Wall Street

Fully aware that industrial capitalism is yesterday’s game, both films nevertheless grapple with, in a secondary register (and often in an almost incidental way), the persistence of this outmoded capitalist mode. Romantically phrased, Wall Street and Pretty Woman, as if to cinematically mark the passing of a capitalist era, pay sentimental—that is, if sentiment can be aligned with the logic of the incidental—tribute to late industrial capitalism. But if both movies register the demise of industrial capitalism, they do so in distinct registers of nostalgia. Wall Street is matter of fact and ruthless. That is, it is completely unsentimental about the demise of industrial capitalism, except in those moments when Carl and the wannabe yuppie Bud meet in the working-class pub that Carl and his workmates frequent. (Yuppie, in 1980s lexicon, was the term for a generation that understood itself as young, upwardly, socially mobile. A generation that took as its preeminent adornments fast sports cars and a Rolex, preferably a gold one.) The movie is largely lacking in sympathy for the union-man’s son, the “NYU Business School” graduate who is caught out by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and will have to serve prison time for his role in insider trading; the son who could not resist the wiles and temptations—the financial perks, the chance to move out of his tiny Manhattan studio, the women—made immanent for him by Gordon Gekko, the poster boy for1980s corporate raider capitalism. Gekko is a character that is said to have been modeled on, appropriate for the zeitgeist of the 1980s, Michael Milken (the master broker of worthless high-yield bonds, that is, “junk bonds,” for which Milken would be imprisoned) and Stone himself—Stone’s father was a Wall Street stockbroker during the Great Depression and the movie is a tribute to Lou Stone.

Even as Bud Fox gets ready to face jail time for his “insider training,” Wall Street remains unrepentant about the exploitative destruction that corporate raider capitalism visits upon industrial capitalism. No surprise, since the movie is an ode to Gekko’s infamous motto: “Greed is good.” Words to live by, and, as such, also words to die by. “Greed is good” stands as an unsentimental, rude obituary to industrial capitalism. Wall Street greed is how industrial capitalism meets its rough end.

And who better to issue that death certificate than Gordon Gekko, that most ruthless of corporate raiders. Our Mr. Gecko is a study in corporate raider capitalist self-confidence, a self-confidence, however, that derives from a bitter lower-middle-class consciousness. A “City College” graduate, Gekko, his hair is slicked back just so, his high-end suspenders holding up his immaculately tailored pinstripe suits, with matching French-collar shirts and boutique neckties, is in the business of not only accumulating obscene amounts of money. He is also getting his revenge on those “Yale and Harvard boys.” Wall Street is what happens when the lower middle class, unapologetic about its desire for capital accumulation, uses its street smarts to game the system. And we can say that, in beating the financial system, it also reveals the bankruptcy that is at the core of global finance. The system is always only one hustle away from being ruthlessly exposed.

As in the case of the French Revolution, when the maritime bourgeoisie found the discrepancy between their vast riches and their middling class standing intolerable, class warfare is always waged most intensely by those who have the most to gain. Those who have the most to gain at the expense of those who for too long, in the minds of this particular constituency within the historically excluded (the maritime bourgeoisie; the colonized elite; and various other stripes of the parvenu), have kept them out. Those who have denied the historically excluded their fair share of the economic pie. Even though he has managed, for the price of a mere one million dollars, to secure himself a seat on the board of the Bronx Zoo, Gekko still burns with class rage, as a consequence of which he wages his own private class warfare from within the plush environs of his spacious office, with at least three brokers present to do his bidding, to execute his wishes.

Carl, who belongs, roughly, to the same generation as Gekko, instantiates a very different set of values (virtues?). Carl Fox belongs to a white American middle class that is satisfied with a modest home in the outer New York City borough of Queens, the house to which Bud cannot return. Carl regards the working man who pays his union dues as a respectable citizen because he has made something of his life. Carl provides for his family, so much so that he can afford to loan his wannabe yuppie son the odd $200 or $300 when Bud is in a pinch. Such home comforts are scorned by Gekko. In fact, making such a pact with life registers as failure to Gekko. No matter that Carl has put his son through college and stands his son a beer, “a Molson Lite,” while ordering a helping of “spaghetti” at his local bar. This humdrum respectable life is not that to which a City College graduate aspires, certainly not one who is full of animus toward the Ivy Leaguers who consider themselves his social superiors.

His social superiors, maybe, but in every social encounter with them we see the Ivy League types obsequiously trying to curry favor with this nouveau riche corporate raider. Gekko responds by either backslapping or insulting them.