Mark Reviews Movies: GAMESTOP: RISE OF THE PLAYERS

Gamestop: Rise of the Players, Super LTD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 28, 2022

To understand the basics of what happened in the stock market in late January of 2021, one needs a pretty decent understanding of the market and the idea of shorting a stock—essentially, betting that the company will go under. In this specific case, it's also vital to have some knowledge of internet culture, the nature of social media, the effects of the global pandemic, and the politics of populism on both the economic left and the nationalistic right. GameStop: Rise of the Players provides most of that information in quick, succinct doses. It's not much of a help.

The narrative of director Jonah Tulis' documentary follows a group of people, from across the United States, who caught on to the possibility that the stock of video game retailer GameStop was worth more than the market price suggested. Those are our "heroes"—and good on them, seriously, for seeing that seemingly unlikely potential, holding down the fort, and making unspecified fortunes from a rare event that appears to have had little to do with them.

That's one of the odder things about Tulis' movie: All of its main subjects seem to be little more than bystanders in the actual "short squeeze" that drove up the stock prices of various, apparently dead-or-dying-in-the-water companies. Some of these people—such as Justin Dopierala, the founder of a small capital management firm in Wisconsin, and Jeff Tarzia, a game tester who started an online video channel as a career change—had nostalgic feelings for the company, which sells physical copies of video games in a market that's becoming increasingly digital. The stock was cheap enough when they started buying it—a few years before the main attraction of the squeeze—that good feelings were enough of a justification.

Other players include Jenn Kruza, who quit a job to pursue a career in the music industry, and Farris Husseini, a second-generation immigrant who took his late father's advice about being a self-starter, and the couple Joe Fonicello and Abbe Minor, who took to a van to travel the country when COVID-19 hit. We get a lot of their stories, with most of the subjects connected by economic and career uncertainty, as well as their shared realization that their parents and grandparents' way of life—working a regular job with good benefits and the guarantee of a retirement fund—has disappeared. Mostly, though, they're united by a then-weird love for a company that had become a joke among its target customers.

For what it's worth, the movie never really convinces us that GameStop has made or will make any real and significant changes, as Tarzia and a fellow online-video streamer known as "Roaring Kitty" insist. When, though, has that ever mattered in the big casino we call the stock market, anyway? It was never the point, and one of the more ingenious and revealing consequences of the 2021 short squeeze is how it made that reality clear to anyone paying attention.

For all of the definitions and data that Tulis presents in this movie, the filmmaker either misses or ignores that larger point. To be sure, the aftermath of the squeeze brings with it an onslaught of news reports, which Tulis offers up in the technique of overlapping montage (One reporter says a word or phrase, and then we get several more repeating the idea), and a public Congressional hearing, in which a hedge fund manager whose company had been shorting the stock and a man who created an easy way for everyday people to invest in the stock market evade direct answers to even more direct questions.

Some talking heads compare the phenomenon of these "meme stocks" (It's amusing how Tulis includes footage of a reporter being embarrassed for not knowing what a "meme" is, only to never explain or contextualize that GameStop was only one part of the event) to the Occupy Wall Street movement. People on the political left and right in the United States see the squeeze as a good thing, and that, apparently, is as deep as Tulis is willing to dig into the politics of the issue (The movie definitely overlooks the more sinister motives and elements of the online movement to stick it to the hedge funds).

There's a feeling of inescapable disconnection in the way all of these stories—the personal ones, the central subjects' decisions to invest, the short squeeze itself, the fallout—are combined. For our "heroes," the squeeze appears mostly to be a case of persistence and luck, unless Tulis or they are keeping some details of their participation a secret. They are on the side of a much bigger picture. By the end of GameStop: Rise of the Players, we come away with a decent comprehension of what happened, but as for how and why it happened, that'll be a story for one of the many, many documentaries and dramatizations that are certain to come in the future.

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