Gambling is How Finopower Feels: Ozark and the Art of American Neoliberalism

This chapter explores gambling as statecraft and subject formation through a close analysis of a popular and critically acclaimed Netflix television series. I argue that Ozark’s exploration of the moral degradation of an ‘ordinary’ American family ensnared in a money laundering operation run by a Mexican drug cartel provides a unique lens through which to understand gambling’s role, both in reproducing American neoliberalism’s ‘structure of feeling’, and in disseminating it to transnational audiences. The first part of the chapter evaluates the utility of existing scholarship on ‘casino capitalism’ and elaborates the concept of ‘finopower’ (Nicoll, 2019) as an alternative approach to understanding the politics of gambling. This is followed by an explanation of what closer attention to aesthetic production and analysis can contribute to gambling research, particularly in an academic context where qualitative methods are often marginalised in favour of quantitative studies of gambling pathology and prevalence. My conclusion provides broader reflections on how the transnational entanglement of gambling and organised crime with municipal and other sub-national processes of government shapes the everyday lives and deaths of citizens and consumers.