Echoes of hysteria: Gender, affect and economic crisis in Blue Jasmine and Young Adult

This article analyses gendered representations of the 2008 financial crash in contemporary American cinema, focusing on films by Jason Reitman and Woody Allen. Scholars of the financial crisis on film have persuasively argued that the main impetus of indie global financial crisis cinema has been less to narrate the events than to make them intelligible through personification. I illustrate and modify this statement by suggesting that Reitman’s and Allen’s characters not only embody the financial crash but do so, importantly, along gender lines. What stands out the most, I propose, is the trope of female suffering. In both films, we witness female protagonists in the grip of monetary and mental crisis. I contend that this image of the distraught woman – with all the messiness and embarrassment of her feelings in full view – sheds new light on the affective pathologies of American capitalism. To make this point, I draw on cultural emblems of female hysteria, as well as on the work of political scientist Claudia Leeb on the expression of suffering and its transformative potential. Through their tormented heroines, Reitman and Allen provide a provocative view of US capitalism and its casualties after the global crash.