The Crisis of the Individual as a Precept of Political Cinema: Kuhle Wampe (1932) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947) Angelos Koutsourakis For David Carter In the contemporary neoliberal environment discussions of individual agency tend to be grounded on conformist cliches of "moral responsibility" that obfuscate the interactions between individuals and their social environment. The typical Thatcherist motto that there is no such thing as society reduces social problems such as unemployment and crime to "individual irresponsibility" rather than treating them as systemic malfunctions. Such a contention originates from an understanding of the individual as a "rational actor" whose success is contingent on his or her ability to integrate into a rational market environment. Inability to "adapt" is not to be bfamed ·on systemic deficiencies, but on individual failure. Tellingly, cinema has not been immune to this "moralization" of social qμestions, and many films concerned with political questions have to valorize abstract notions of ethical choice instead of addressing the ways that social processes can be the route to understanding individual behaviors. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, for instance, mention Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) and the BBC film Freefall (2009) as contemporary works that fail to represent the current economic crisis politically. The political structures of late capitalism are disregarded, and a complex issue such as the global financial crisis is viewed as symptomatic of moral failure on the part 26 of some "greedy" individuals. These media objects imply that social changes can be achieved by means of changing individual attitudes and not the social scheme of things. of their moralist standpoint is the romantic valorization of family as a solution to the current crisis; as Toscano and Kinkle explain, this reveals "a world whose imagination is stripped of collectivity and riven to a narrow horizon offinitude, in which the best one can imagine is more family and less greed, fewer commodities and more stability" (Toscano, Kinle ). One contradiction arises here: in their attempt to criticize the reality of financial capitalism these media objects propagate the neoliberal logic of the "responsible and autonomous" individual. 1 Jyostna Kapur and Keith Wagner rightly observe that neoliberalism is in a way a return to nineteenth century free market capitalism (2); this goes hand in hand with a reanimation of ideas of "individual libertarianism" that have their roots in classical liberalism (Harvey 42). David Harvey explains how liberal ideas grounded in the view of society as a system based upon mutual cooperation among autonomous individuals valorize notions of moral autonomy without regard for systemic formations. Criticizing John Rawls' ideas that social justice can be achieved by rational individuals without altering the capitalist social structures, Harvey sets as an example the problem of uneven distribution and concludes that liberals like Rawls fail to understand how social injustice, scarcity, and deprivation can be socially organized so as to serve market objectives. Whereas for Rawls social justice can be achieved by responsible individuals within an environment that allows markets to act competitively, Harvey argues that the very structure of the market society produces social injustices (2009; 109). Yet while liberals accept the idea of social cooperation between free and responsible individuals, neoliberalism pushes further the liberal maxims of individual autonomy and moral responsibility so as to interpellate subjects within a market reality. What benefits the market is automatically viewed as positive for society, and inability to adapt to the market reality is scorned as irresponsible citizenship. As Wendy Brown observes, social inequality is simply dismissed as "mismanaged life," and such moralistic rhetoric depoliticizes social and economic divisions, which are structural in form (43). The foregoing comments set the tone for understanding that representing capitalist crises as something that can be attributed to "greedy" characters fails to politicize representation, since it relies 27