The 2008 financial crisis has left us plenty of movies: The Big Short, Margin Call, and Wolf of Wall Street, plus documentaries such as Too Big to Fail, Inside Job, and Capitalism: A Love Story. Rich-men-in-suits films. They sit at desks, they talk on phones, they carry briefcases while walking in small self-important groups, they gather around conference tables, they look at computer screens, they testify incompetently in court.

Thinking back over the combined imagery from such films, we find a maddening lack of monstrous imagery to correspond with what we know to be monstrous practices. While they’re busy destroying the world, how can these middle-aged duds in power ties be so ordinary, so contemptible, so dull?