Jesse Peretz's The Ex--and the Endurance of Market Populism

When the comedy The Ex hit theaters in 2007 there seem to have been relatively expectations among the critics for the film, largely on the strength of the regard many of them had for the cast (Zach Braff's stock was very high then with his hit show Scrubs and well-received directorial debut Garden State, there was the level of critical adulation for Jason Bateman that never ceases to bewilder me, etc.), and the confidence implied by its release during the competitive summer season (hitting theaters the week after Spider-Man 3, the same week as 28 Weeks Later). However, the actual movie was received as a significant disappointment, and so far as I know there has been no revaluation of the film in the nearly two decades since--deservedly if memory serves.

Still, bits of the film have stuck in my mind, not least the look and tone of the workplace at the protagonist's father-in-law's ad agency, and Donal Logue's character as a client of the firm, a tech world entrepreneur affecting the dress and demeanor of a hippie. Saturating the film in the "market populist," "creative class" claptrap so fashionable in the '90s, and already so ridiculous in the eyes of a Thomas Frank and his readers, it already made the movie look like a relic in 2007. Today that claptrap is scarcely even a memory. But it is well worth remembering how heavily the media pushed that particular garbage (not least in films like that one) because it is part of the story of how we got from where we were in the dot-com bubble days of yore to where we are now in 2025--and far from the last time that it has participated in such deceptions. (Yesterday's market populism, after all, is today's "corporate wokeness"--the flimsiness of which, if long recognized by the astute, is today apparent to even the stupidest observer of the scene as corporations fall all over themselves to discard it.)