There’s an infamous scene in the (somewhat) recent film The Big Short (2015) in which the film-makers solve the problem of how to transform the minutiae of financial speculation into the height of cinematic spectacle by assigning the film’s most technical speech to a nearly-naked Margot Robbie in a bathtub. The visual pun that links the champagne Robbie sips, the suds that surround her, and the financial bubbles she describes is arguably crude. But what angered some critics was the assumptions the scene implies about the film’s public— a public it hails as largely male and heterosexual (and thus most likely to be held by Robbie’s come-hither gaze) as well as easily manipulatable (by the Wall Street elites who obscure their dastardly deals behind overly technical language as cleverly as the filmmakers obscure their technical explanations behind Robbie’s soapy décolletage).
It might seem surprising to begin a review of a...
