In his discussion of violence, Slavoj Žižek warns of allowing our attention to be drawn too directly to the obvious transgressiveness of what he calls subjective violence (crime, riot, war) in a way that would blind us to the systemic and symbolic violences that have become normalised as the apparently peaceful face of the status quo. To see violence more adequately, he suggests, we need to look at it askew or sideways (Žižek 2008: 1–7). The same might be said about the crisis, with or without a capital C, which erupted in 2007 to 2008. If we look at it too directly, we may only see its disruptiveness and be blinded to its complex connection to the status quo, its instrumentalisation as a governmental tool and its ‘outsourcing’ to ordinary people who are either forced to bear its cost or live under its more or less permanent sway. This is why, although I will not ignore the cinema that came out after 2008 and responded more or less directly to the crisis and its fallout, I will engage with a broader body of films, some from before 2008, that will allow me to look at the crisis ‘sideways’. In this, I follow in the footsteps of scholars like Berlant and Koutsourakis who adopt a similar procedure (Berlant 2011a: 10–12; Koutsourakis 2020: 60–1). I will consider films that engage with debt, austerity, the rationing of productive places and the murderous violence of competition as so many personalised crises already lurking within the neoliberal status quo. But I will also be drawn to less obvious films which help us, directly or indirectly, and more or less consciously, to look beyond neoliberalism, without necessarily seeing crisis as the deus ex machina needed to render some form of exit possible. To begin with, though, temporarily ignoring my own counsel, I will look at the crisis frontally.

In 2007, something often called the sub-prime crisis began to make itself felt. Initially associated with major American banks that found themselves holding mortgage bonds whose value was collapsing, and with other American institutions such as insurers caught up in the shockwave, the crisis quickly revealed its global nature as more and more financial institutions across different countries faced potentially catastrophic losses and economies tipped into recession.