We Rise, Movies About Revolution: Dumb Money, Bottoms and Lawrence of Arabia

Power doesn’t get handed over voluntarily, so history is essentially a narrative of revolutions and rebellions – some more successful than others, but all of them important. Even uprisings born out of ideals we might not share still hold essential meaning in this bizarre scheme of things we call humanity. What comes from these actions might not appear relevant until years, decades, centuries later, and it is within hindsight that we get to see how big things have small beginnings.

PS - You guys are just lucky I didn’t like the film version of Les Mis otherwise you best believe that one would be closing out this article.

The 21st century is less than a quarter of the way through, and we’ve already seen a lot of turbulence. Some of the stories that are starting to make it to the screen center around money and information being disseminated in a way that it never has been before in human history. Dumb Money (2023) perfectly captures a chaotic time we only just left and an event that proved the power of mass mobilization.

Keith Gill (Paul Dano) is a smart guy who has built a following on YouTube with live streams where he’s completely transparent about his investments and seems to be seeing things that Wall Street misses. He focuses on GameStop stock, believing it to be undervalued and overlooked, especially when he notices that major firms are hoping to short it and make bank once the company folds. He rallies his troops, in a sense, and accidentally leads the way for retail buyers – known as ‘dumb money’ to professional Patrick Bateman types – to drive up the price of the stock. Many of these general public traders are buying through the app Robinhood, a company allegedly founded on the concept of leveling the playing field for investments. (Keep this in mind. It’ll be important later.)

Since so much of this is recent history, I won’t go through every beat of the movie. Gill manages to create a movement by continuing to buy and refusing to sell even as the stock climbs “to the moon.” The people who have been following his trajectory and advice stand by him, declaring themselves ‘diamond hands’ and holding the line like it’s a battlefield. It becomes obvious that if the fight is going to be fair, the side with college students looking up investment advice on Reddit and shift workers watching live streams has the numbers. Besides, in a world built by bankers and finance bros, they could make waves just by playing by the already established rules. Eventually favors are called in, Robinhood gets paused so no one could buy or sell and Reddit pages shut down, but even the cheating doesn’t go unnoticed. Gill along with a handful of investment management firm CEOs get subpoenaed to testify before congress, and in an epilogue, the film tells us just who made money, who lost money, and who managed to use their leverage to weasel out of consequences yet again.

Instead of just revolving around Gill and the hedge fund billionaires who do everything to stack the deck in their favor, Dumb Money weaves in several different narratives from everyday types who took a chance and saw something happening before the rest of us watched it on the news. The real focal point of Dumb Money though is how this interconnected world is casually upending long-standing institutions. No one was paying attention to message boards even though people were exchanging information and plans. No one thought an app that allowed people to buy and sell stock from their phone was going to cause a debacle that would end in front of congress. It’s a movie about an accidental revolution and an accidental revolutionary who wound up rattling more than just cages. The epilogue mentions the ripples coming off this main event and how in about two years from the GameStop frenzy, the change started in 2021 is only growing in effect.

Slightly less serious and considerably less realistic, Bottoms (2023) is a rebellion movie that asks the question “what if we started a fight club in high school?” We’ve all thought about it, don’t lie.

In an attempt to get into girls’ pants, best friends PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) start a feminist self-defense club. To their surprise, they wind up sparking an insurgency within the ranks of their high school as the majority of the female students join their ranks and start telling their football player boyfriends to go to hell. Stories about PJ and Josie themselves begin to get spun and grow wildly out of control. The girls involved with the club look to PJ and Josie as leaders, partially because they started the club but also because there’s a rumor (one not squashed at all by PJ) that the two of them spent the summer in juvie. Naturally, PJ claims this is where they learned how to fight.

The football players at the school see their hierarchy becoming threatened and set out to make an example of someone. At a pep rally, they challenge fight club member Hazel (Ruby Cruz) to take on a male member of the wrestling team. Hazel gets brutally beaten and football team captain Tim (Miles Fowler) reveals that the club was started as a way for PJ and Josie to meet girls who would otherwise never give them the time of day.

The club disbands, the girls return to being lonely outcasts, and it seems that the homeostasis of Rockbridge Falls High school has returned to normal. That is until Josie hears about a tradition for an upcoming football game where the rival team kills a player on Rockbridge Fall’s team. She reaches out to the fight club in the hopes of gathering the resources they need to put a stop to their rival’s plan before Tim gets murdered.

Bottoms is about an internal movement that threatens the status quo but manages to fly under the radar at first because no one takes it seriously, much like Dumb Money. It also has accidental leaders unsure of what to do with their power though PJ is ready to run with it unlike Josie and Keith Gill. Where it varies wildly is in the sheer insanity and weirdness packed into every minute of this film. It reminded me of Strangers With Candy in that it’s in no way realistic but still somehow manages to effectively capture the feel of high school. Everything is over the top and the stakes start silly and simple then are suddenly out of control, which reminded me of being a teen. A disaster could be whipped up out of an innocuous comment and full-on drama can happen in the blink of an eye.

Or maybe I just spent too much time around theater kids.

For the last one, we’re looking at a classic: Lawrence of Arabia (1962). I find it hard to believe that a reader of this site would not be familiar with this David Lean masterpiece but if you’re not, it follows the true story of T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), a military man who doesn’t seem to like the military or his quiet job of drawing maps. He is fascinated with the desert, Arab culture, and the area of the world that his home country seems to consider so beneath them. After a chance promotion, he attempts to galvanize the Arab tribes to govern themselves in order to kick the British out of their homeland. When this dream eventually collapses in front of him, he returns to England, believing there to be nothing left for him in a place where he once commanded armies of men and was seen as a revolutionary leader.

Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best movies ever made for a reason. It’s very nearly perfect and each performance in it can bring tears to your eyes. O’Toole and Omar Sharif have a palpable chemistry and Alec Guinness as Prince Fasial is the personification of “heavy is the head that wears the crown.” He manages to keep his seat at the table by knowing how to play both sides and when a general of the British Army comments on his hardness, he reminds him that this is what it means to be a king. It’s a film about how power can be gathered and garnered, and how ultimately everything can be destroyed by the very people the rebellion was trying to serve.

Lawrence could be kin to Rachel Sennott’s PJ in that he allows himself to believe his own hype, asking his men to walk on water and thinking his power is so potent that he can go unnoticed by Turkish guards in an occupied town. Throughout the film, we see events that spin out of his control, and even still, he thinks he has a handle on what he’s doing. The armies cobbled together from the tribes eventually assume he’ll leave them behind once he can, but Lawrence is not happy to be returning to England when the time comes. He, like Paul Dano’s Keith Gill, was involved on the level he was because he saw potential where others saw a silly, little people.

Through a variety of avenues, revolutions rise up in history. They all have different goals and approaches, and many have leaders that are the face of it despite themselves. The one thing that remains a common denominator is that the power comes from sheer numbers and that within each one, we see what’s possible when our ire is turned towards the structures in place rather than ourselves.