This book began by suggesting that crisis was a complex, multi-dimensional topic because of its association with the long-term crises neoliberalism generates, a specific period of systemic crisis which began in 2007, and an ongoing mode of neoliberal governance. It went on to argue that any fixation on a singular crisis, even as a potentially liberatory moment, and no matter how cataclysmic it seemed, risked blinding us to its connections to, and functioning in, a broader context.

If one were temporarily to disregard such an argument and look for a cinema of the crisis as a singular event, one could surely find it. Assuming that there is an inevitable time lag between any given occurrence and cinematic responses to it, we might reasonably begin to look for crisis films from about 2010 onwards. I have discussed a number of these in each chapter of this book. While few directly reference the global financial crisis, they do develop what one might call a thematics of crisis: rising precarity and debt; workers becoming disposable and driven to suicide; social isolation and a murderous competition for productive places expressed in the collisions of individual bodies. The same films suggest a closing in of temporal horizons: a past whose memories of collective resistances can only be accessed nostalgically or not at all; a future foreclosed by debt or by the profoundly asymmetric nature of the forces in play; characters trapped in an oppressive present, their bodies defeated or exhausted, running to stand still. As I argued across several chapters, patterns in these films often converge around a sense of the neoliberal subject in crisis: a crisis contained in Audiard’s films where the threat of precarity and murderous competition was put to work for narratives of triumphant entrepreneurial flexibility; a crisis refusing containment in the debt and worker-suicide films discussed and within which the neoliberal entrepreneur of the self, shedding any heroic veneer the figure might have, was forced to manage their own insolvency or disposability and inevitably failed to do so; a crisis, finally, of individual agency within which, becoming mere cogs, subjects were torn apart, their attributes, affects and gestures inserted into the complex machineries that structure our lives but with which so much mainstream cinema struggles to engage.