'Industry' Season 4: Modern Gothic, Post‑PC Hedge Fund Psychodrama
HBO's ‘Industry’ Season 4: a modern gothic, post‑PC hedge fund thriller with vampire-squid capitalism, toxic masculinity, and David Lynch vibes in London’s finance underworld.
by Cody Ross
Marisa Abela as Yasmin Kara-Hanani .
Call it modern gothic and ‘post-PC.’ Set in the world of London's manic and morally bankrupt hedge fund scene, the series remains an erotically cool psychodrama full of vampire squids, gothic horror and high finance vixens.
By now everyone is familiar with the best thing on TV: ‘Industry.’ Created by former finance bros Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, this financial thriller from HBO is edgy, creepy-chic and transgressively awesome. The show is a grinding machine combing the dark, Darwinian landscapes of hedge fund trading, Freudian psychology and surrealist cinema.
Without giving too much away, Season 4 has the freaky feel of a David Lynch flick meets ‘A Clockwork Orange’ with the velocity of ‘Less Than Zero’ (Bret Easton Ellis) and the deliriousness of ‘American Psycho’ . The actors are great. The script is f*cking phenomenal with a palpable sense of realism. The cinematic style is super-cool, inventive and done in a Kubrickian manner with slow zooms and symmetrical framing. The creators even peppered the soundscape with nostalgic new wave music (New Order, The Prodigy, etc.) and imbued the characters with similar archetypal 80s energy.
Modern gothic finance - Myha'la-as-Harper-Stern
Ken Leung in season four
There are endless liaisons with f*ck boys/girls and high society types punctuated by the show's predator-prey notion of love, rapacious profit-seeking and power-dynamics. In a sense, the show is somewhat of a punchy ‘counter-countercultural’ polemic: wokeness is dead (sort of) and toxic masculinity is back with a vengeance. DEI and ESG are in terminal decline and non-PC discourse is ascendant.
Industry also lifts the lid on the ever-crazier gamification of capital markets, a stochastic, highly manipulated system driven by the hyper-complex trickery around financial engineering and narrative construction. Harper and her hedge fund ilk will do whatever it takes to win in the game of existential risk, including systematic manipulation, securities fraud, serial promiscuity and martingale YOLOing. Industry shows how wealth and power (via the markets and a few old school oligarchs) concentrate into a few elite hands on the back of manufactured volatility. Stocks, bonds and collateral get relentlessly mispriced and over-priced, and the re-pricing of risk tends to be rather violent (metaphorically and in reality).
Anyway, the show is brilliantly penned and excellent at lensing contemporary pop culture, fashion, art and what you might call the zeitgeist. The new season will tattoo itself on your brain and leave you thinking about life, love, personal partnerships and the tidal wave of anxiety that constantly washes over us. Industry Season 4 thus far is a cultural breakthrough and a modern masterpiece. We will be binge watching this season for years to come!
