In the opening scene of Netflix’s series Ozark, a man is loading two coolers full of wads of cash onto a boat late at night. The money is hidden beneath dead fish and ice. Meanwhile, we hear a voice-over listing up to ten different words all used for money. “Wampum. Dough. Sugar. Bread. Bucks…” A deep reflection on the nature of money follows. “What is money?”, he asks. “It’s everything if you don’t have it, right?” he answers himself. Money’s polysemy is evidence of its power and ubiquity, its infinite meanings, its inescapable influence.
Money on TV
It has often been said that all fiction can already be found in classical Greek literature. It can also be argued that all fiction and non-fiction stories are about the economy –the way we organize ourselves around money–, and since nowadays TV fiction is the ultimate form of storytelling, all series are more or less openly about money.
“An agreed-upon unit of exchange for goods and service,” is the second definition of money our protagonist proposes. Certainly, some of the best series in history such as The Wire, Breaking Bad or The Sopranos revolve around the basic logic of the economy: greed and the need to escape or maintain one’s place in the economic structure.
The haves from the have-nots
“That which separates the haves from the have-nots,” is a more Marxist approach. It’s the class struggle that takes place in Mr. Robot. When a schizophrenic hacker wipes out the entire debt records of a megacorporation, a new world order is set in motion. Later on in that same first episode of Ozark, we learn that the philosophical reflection on the nature of money is just a selling pitch: the protagonist is a financial advisor trying to convince a young married couple to manage their savings.
He’s a nice guy, a caring and loyal husband, a loving father, and he launders money for a Mexican drug cartel. Maybe his fourth definition is the one that best suits Ozark itself: “Money as a measuring device. At its essence, it is the measure of a man’s choices”.
