What the Last Four Feature Films I Saw Taught Me About Money

Spoilers below.

Paper Towns: So a group of high school seniors go on an unplanned road trip during the school year, and none of them are worried about missing school or having to call in to part-time jobs, but they somehow have enough money to drive a car over 2,200 miles round-trip and buy enough food for all five of them.

Let’s do some math. With gas at roughly $2.50 a gallon and a 20 mpg minivan, their 2,200 mile trip would cost about $275. I’ll count the food as $20 per person per day for three days (since they were mostly eating gas station fare), which comes to $300. So their trip could have cost around $575 or so. Who paid for that, especially if none of them appeared to have jobs? They talked about “the credit card;” did that belong to one of them, or to somebody’s parents?

It’s a good thing they slept in the van.

Sharknado 2 (Rifftrax version): How much money is the Today Show getting for their featured role in the Sharknado franchise? Sharknado producers, if you would like to feature The Billfold in the inevitable Sharknado 4, I volunteer to get eaten by a shark while standing at my laptop writing “The Cost of a Sharknado.” And then the shark can hit “publish” with its flipper. It’ll be a great visual gag! Let’s negotiate.

Also, Kelly Ripa has played a caricatured version of herself in what appears to be nine different TV shows and movies, according to IMDB. (The Broad City version is of course my favorite.)

Inside Out: There is no money in this movie*, but the characters’ worth is still determined by what they produce. The most important characters get to work on the biggest projects (the core memories) while the other characters are asked to churn out as many low-value memories as they can, most of which will eventually end up discarded. They’re all working in the same organization, but only a couple of them will be associated with the long-term legacy work that makes a career.

Also, read James Douglas’s The Pixar Theory of Labor at our sister site The Awl if you haven’t already.

Mad Max: Fury Road: This economic future is just realistic enough to be uncomfortable.

*I mean, there’s totally money in Inside Out if you consider that the father is uprooting his entire family from Minnesota to go live in San Francisco while he works on a startup, and the fact that they were able to get even a dumpy house within the hills of San Francisco made me wonder how much this family was making, exactly. Shouldn’t they be in the exurbs? Is this dad a secret genius bazillionaire? Did he quit his job in Minnesota to take this opportunity, or did he lose his job and couldn’t get another one, and then his friend said “come work at my startup, dude,” and then he dropped everything into this terrible house because he didn’t really know about San Francisco real estate, and the startup is going to fall apart within a year, and he’s never going to get a real paycheck?

Also, what about the mom’s job? Is it just one of those “dad works and mom stays at home and let’s not examine it too carefully” things? Did they decide that Mom’s salary would go to childcare, and then decided it was more cost-efficient for her to stay at home, and now Riley’s in middle school and she’s trying to get back into the workforce? Does Mom’s at-home labor support Dad’s ability to advance in his career? Does he give her a wife bonus? Or did she give up her own career to follow Dad to San Francisco? How does she feel about that? What kind of core memories about family and partnership and identity is she making?

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