Hollywood films eroticized corporate raiders despite their real destructive impact.

Evidence

Larry the Liquidator, a financier played with devilish sincerity by Danny DeVito in Norman Jewison’s Other People’s Money (1991), wakes up in bed and turns to his “lover” Carmen. A jazzy song accompanies some soft grunts as the camera intimately follows Larry’s hand as it offers a tender embrace … revealing that Carmen is his bedside computer that reports stock market opportunities. A close-up on his widening eyes: “Up two points,” he gasps, referring to a stock price. This colorful characterization begins a strangely sexual film about a successful corporate raid, or hostile takeover, in which a firm or financier acquires control of a company through shareholder manipulation or a “leveraged buyout” (raising debt to finance the acquisition), often to individually sell off its assets for profit (known as “asset stripping”). — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 238

Categorization

• XREF: The Larry the Liquidator/Carmen opening is a formal embodied trace — the financier’s sole intimate relationship is with his market-data screen, which the chapter structure suggests links directly to the financialization-frame theme of this book.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the grafting-piece instinct that ownership/finance structure leaves fingerprints on artistic form, since the film literally frames a stock ticker as a lover — though here the aesthetic choice predates rather than follows actual financialization of Hollywood.