligent people, Dick and Jane actually get pretty good at robbing people and even enjoy it – but they have second thoughts when they're reminded that crime can hurt innocent people. When the couple hears that Globodyne boss Jack McCallister actually swindled the company, they plot revenge.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I just watched the 2005 Jim Carrey movie Fun with Dick and Jane, about a nuclear family whose father loses his job, pension, and house working at a place like Enron or WorldCom while a CEO resembling Ken Lay played by Alec Baldwin steals the whole pension fund.
Watching it yesterday was a shocker though -- I had forgotten (having been so young) that the 2008 financial crisis had roots so much earlier.
But then I reminisced a little more: this was based on what I recall actually going on at the time. I was a kid at the time, who got his first minimum wage high school job working side by side with a lady who was there because her husband had his pension stolen at WorldCom.
A certain class of elites really got away with a lot then, and were never held to account. Instead, their elite grifting culture just spread wider and wider. We tried in 2011. If you were alive then, you know how big Occupy Wall Street was getting. You remember how big Bernie was.
But they figured out how to use social media to divide us and redirect our anger into right vs left politics instead of ultrarich crooks vs everybody else working hard. Even I had been starting to forget until Jim Carrey shook me out of my millenial reverie.
The youngest kids if they have any political consciousness now it's solely channeled safely into the left vs right pattern, unable to effect meaningful change to the robber baron economy. Smartphones and recommendation algorithms truly were a powerful technology that generated great value after all-- for just a very small elite that can use it to hold off any accountability for their monstrous crimes.
CSA was a high paying well respected job as I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.When I graduated and for a few years after it was still at the top, though software jobs had been moving away from CSAs, so you ended up with a bunch of people who couldn't get decent paying jobs in the field.
Back then the meme was L2Web Design.
It quickly overtook CSA and became the hot new fad, but the bubble burst fairly quickly, and now again you have people out of work and all competing for the same few jobs.
I watched so mamy web designers, real estate agents etc scramble to find some kind of work they could do that would pay close to what they'd been making.
In the end, most made career changes.
Here we are again and it's worse. Companies infantilzed their workforce, got them to expect pay of probably 10x what they are actually worth, and now they may have to join the 'real' workforce and get an actual job.
The movie Fun With Dick and Jane explores this very well even though it's technically a comedy, it holds so much truth its scary.