Where There's Smoke, There's Debt

Payback asks, how much does BP owe the future?

«««  Payback.  Written and directed by Jennifer Baichwal, based on the book by Margaret Atwood. Available on Netflix.

With the nation hurtling toward a so-called "fiscal cliff" at the stroke of midnight, December 31, it looks like 2013 will be a year as preoccupied with debt as 2011. Indeed, it's high time--though not necessarily for the reason Tea Partiers and deficit hawks worry about. For as Jennifer Baichwal's topical documentary Payback notes, the apparently simple notion of debt, of the conditions and consequences of one party owing something to another, is actually quite complex. You might even argue that it's apparent simplicity is key to its unquestioned ubiquity. Like most matters of ideology, it masquerades as something as natural as breathing. But when we ask what it really means to be a borrower or a lender, and what should count as assets we have borrowed--intentionally or not--it doesn't look so straightforward after all.

            Payback is based on the essay Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake). Much of it (and admittedly, the less compelling parts) presents Atwood reading from her book in public, or engaged in at-home proofreading in a comfy chair in her office. In that sense, it suffers from the same preachy awkwardness you might expect when your coolest aunt takes you aside to straighten you out on a few things. The intervention may be hard to stomach, but at least you can't fault her motives.

            Baichwal illustrates Atwood's discussion with imagery from a disparate instances of "owing" and "paying back". We hear from the protagonists in a real-life family blood feud in Albania, where an entire family is confined to its home out of fear of retribution by another. We get a glimpse at a clash between labor and capital in the Florida tomato market, as farmers are forced to consider what--if anything--they owe the migrant workers who pick their fruit. We get an ex-con tormented by guilt because he traumatized a Holocaust survivor during a drug-hazed burglary, and evocative footage of a 19th century debtors' prison, now abandoned and crumbling to ruin. And we get a perspective on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, for which the company has paid $20 billion in damages and fines, but still got away relatively cheap. For what dollar value can be placed on a region that helps clean and drain half a continent?

            As Atwood notes, debt is not just a matter of economics. Insofar as all members of a society are enmeshed in systems of mutual obligation, it is essential to sociality itself, in all the ways it functions. We see debt as moral issue, of debtors being subordinated to creditors in a sense that is both specific ("We owe China  a trillion") and vague ("It makes me uncomfortable to borrow from China"). But insofar as, say, China's development depends on US consumption of the stuff they make, who exactly is more beholden to whom in that relationship?

            Baichwal likewise ponders the question of what our entrepreneurs and "job creators" owe their stakeholders. What do they owe to the environment they depend upon, and to future generations that have to cope with the consequences of their acts? Though verging on the didactic, she does it better than President Obama did recently, in his awkwardly phrased "You didn't build that" speech.

            Many conservatives view humans as entering the world with a clean ledger, owing nothing to the world that birthed, educated and sustained them. To this way of thinking, a clean environment is a luxury, something pretty to put around a productive society. But as drought driven by climate change showed our farmers this year, the environment is no longer a passive frame, but an increasingly grumpy partner. Atwood and Baichwal rightly wonder what we owe that partner to keep it from becoming not just grumpy, but an obstacle.

            Payback strains a bit in visualizing some profound and very un-photographable concepts. Those seeking a deeper, more historical view of the subject should read David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years and, of course, Atwood's book-length treatment. Baichwal does us a service in raising questions, though, and for that we owe her thanks.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro