'The New Americans: Gaming A Revolution' Review: Wall Street For The Meme Generation | SXSW
Courtesy of SXSW.
Since the pandemic began, our country’s economy has been irreversibly changed, a process that Ondi Timoner (Last Flight Home)’s newest documentary, The New Americans: Gaming A Revolution, believes began 15 years ago with the financial crisis of 2008. Instead of creating a strong, original narrative that provides insight into why and how this hopeful shift of economic power, the film purely acts as a teacher, educating its viewers on the terms and intricacies of the stock market, crypto, NFTs, and more. While this isn’t necessarily bad, the way the film approaches it is. This isn’t only due to how frequently New Americans tries to “teach” us but because of the way it does it. This is through the film’s own AI narrator, who appears as a part of a recurring theme of the primary subject progressing and “leveling up” in hopes of unlocking a new world of their own creation and manipulation.
Courtesy of SXSW.
The biggest issue with Timoner’s documentary is how provocative it wants to be in hopes of arousing discussion and commentary on the issues it tackles, but flies through them so quickly that we don’t have time to think about the information being conveyed, and instead find ourselves confused and amused by the absurdity of some of it. The first act of the film is done generally well, giving viewers a “recap” of the biggest financial events they need to know about post-2008 in a quick enough manner that allows us to dive into the true focus of the film, the Reddit and memeification of finance, and the biggest examples of it in recent times (COVID-era). Initially, we’re introduced to cryptocurrency as a whole and examine the rise and fall of DogeCoin through the perspective of one of its biggest investors and the mindset he takes as an approach to investments. We focus on other newfound day traders, including, but not limited to, a mom, teen, and the son* of our director (does this explain the interest of the documentary?*).
Timoner’s film highlights the shift of power away from Wall Street and the financial insanity that’s unfolded since the pandemic began and does so effectively. The issue with this is that New Americans tries to unpack almost everything that’s happened in this period of time too quickly, feeling stuffed with so much information that, at a point, it becomes hard to follow, even though we get reminders of definitions every few minutes. The subsequent problem is that because Timoner is purely trying to get as much information as she can out of her subjects, the interview segments feel dry and leave us wishing that the interviewees were pushed to go deeper into their motives more than just explaining the system.
It’s at the point that a direct through-line is made from the WallStreetBets SubReddit to the January 6 capital insurrections. It’s clear that we’ve lost most of the focus and are essentially clicking through each pop-up ad that appears on our journey into the internet. The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution does a good job of educating its viewers in a formal sense but needs to dig into why this economic power shift affects us in more of a sense than through the video game comparisons.
