Page - 73 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

73 conVerting Kebab and currency into community rowing or debt per se that is depicted as causing hardship, nor the presence of foreigners, but rather the fact that no new cur- rency is making its way into the neighborhood. The loan shark Frau Jahn only becomes a problem when the crime boss Disko is no longer around to offset her accumulation. As the relation between Frau Jahn and Disko demonstrates, banks only become a problem when governments refuse to inject new money into the system, as they do in adopting neoliberal austerity measures. Riebl could easily have made a morality tale that blamed the human greed of bankers, something Austrians are all too famil- iar with on account of the BAWAG banking scandal. Three years before the American banking crisis, Austrians received a ter- rible lesson in the realities of “banks too big to fail,” when what had traditionally been the bank of their workers, the BAWAG (Bank für Arbeit und Wirtschaft AG [Bank for Labor and Com- merce]) with its close ties to Austria’s Social-Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the trade unions, was discovered to have made bad loans to the CEO of Refco, an American commodities brokerage company that had been involved in risky derivative investments held in off-balance-sheet vehicles. Refco’s creditors came after the BAWAG, and its owners, the Österreichische Gewerkschafts- bund (ÖGB), the trade unions’ national representative body, saw itself forced to divest itself of the bank, which was sold to an American consortium called Cerberus, which has in the mean- time been trying to make it profitable through the type of layoff- based restructuring with which Up in the Air (2009, dir. Jason Reitman) has become synonymous. Instead of a film about the sophisticated dealings of amoral bankers, Riebl preferred to make a romantic comedy that draws attention to banking’s basic structures and how intimately they are imbricated in everyday life, that is, the lives of everyday people and not a few white male masters of the universe. As he put it, “[e]s geht um Leute, die gerade irgendwie durchs Leben durchschlupfen und es gerade irgendwie schaffen” [“It’s about people who somehow barely manage to find a way and some- how barely manage to make it”] (“Presseheft” 2015). And those people are in Ottakring, where historically “the people” experi-