Cold Calling Is a Mug’s Game

Even that most unrelentingly ruthless of corporate raider movies, Wall Street, the other film that will figure in this essay, pays (a) tragic lip service to the ethics of American productivity. As the union man father, Carl Fox (Martin Sheen) is dropping off his son Bud (Charlie Sheen) at the New York County Courthouse, where he is about to give himself up for his role in insider trading, Carl offers this nugget of fatherly advice: “Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others.” The message is clear: earn your living through the making of something. There is, as every artisan has been instructed since time immemorial, honor in labor. This is the kind of mindset that holds itself to the standard of “job well done.” To Carl Fox, his son’s ambition, his desire for upward mobility, is understandable. The lack of productivity, which would appear here to be analogical to economic parasitism, is what Carl cannot abide. It is precisely Bud’s inclining toward “living off the buying and selling of others” that got him to where he is: about to be charged for the crime of insider trading. At the core of Carl’s admonitory advice is a form of regret that is inveterately nostalgic. Bud lost his way because he could see no value in making things. But neither was the aspirational Bud satisfied with cold calling clients at his manager’s behest and offering them the opportunity for an investment that Bud promised would make his would-be clients a quick buck. Bud is wise to his manager’s injunction. Cold calling is a mug’s game.

Carl’s dedication to building things—airplanes, in his case—suggests that late industrial capitalism, no matter its precipitous decline after its postwar dominance, also bespeaks a certain social modality. Carl has achieved his dream: the house in suburban Queens. Bud is a figure of postmodern economic ambition. Not for the son a lifetime of laboring for a single company. Not for Bud his father’s suburban dream. Postmodernism, with and because of all its technological innovation, increased the speed at which life would be lived. It turned its nose up at the suburbs, it marked a renewed commitment to fast-paced urban living.

Postmodern capitalism as a mode of being is only possible, in the Wall Street imaginary, amidst the skyscrapers of Manhattan. It is a life that cannot be lived in a duplex in Queens. Postmodern capital would rather endure a tiny studio apartment in Manhattan than suffer the indignity of moving back into your old bedroom in your parents’ house in Queens. The postmodern economy is as much about a way of life—a “lifestyle”—as it is about a relationship to rapid-fire capital accumulation. “Time is money,” the motto of the postindustrial economy, means get rich quickly, and ostentatiously. It is not enough to be rich. It matters as much that your wealth be publicly visible. The aesthetic and ideological difference between old money and the arriviste class. Old money prides itself on discretion and understatement. You can tell a parvenu by how the labels are still, metaphorically (and maybe even literally; garishly), visible on their suit and by that gaudy Rolex on their wrist.

In the postmodern economy, to simplify the argument, it was as much a matter of how much money you made as it was a matter of how quickly you made it. The postmodern economy was an impatient beast. It would not tarry. It takes time to build things. Time that Bud did not believe he had. Bud was certainly in no mood to hang around, put in his time, and then be given a gold watch upon retirement. Bud’s fate then, registers as a supreme irony. All Bud’s economic impatience—his ambition—results in him “doing time.”