Later this month, Clive Owen’s latest film The International will open in theaters everywhere. The premise, at least from the trailers, appears to be simple: Clive Owen is investigating the largest bank in the world. Apparently, this bank is using all of its wealth to kill and steal and murder and all sorts of other nasty things. Yup, thanks to the piles and piles of money that big banks have, they’re able to…

Mr. Potter, the evil banker in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Oh, wait a minute. Given the events of the past few months that doesn’t seem quite so likely, does it? I mean, the question being asked of the characters in the trailer to the film is: “How do you take down a bank?” Well, we all know the answer to that, don’t we? Mortgage-backed securities! Credit Default Swaps! Misleading credit ratings on risky investments!

In all seriousness, the notion of the evil banker has a long and wonderful history in popular culture, due largely to the fact that, throughout most of human history, banks and bankers were absolutely despised. In most western cultures, this is because the major religions of Christianity and Islam both forbade usury. As a consequence, most bankers were folks with money (who have really never been popular) who existed outside the usual religious norms of the community (again, not usually a popular thing be). In Europe, this meant that most bankers were Jews, which not only fed anti-Semitism in Europe, but also led to the cultural figure of the sinister Jewish moneylender that still influences the “evil banker” archetypes today.

So what typically makes an “evil banker.” Well, they typically share a number of common characteristics. For one, they are typically effete or somehow otherwise unmanly. In It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, the banker villain Henry Potter was old and confined to a wheelchair. Another example is Other People’s Money, “Larry the Liquidator” was played by Danny DeVito, whose short, stocky physique provided a contrast to the hero Gregory Peck’s much larger, slimmer build.

Second, banker villains are typically portrayed as having “no heart”–to the point where they rarely, if ever, have any family or friends. In the movie Casino Royale, for instance, the villainous banker LeChiffre was shown to be so soulless that he had tears of blood. And in a key moment of the film, he is shown as being more than willing to allow his girlfriend to die. The classic banker villain (at least in the beginning), Ebenezer Scrooge, is shown to have grown old without a wife, has very cool relations with his family, and no friends to speak of.

The third and most nebulous attribute of a villainous banker is that he is typically “out of touch” with the community in some one. This is generally done in a number of ways. Frequently, the banker is portrayed as foreign (in American movies, they are typically French or German). Alternatively, if they’re not specifically foriegn, they are foreign to the community of the story, whether it’s by walling themselves off like Ebenezer Scrooge, or a more typical urban/rural divide such as Other People’s Money.

[A quick digression here--I'd like to state for the record that I have seen Other People's Money a number of times and to me, Larry the Liquidator always comes off as the hero. Nevertheless, he's clearly meant to be the villain of the piece, and most of the archetypes apply. As long as we're on the topic of unconventional interpretations, I'd also like to state that I think that Creon is the real hero of Antigone.]

Now that we are entering a time of financial crisis where banks are broke and companies are being liquidated by necessity rather than by hostile takeover, it just seems now that bankers don’t seem to carry the same sense of menace, do they? Even the folks we look at as crooks, like Bernie Madoff, are all pretty much getting caught. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about American cultural attitudes towards con men by watching movies, it’s that we only like them when they’re successful con artists?

So where does that leave us? What group of people can fill the evolutionary niche in popular culture that needs to be populated by wealthy, effete, heartless, foriegn/elitist villains? Well, in this climate of economic doom and layoffs, the answer is obvious, really. Bankruptcy attorneys. They’re the only people with money anymore, right? Now somebody get me a pitch meeting with a producer!