The Cinema of Too-Late Capitalism #1: ‘Eat the Rich’ with Dr Amin Samman

When: Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: BLOC Cinema, Mile End

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A screening of Netflix's Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga, followed by a discussion with political economist Dr Amin Samman.

In early September, the United Nations reported that anthropogenic global heating will now hit at least 1.8C in the most optimistic scenario and all good outcomes have now been exhausted. The report came after a disastrous summer of record-breaking heatwaves, floods, military conflict, trade wars, AI slop, and political unrest, with no effective climate action in sight, together adding fuel to the already widespread sense that we are living in increasingly catastrophic and even apocalyptic times.

In her recent book ‘Immediacy’, theorist Anna Kornbluh named this lived period of continuous and debilitating crisis the time of “too-late capitalism”: an overwhelming planetary condition where “we are fastened to appalling circumstances from which we cannot take distance ...”

In this SSE film series organised by Uygar Baspehlivan and Martin Coward, we will explore how the time of ‘too-late capitalism’ becomes mediated in cinematic form. Each month, with experts from the field, we will engage with this theme across different phenomena: from ecological breakdown to financial nihilism, technological destruction, global collapse and all things doom and gloom.

For the first event of the series, we will be joined by political economist Dr Amin Samman (author of Currency of Nihilism) to watch the 3-part Netflix Documentary ‘Eat the Rich: The Gamestop Saga’. The documentary chronicles the infamous Gamestop events of 2021, in which meme-addicted day-traders ‘with nothing to lose’, banded together to wreak havoc in global financial markets, nearly bankrupting billion-dollar hedgefunds and flushing their own savings away in the very process.

Through the documentary, we will discuss the increasingly nihilistic and apocalyptic mood that grips contemporary financial capitalism, how the financialisation of everything has destroyed the possibility of meaning, and how people seek to profit from the very catastrophes that lead us to this point.

This screening will take place in the BLOC Cinema in the ArtsOne Building, which is number 36 on this map of the Mile End campus.