Sinister Synergies

That it was Pollack steering the fine studio entertainment of The Firm is fitting, and not just because he had made his own journey to the inside, becoming one of Hollywood’s great company men and a trusted maker of corporate product. The Firm and Antitrust both closely resemble Pollack’s great Three Days of the Condor (1975) in their stories of low-level insiders who stumble upon conspiracies and find themselves surveilled, blackmailed, compromised, and on the run. The difference is that these movies were made in an era where the locus of power, and therefore conspiracy, had moved from the government to the corporation; here, it’s not the CIA you have to worry about but the boardroom. Indeed, in The Firm the feds are largely impotent and easily held at bay; in Antitrust, the justice department is just another tentacle of the NURV octopus.

Maybe just as importantly for fomenting paranoia, the corporation is where all the mystification happens. As the economy becomes all but illegible to ordinary people, the only possible way to explain consolidation and inequality is in terms of mafia-sponsored tax-dodging schemes and techie murder conspiracies. On the one hand, this is all a bit ridiculous; on the other, well, a tech giant built on a foundation of stolen intellectual property? A white-shoe law firm helping clients hide money offshore? Some specific details may be wrong—among other things, no programmer in history has ever looked or sounded like young Ryan Phillippe—but the broad strokes are correct: something rotten is happening within the upper echelons of corporate America.

No movie more explicitly, enjoyably, or flamboyantly articulates this intuition than The Devil’s Advocate (1997), directed by the reliable Hollywood veteran Taylor Hackford and written by Tony Gilroy, who would eventually enter the Disney inner sanctum as the showrunner behind Andor (2022–2025). Here, again, we have a beautiful young working-class go-getter—Keanu Reeves, intermittently affecting an accent as southern defense attorney Kevin Lomax—selected and groomed for success by a powerful older man, in this case a grinning Al Pacino, strutting about in Cuban heels, as the superlawyer John Milton. At Milton’s behest, Lomax moves from Gainesville to Park Avenue; he attends parties with senators and represents millionaires.

But something isn’t right. At home, his wife (Charlize Theron) is losing it; when she goes shopping with other lawyers’ wives, their smiles contort demonically, and she dreams of a baby playing with entrails. “I know we’ve got all this money, and it’s supposed to be OK, but it’s not,” she tells Kevin, before slitting her throat in a locked hospital room. In Milton’s concrete penthouse apartment, Lomax confronts his boss, who reveals that the firm is indeed a front, not in this case for an insider trading scheme, or the mafia, or a murder ring, but for literal, actual Satan—Milton himself. No actor in history (for better or worse) has ever had as much fun as Pacino does revealing the truth of his identity, and of the world: “Who, in their right mind,” he asks Lomax, “could possibly deny that the twentieth century was entirely mine?”

Lomax, confronted with this reality, shoots himself in the head, and is transported back to Gainesville, where his adventure in New York is understood as a daydream. Fox, we assume, heads to jail; Hoffman exposes Winston on local cable-access; and McDeere moves back to Cambridge, where surely he’ll never encounter another powerful and menacing sexual-extortion racket.

These are all guys who wanted out, once they’d made it inside. But what about the reverse? If one version of the corporate thriller follows the journey from outside to inside, another draws its narrative tension from movement in the other direction, exploring what happens as you go from the inside to outside, and get left behind as the economy, and the social order, transform.

In Disclosure (1994), Michael Douglas, only seven years removed from Wall Street, trades in his contrast collars for a toothpaste-stained tie as Tom Sanders, a middle manager for the tech company DigiCom on the eve of an important merger. Sanders isn’t a Gekko-style slick—you can tell because his hair is too feathery, too mullet-like—but he’s no slouch, either; he expertly manages a global supply chain manufacturing CD-ROM drives and arrives to his Seattle office at the start of the movie expecting a deserved promotion. But even as he ably surfs the changing tides of globalization, he finds himself caught out by the treachery of gender politics: His new boss Meredith Johnson, a former girlfriend played by Demi Moore, seduces him and then accuses him of assaulting her. Sanders, in turn, accuses her of sexual harassment; as the case unfolds, it becomes clear that more is going on than the simple assignation.

Disclosure is lethally symptomatic of its era, and, as such, lethally prescient about ours: it’s hard to imagine a movie that more efficiently compresses preoccupations about male sexual anxiety in the workplace and a disruptive tech boom dependent on Asian manufacturing into an actually-fairly-entertaining two-hour feature. But at its core, it’s a movie about being left out—thinking you were on the inside and finding yourself on the outside. Sanders is constantly missing meetings, arriving late, finding himself a step behind, catching glimpses of things through the glass walls of the DigiCom office.

Befitting the strangeness of the Great Moderation economy, the stakes are effectively nonexistent—“If this deal goes through, we’ll be rich,” Sanders tells his wife, who responds, “we’re already rich”; when Johnson’s assault accusation is levied, the biggest threat to Sanders isn’t jail or even social sanction, it’s being sent to Austin, Texas—but are cast as existential. DigiCom’s business is about to be supercharged, everyone agrees, and the worst possible outcome is to be left behind. In the movie’s inevitable virtual-reality climax, Sanders becomes something like a ghost, watching helplessly as a wireframe Johnson, oblivious to his existence, goes about deleting exonerating files.

If the conspiratorial structure of corporate-thriller plots reflect an increasingly mystified and stratified U.S. economy, the recurring use of mergers and acquisitions to establish dramatic stakes in these movies—beginning with Wall Street, which uses Gordon Gekko’s hostile takeover of Bluestar Airlines its central dramatic device—should be seen as a reverberation of Hollywood’s own experience of consolidation over the twenty years between Black Monday and the GFC. Sanders’s jockeying for position around corporate restructuring was probably a familiar experience to the executives at Warner Bros who greenlit Disclosure; the studio had merged with Time, Inc., in 1989, in a deal that was nearly thwarted at the last minute by a hostile-takeover bid from Paramount parent conglomerate Gulf+Western.

The rapid consolidation that would follow over the following two decades didn’t necessarily seem like a hazard for the movie industry as either a creative or a business concern; major studios and especially their independent arms enjoyed a remarkable run of critical and commercial success even as their ownership concentrated, and corporate profits soared. In the eighteen months before Disclosure was released, Viacom bought Paramount for $10 billion, and Disney bought Miramax for $60 million; the resulting conglomerates would win the Best Picture Oscars for the next five years and make the executives involved unimaginably rich (while also, notably given Disclosure’s subject matter, ignoring horrifying whispers of serial sexual assault by Miramax’s CEO Harvey Weinstein). No wonder, then, that the DigiCom merger is treated mainly as a threat to Sanders’s personal standing and potential future earnings, rather than the business’s product or profits.

Sanders ultimately clears his name, and despite the internal conspiracy he’s discovered, the merger goes through. He isn’t left behind—yet. But who can say what might happen to DigiCom, over the next decade? Maybe it would be capsized by the tech bubble bursting in 2001, or, given the clear problems with its corporate culture, caught in an accounting scandal like the one that collapsed Enron that same year. Or maybe the disc-drive manufacturing company—a tempting acquisition for a media empire driven by DVD-sales profits—would end up as a subsidiary of one of the Big Six conglomerates that, by the mid-2000s, bankrolled the vast majority of movies seen by Americans.

Where the mergers and acquisitions in Wall Street, Disclosure, and Antitrust—morally ambiguous though they might be—appear as gateways to wealth and success for those movies’ heroes, the plot-driving merger in Michael Clayton (2007) is treated more like a closing bell. The New York–based firm Kenner, Bach & Ledeen is about to merge with an unnamed London counterpart, and the stakes are existential; if the deal doesn’t go through, explains partner Marty Bach—played by none other than Sydney Pollack—“we’ll be selling off the goddamn furniture.” (Pollack might well have been talking to himself: his personal shingle Mirage was one of the three production companies behind Michael Clayton, all of which were shuttered or reduced in size in the years on either side of the film’s release.)

In the movie’s opening scene, an army of lawyers gather in a conference room in an office high-rise, trying to get a settlement finished—and any bodies, metaphorical or literal, fully buried—before the merger deadline. The portentous emptiness of the office hallways, the secrecy of the meeting (Bach tells a Journal reporter fishing for info to kiss off), and the manic voice-over monologue of partner Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) make the scene feels like a prefiguration of the bankruptcy-driven mergers and acquisitions that would ripple through the finance industry the year after the film’s release—a series of all-night negotiations and conferences more literally depicted from the other side of the crisis in the 2011 financial thriller Margin Call.

Somebody might get rich from this deal, but it isn’t our titular hero (George Clooney); in fact, he’s worried it will end his career and leave him without protection, another casualty of a shifting economic environment, “trying to explain what the hell it is I do around here.” Unlike the Foxes and McDeeres of early-period corporate thrillers, Clayton isn’t a bushy-tailed young naif but a greying fixer. Those conspiracies that our heroes uncover in The Firm and Antitrust? That’s the kind of thing Clayton is paid to cover up. He’s there to keep business orderly and functioning, one bribe, bail bond, or called-in favor at a time. As he tells a client early in the movie, “I’m not a miracle-worker. I’m a janitor. The math on this is simple. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean up.” (Tony Gilroy, making his directorial debut at fifty, could probably relate, having become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated script doctors in the years since The Devil’s Advocate.)

The mess, in this case, involves an agrochemical giant called U-North, facing a class-action lawsuit over toxic pesticides. Edens, overseeing the U-North defense, has diligently protected his client from accountability. But the constant stress that accompanies years of concealment and rationalization has broken him, and Edens can no longer live with himself. “Am I just some freak organism that’s been put here to eat and sleep and spend my days defending this one horrific chain of carcinogenic molecules?” he asks Clayton, his former protégé. After he steals an incriminating memo and threatens to release it, Clayton is tasked with tracking him down and cleaning up.

The feeling that dominates Michael Clayton is one of stress and urgency, contraction and imminent implosion, fissures showing in a previously stable world. Edens, once a master of compartmentalization and billable stability, has cracked wide open in a manic eruption of guilt and shame. Clayton’s brother has fallen off the wagon; the restaurant they started together has gone bankrupt. He owes a loan shark $75,000, but the partners are trying to play hardball on his new contract. Clayton knows they’re pulling up the ladder and he’s going to be left behind with only his debts—along with any liability he’s incurred as a bagman to the rich and powerful.

Clayton was not the only person coming to terms with an increasingly unsustainable world. By the fall of 2007, the party, such as it had been, was nearly over, in Hollywood as in the U.S. economy as a whole. The subprime mortgage crisis was in full swing; the credit crunch was beginning; and the structural debts incurred by two decades of deregulation, financialization, and stratification were coming due.

The presence of Pollack, drawing on memories of his turn as the sinister gatekeeper Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), suggests that Michael Clayton might be seen as The Firm from the other side of the Great Moderation—a lawyerly conspiracy, but not one where a recent grad uncovers the corruption he didn’t realize existed. Instead, Clayton is a veteran fixer admitting to himself the true nature of the world he’s been living in: decades of greed, fraud, compromise, and cover-up. Maintaining one’s position on the inside of corporate America requires a heavy dose of self-deception too. That’s why even an insider as seasoned as Clayton can find himself slipping back into the naivete of a Bud Fox. As Pollack, playing Clayton’s shrewd, compromised boss, tells him: “Fifteen years in I gotta tell you how we pay the rent?”