A Hollywood Genealogy

Movies such as (in chronological order and beginning with Wall Street, a film which we have already noted [Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Martin Sheen]), Pretty Woman and Other People’s Money (1991, Danny DeVito) stand as the cultural artifacts that pronounce the death of industrial capitalism. Douglas’s Gordon Gecko, we remember, gave full-throated voice to the Reaganite zeitgeist. The phrase that will not die, no matter how odious its resonance: “Greed is good.” Late industrial capitalism puts its massively devalued stock in, as George H. W. Bush would have phrased it, a “kindler, gentler” capitalism. Capitalist rapacity, union busting, the undoing of the welfare state, all of it was permissible in Bush’s conception of beneficent capitalism; capitalism without its harshest Gekko-esque features, without making its ardor for exploitation quite so plain. No need to shout “Greed is good.” The more discreet registers will do as well. Subtlety, understatement: that behavior which befits a Skull and Bones man.

Late industrial capitalism is out of joint with the economic imperatives of the time.1 In the NAFTA moment, countries such as Mexico, China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, represented the guarantee of lower labor costs (that is, the lowest possible labor costs), a minimal investment in the construction or maintenance of the physical plant (a plant that has proven, again and again, not only hazardous to workers’ health but often fatal), no threat of unionization, no environmental legislation that could drive up costs, and, in general, a political class committed to generating national wealth through the creation (in most cases, anyway) of a manufacturing sector that had previously only been nascent but could now be expanded, exponentially, and where even criminally low wages represented an improvement in economic prospect. Offshore manufacturing was a mode of economic production that was ripe for exploitation. For the exploitation of the other.

NAFTA, economists of a certain persuasion make clear, signaled the official death knell for manufacturing in this country. To hear the likes of far-right white nationalists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene sound the “make things in America” clarion call is to know that it is, as she would insist, “antiglobalist,” the surest economic sign that the “America First” movement is dedicated to that fictitious sovereign economic-political beast known as “America.” It is to hear, with great apprehension, the violent white nationalism that is (at) the core of that call. Always audible, however, is the discourse of the nostalgia for late industrial capitalism. A distinct nostalgia.

The lost object is not Norman Rockwell’s bucolic postwar New England town. It is, rather, more akin to the kind of beaten-down Rust Belt city (with its equally devastated peripheries) to which The Deer Hunter’s Vietnam veterans return. In other words, we’re talking Clairton, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh, where industrial decay has since the late 1960s and early 1970s become the norm. Clairton is the kind of working-class town where noncollege-educated white men are presumed to live hardscrabble but always, at least in Taylor Greene’s imaginary, honorable lives. (The Deer Hunter’s director Michael Cimino offers a far bleaker view of the Clairtons of the world: His three returning veterans, all Slavic American, suffer not only from PTSD but also from a dislocation that is more than economically induced.) For the various Taylor Greenes who dominate our moment, loudly, Clairton is the kind of place where racial segregation is, de facto, upheld, no matter the Civil Rights movement and the legislation that ensued from it that tried to build a different America.