Lust, Caution

I found the new Ang Lee movie, “Lust, Caution” an engrossing movie. It’s a Chinese WWII spy movie in which a traitorous Chinese collaborator is the main enemy rather than a Japanese. It is plenty sad, particularly the ending, and powerful in a good Ang Lee way. I realized afterwards that while many other movies portray the sadness of this era by showing Chinese getting killed or tortured or mistreated somehow by Japanese, there was not a single violent gunshot in this film.

In one camera angle of a Shanghai street, pedestrians walked while avoiding a man laying down. It’s only when the camera pans closer that you see a puddle of blood near his head. In another scene in which good Chinese patriots are about to be shot by a cliff, the camera pans to the cliff and the river below, jerking my heart all around, and all without any gunshot sound FX.

One thing I like about this movie has nothing to do with the movie itself but rather the fact that it is based on a short story by Chang Ailing, a Chinese writer and hero to the Chinese people. (Chinese are always eager to worship another hero.) I promise there are no spoilers here, but she based her short story on her relationship with her first husband, a Japanese collaborator who was married to another woman when she first met her. That husband eventually left her for another woman, and she left China in 1955, never to return. She settled here in the States and died in Los Angeles  in the 90s after a life of writing literature. She never felt very successful about her life, though many Chinese, my parents included, believe that if any Chinese were awarded a Noble Prize for literature, that it should belong to Chang Ailing.

Great Drama and Oil Trading

This is one of my favorite scenes from Syriana (no spoilers):

Alexander Siddig as Prince Nasir Al-Subaai : I want to create a parliament. I want to give women the right to vote. I want an independent judiciary. I want to start a petroleum exchange in the Middle East, cut the speculators out of the business. Why are the major oil exchanges in London and New York anyway? I’ll put all of our energy out for competitive bidding. I’ll run a pipe through Iran to Europe like you proposed. I’ll ship to China. anything that achieves efficiency and maximizes profit, profit which I will then use to rebuild my country.

Matt Damon as an energy market analyst: Great, that’s exactly what you should do.

Al-Subaai: Exactly, except your president rings my father and says, I’ve got unemployment in Texas, Kansas, Washington state. One phone call later and we’re stealing out of our social programs in order to buy overpriced airplanes. We’ve owed the Americans but we’ve repaid that debt.

Awesome Drama!

And yeah, why in the world are the major oil exchanges in London and New York anyway?! Okay, those are the two major financial centers of the West, which is the center of humanity’s financial power, but what business do speculators have as the largest buyers and sellers of petroleum? I would love to see a thousand barrels of crude delivered to the Goldman Sachs reception desk. Commodities trading originated as a way for supply and demand to lock each other into contracts. As uncertainty about prices grew, so did the commodities trading business, and so entered non-supply-non-demand players like these investment banks and hedge funds. What good do they do for anyone? The best argument I have heard in their defense is that their trades provide liquidity and data points for market researchers, but that does not seem plausible. Since financial trading floors represent neither supply nor demand, they introduce noise, not true votes on the intrinsic price of the commodity.

This is one of many signs I see of over-financialization of a modern economy – more and more of our GDP derives from financial papershuffling rather than actual value creation. Not to make any predictions of a Rome-like decline, but it’s a shame.