Review of Waffle Street (2015) by Joe G — 25 Sep 2016

I have never seen such a blatant artefact of white privilege American right bootstrap myth propaganda. The premise of this film could have provided deep insights and critical viewpoints of the situation that led to the crisis and followed the crisis through the lens of a character especially well-situated to narrate it, but it never once consciously acknowledges how despite Jim's personal sacrifices and growth, he is able to coast above the deeper issues that would keep the average individual who experiences those same hardships from ever rising out of these poorly paying and gruelling positions.

He has a wife who can still work a solid middle class job, he has a mansion he can mortgage, he has an audi he can trade in for a normal car, he has parents who offer to lend him all the money he needs, and all he has to do to earn anything is prove he can work as hard as literally anyone else who doesn't have the luxury of an MBA to land them a desk job.

A truly bothersome story that purports to prove that anyone who works hard will make it on their own hard work, when that is clearly only true of this already privileged individual. I am not devaluing this guy's hard work in real life, I just resent that the film would posit that kind of hard-work as all it requires for any individual to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps when it is clearly and unfortunately not the case.