Bastard 2: The Hostility of the Takeover
EDWARD: It used to be easy. The market crash and a few scandals have made things tougher. And management has got smarter. I have to be more careful about my targets now.
—Pretty Woman
To James Morse, Edward Lewis is nothing more than a “parasite.” To label Edward as such, however, is to cast an effective moral aspersion, but it is also to understate both his ruthlessness and his appetite for consumption. Edward is a very large vulture, circling menacingly above distressed companies, occasionally toying with them by pretending to stage a takeover only to pull back at the very last moment. At other moments he is a brutal predator, taking exactly what he wants, picking the meat off the carcass of his victim, so to speak, and leaving naught but a bare bones in his wake.
When James Morse tells Edward that he knew his father, from whom Edward was estranged for the past “fourteen and a half years” of his father’s life, and tells him that Edward’s father was a “bastard,” Edward demurs. He demurs because he claims the mantle of the bloodless PEF “bastard” for himself. Having already been rendered etymologically impure by James Morse, Edward goes one step further: “No,” Edward says, “I’ve got the monopoly on that.” Edward Lewis: the bastard’s bastard. It’s quite a thing to claim for oneself, a moniker most would prefer not to be appended to them. Whatever the poetry of “Greed is good,” “bastard” has a sting that cannot be matched. What a thing it is to embrace it without apology.
In the PEF world, “bastards” always seem to come out on top. At least if you’re named “Edward Lewis.”
The enduring lesson of capital, however, is that it extracts, in one form or another. It never fails to get something, to take something from you, and never in a fair exchange for what you understand yourself to be giving it. In capitalism there is never an equal rate of return on the investment.
Edward knows this, and he uses his insight to damn Stuckey in their final encounter.
Angry after Edward manhandled him off Vivian while he was trying to rape her, Stuckey protests: “I gave you ten years.” “Bullshit,” Edward retorts, “you lived for the kill.”
Et tu, Brute.
But to his own bloodlust, if not to his thirst for destructive destruction (to reconfigure Schumpeter), Edward is blind. His is a bloodlust that includes the blood of the father that is on his own hands.