You undersell metaphor, but that's already well-established. The important points about neo-noir are not encapsulated in any poetic description of the characters in films about the financial industry, which are in any case a small and rarefied subset of neo-noir, but in the substructural assumptions that move through the particular story and reveal the nature, extent, and effect of the "systemic evil." On the other hand there is the amorality of the Irons character who sloughs off the moral implications by embracing the cyclical nature of boom and bust.

Metaphor is needed so that we are not lost in the details of how that evil is allowed to fester within corporate entities and, in the case of Wall Street circa 2002-2007, within the very financial instruments they concocted to further game the system. The opacity of the process is what flummoxes and confounds all of the characters in the film, and to my mind it is rendered in the most appropriately possible way: a haunted night that leads to a bloodletting conducted by foot-soldiers of paper tigers who have been asleep at the switch.

I retrieved this film, along with a number of others that had been included originally by someone other than myself on a master list compiled in an earlier incarnation of this effort. I'm making the case for it remaining there and nothing else. Watching the film again I'm struck by the consummate lack of human engagement that it portrays (accurately, based on the testimony of many) which is, ultimately, another manifestation of alienation, the substratum of it that some theorists called "reification," where those forces have taken hold to such an extent that basic human emotions are completely disabled.

For a film with more "overdetermined" metaphor related to the substratum of film that could be called "financial neo-noir," feel free to take up with David Cronenberg's adaptation of Don LeLillo's COSMOPOLIS (2012). It's also a film where the gender politics and the highly unusual arc of the lead female character could bring out some discussion from Dan (though I felt at the time of its release that it needed a woman to review it, which was what occurred at the NC e-zine).