Lost in America as Metaphor for Mortgage Meltdown

Shawn Wolfe says:

This is what happens when an annoying asshole (Wall Street) loses everything in a casino (the stock market) and desperately begs the house (Congress) to "correct" their little mistake (massive bail out), and the house (Gary Marshall) ain't havin' it.
I think it is also instructive here that this scene takes place at 4am. Albert Brooks is in his bathrobe. His pants are basically down. The owner of the Desert Inn is granting him a sit-down and happens to be dressed in a suit and tie and oak desk.

"The Desert Inn has heart... The Desert Inn has heart... The Desert Inn has heart..."

"We're through talking."

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Excellent! Maybe Bush, McCain and his cohorts can work on associating Christmas with Wall Street – “There aint gonna be a Christmas – you can blame us”.

BTW it’s “we’re finished talking”.
Foolster41

An apt metaphor.

I don’t think I would be as nice as the casino guy was. I would tell the guy he’s crazy and he doesn’t understand how reality works.
billmarrs

lol, that clip was like the opposite of watching a pitch on Mad Men.
TedJohnson

Perfect. One of my all time favorite movies.

Watch Brooks’ mood change when he thinks he’s making progress, and when he encounters a setback. That’s the stock market fluctuating.

This metaphor would be even better if this were the FOURTH time in a month that Brooks came scraping to Marshall, and asking for the biggest bailout yet.

Watch Awkward Loan Interview from The Daily Show.
TedJohnson

Sorry, this is the correct link to Awkward Loan Interview from The Daily Show.
william

Just to be clear, we shouldn’t bail out Wall Street because they want it. Fuck them and the Ferraris they rode in on.

We should do it because we don’t want a collapse of the financial system, and because it’s cheaper to clean up the mess all at once rather than doing it one bank failure at a time.
Anonymous

Harolds in Reno might have given Einstein here his nest egg back.

They did this occasionally when someone had foolishly gotten in over their head, and rather than a run on the casino bank, it created enormous positive word of mouth, and helped bring in the average joe, as opposed to the typical hood or compulsive gambler.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/rsmith_hi.html discussses this a bit, but the book this PBS mini series was created from goes into more detail.

Of course, that is sort of like making mortgages seem safe as a lure to bring in more people into bad deals.
O_P

Is Albert Brooks actually meant to be funny? Or is the fact he’s not really funny part of his appeal?
I don’t get him at all.
mdh

I feel very much like they just told up to step between their bookie and their knees.
Johnny Cat

One of my cherished titles as well.

“I’ve seen the future! And it’s a bald-headed man from New York!” Substitute DC for NY, and you got another applicable metaphor.
rrsafety

“and the house (Gary Marshall) ain’t havin’ it. ”

To make this on point, shouldn’t that actually read: “and the house (conservative Republicans in the Congress) ain’t havin’ it.”

??