Film Review: DIAMOND HANDS: THE LEGEND OF WALLSTREETBETS: A Raucous Report on Pandemic-Era Economic Malaise [SXSW 2022]

Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets Review

Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets (2022) Film Review from the 29th Annual South By Southwest Film Festival, a documentary directed by Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper.

It’s late January 2021. The media cycle is in a frenzy about the storming of the Capitol; the presidential inauguration; the prolonged pandemic; and … GameStop, for some reason? If that brick-and-mortar business’ sudden resurgence in the zeitgeist as part of an exposé on a flawed consumer trading app and a concocted “revolution” to The Big Short the big shorters was too convoluted for you to follow at the time, fear not: documentarians Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper have condensed it all into the raucous and righteously angry overview that is Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets.

Covering roughly a year and a half from just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to early/mid-2021, Canepari and Cooper document the confluence of a stalled economy, financial frustrations, and more free time amidst the American populace. Also in the mix are Robinhood, a mobile app that made trading on Wall Street more accessible to the everyday consumer, and the subreddit r/WallStreetBets, where many of these consumers went for stock-trading advice. (The title comes from the lexicon of this subreddit’s users, wherein “diamond hands” refers to holding onto certain volatile stocks in the hopes that they’ll eventually skyrocket in worth.)

Robinhood became one of the most downloaded and heavily-used apps amidst the lockdowns when Americans were looking for alternative ways to make money (usually in the wake of being laid off from their jobs), and the subreddit – of which its users unashamedly proclaim to be “idiots” with little to no professional expertise – exploded in terms of subscribers. This combination was a perfect storm for a new wave of economic anger, aimed at the Wall Street hedge funds who were continuing to profit amidst another in a long line of worldwide crises. These everyday traders were hoping to leverage this once-in-a-lifetime moment to Stick It to the Man and give hedge fund managers a taste of their own medicine, but what they forgot about was that Wall Street (and on a bigger scale, capital itself) doesn’t even play by its own rules – and a bunch of nerds on reddit sure as shit aren’t gonna make ’em change their M.O.!

Canepari and Cooper inject Diamond Hands with the same playful energy that Arthur Jones did with his Pepe the Frog introspective Feels Good Man two years ago. Both docs examine a burgeoning social isolation brought about by neoliberal political forces, and the various forms of cultural malaise that manifest in its wake. Diamond Hands extrapolates this thorny discussion through bright, kinetic visuals and a hyperactive balancing act of the ironic with the sincere. It’s so good, in fact, that you can even look past the occasional cringe factors of early 2021 viral trends and the epic bacon narwhal reddit-bro mindset without so much as an eye twitch of second-hand embarrassment.

Although where Diamond Hands specifically succeeds is in its materialist analysis of America’s current economic crisis, and the intersectional approach such analysis demands (and for a film co-produced by MSNBC, hey, believe me: I’m just as gobsmacked as you are!). Absent are any presuppositions of these reddit investors being nothing more than the antisocial neckbeard archetype since Canepari and Cooper pull from quite a diverse pool of interviewees, but the duo doesn’t flatten their subjects’ experiences down to fit any perceived notions regarding identity, either.

The filmmakers allow their subjects – and by extension, the film as a whole – to elucidate on how singular aspects like racism limits one’s financial powers differently than, say, just sexism, or just medical barriers, or just generational status does. And yet, they also acknowledge the difficulties of each form of oppression on its own, and how the very presence of any of those inequities is an injustice in and of itself (not to mention how dastardly they can be if they ever overlap). It’s another timely cinematic reminder that capitalism relies on all these injustices to thrive, and that you must untangle the knot of them should you wish to eliminate any single one.

Don’t get it confused, though: Diamond Hands isn’t a blind endorsement of this Wall Street-lite, forum-trolling, disruptor mentality. Canepari and Cooper reveal the addictive aspect that this gamification of economics can have, and how after a while it all starts to feel like gambling at a casino. One particular interviewee talks about when Robinhood started limiting its users’ buying availabilities in order to save face and financially recoup its own pitfalls, and how he lost a vast majority of his investments because he refused to cash out even though he knew that would be the right thing to do for his family’s future. He just couldn’t bring himself to have “paper hands”!

It’s never directly addressed, but moments like these reveal a noteworthy examination on how peer pressure operates in the age of social media. Digital clout has massive sway, and despite the Internet being Not Real to some degree it can still have profound (and oftentimes damaging) effects in the meatspace.

Thus, Diamond Hands isn’t just an important capsulation of a shaky moment in recent economic memory, but another in a growing list of reminders of capitalism’s inherent inhumanity and the instability that is to come. The doc forces us to reckon with not just the potential outcome of this risky game, but whether we all should even be playing it in the first place.

Rating: 8/10

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