The Limitations of Oliver Stone’s "Wall Street"
The most widespread critical interpretation of Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) is that the movie represents a cautionary tale of greed, ambition, and self-discovery. The theme of the movie is both pointedly modern, inditing against the excess of American materialism in the 1980's, and hauntingly timeless. The timelessness of the movie derives from the positing of an archetypal hero and an archetypal villain who are, respectively, the movie's protagonist, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) and the movie's antagonist, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglass), in a man against man struggle with both power and riches in the balance. The cultural specificity of the movie derives from the fact that Stone consciously sought to capture a certain feeling of selfish ambition which was prominent, in his opinion, throughout American culture in the decade of the 1980s.
In fact, not only did Stone view this attitude as prominent in America, the movie Wall Street suggests that Stone saw this attitude as nearly ubiquitous in American culture. As critical opinion typically holds, Stone's film is an exploration of how "1980s America became seduced by fast money and a slippery-slope morality" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 124) and, as such, the film stands as a moralistic narrative: " Now is the time to wake up, the film screams, and realize what we have done. Wall Street is our cleansing, our rite of passage" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 124). The implication is that Stone has fashioned a sort of 1980's "modern fable" in order to deal with a deeply consequential theme in American society which, itself, represented an almost universal struggle for all Americans.
It is by this interpretation of the film's function that most of the film's positive notoriety has been claimed. The film, according to critics who judge it to be of demonstrable social value, is viewed as having somehow combined a "traditional" set of moral and ethical principles with a thoroughly modern crises. The neatness of this critical explanation rivals that of the film's quite conventional plot where a cast of characters meant to represent a social microcosm actually forwards a series of woefully reactionary cultural stereotypes and banal assumptions, which, in turn, are placed in predictable motion toward a predictable conclusion where, by the film's end, the deep, unnerving and profound social crises which the film purports to address are "solved" by a decidedly conventional plot-arc.
The progression of the film's central character, Bud Fox, is the progression from an ambitious young stock-broker to criminal and then back, again, to hero: "Although Wall Street's Bud Fox is seduced by the world of corrupt corporate finance, learns his lesson, and ultimately redeems himself by rejecting Gordon Gekko" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 125). The almost too-pat "fairy-tale" conclusion of the story, taken as a portion of the film's, critically claimed viability of theme, strains the credibility of those critics who have seen, in Stone's film, a "true" portrait of American greed, let alone a portrait of American redemption. The film, as such, is a traditional moralistic film despite its modern veneer and the film in this function is not uncommon in American cinema. Like many other traditional American novels and films, Wall Street seeks to formulate "the American fiction of the self-made man or success hero has been used to reformulate an older republican dream of individual freedom in the context of an increasingly organized, consumption-oriented, corporate capitalist society" (Traube 1992, 67). In this regard the film maintains an overt reliance on universality, it is necessary that the film portray not a restrictive experience of a minority section of society, but capture a cultural "wave" and one which merited serious inspection and creative interpretation.
However, the area in which the film is most obviously lacking is in its implied (and necessarily so) universality. If the film is viewed as the rather esoteric story of a short-lived "Bull Market" which actually did take place in America during the 1980's, rather than an account of rampant and universal greed which held Americans in universal lock-step for almost a decade, then, obviously, the overall impact adn relevance of the film will be judged in a much different way. That said, there is more than ample reason to not only question, but to outright deny, the universality of Wall Street not only as a film which takes as its theme corporate greed in America, but to challenge the universality of the sociological and cultural assumptions which drive the entirety of the film itself.
For example, during the scene when Bud Fox confronts Gordon Gekko about his relentless ambition, the viewer is made to realize that "glimmers of Bud's consciousness have begun to emerge" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 125) and that, perhaps, Gordon Gekko's greed is a symptom of a kind of insanity. When Bud asks "How many yachts can you waterski behind. How much is enough?" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 125) Gekko's reply is that ""It's not a question of enough, pal. It's a zero-sum game--somebody wins, somebody loses" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 125). Although this scene is intended to function as a way of deepening the viewer's understanding that Gordon "Gekko" is a symbol of a limited rather than expanded personality, the overall impact of the scene actually functions to create a cultural gestalt in the opposite direction from the evident moralistic theme of the film.
In other words, if Gordon Gekko is supposed to represent "a "lizard" of ego consciousness in the modern age and in the "me" decade of the 1980s," (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 125), the implication is that Bud Fox's character development represents the "individual[...] separated from the trappings of ego consciousness--fame, fortune, possessions, reputation" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 129) which is discovered "as a result of some inner strength of character, which allows the individual to explore or at least acknowledge the abyss and in losing the self, find the Self again" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 129). The entire principle of the film's moral expression that greed is universal but also universally corruptive rests on the transmission that Stone's equation of the material world with the world of "ego" would be the primary impetus driving the film's tension and thereby be a method toward generating a universality of theme and impact.
This last aspect is worth repeating: the success or failure of Wall Street as a film rests up in the reception of the film as a universal expression of moral conflict between materialism and moral "goodness." In order to the film to succeed in articulating its theme properly the viewer must walk away from film convinced that "If faced with the abyss and separated from the trappings of ego consciousness, Gordon Gekko would have to leap in" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 129). Furthermore, the viewer must experience an inward catharsis (based on universal experience) by way of the Bud Fox character's progression from hero, to villain, and back to hero. If the transformation of Bud Fox, alone, were not enough to induce even the most dense of viewers into understanding that the "zero sum" game of Gekko's imagining actually is a self descriptive for the materialism's emptiness, Stone resorts to, as mentioned earlier, an ensemble cast which is meant to function as a social microcosm and which, ostensibly, demonstrates the vile consequences of Gekko's greed.
In this way, "Stone continually reminds us in Wall Street of the error of Gekko's ways by opposing him with the voice of reason, represented by Bud's father, Carl Fox, and Bud's fellow stockbroker, Lou Manneheim" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 127). The idea is ridiculously simple: "If Gordon Gekko represents the amoral high-rolling player, Lou Manneheim, even more so than Bud's father, represents the ethically conscientious" (Mackey-Kallis 1996, 127) character of the film who is, not coincidentally, also identified with the "labor" class of American society. The obvious nature of the social microcosm extends beyond "labor" to include a single primary female character. This character, Darien (Daryl Hannah) functions as both a love-interest and a materialistic "trophy" for Bud Fox as he claws his way into Gekko's world of insider trading and high-finance. During the final confrontation scene between Gekko and Fox, Gekko intimates that he has "given" both Darien and Fox' "manhood" to Fix, as a father-figure. So the character of Darien is "fixed" in the reader's mind as being a part adn parcel of Gekko's ego-bound world. There is even a scene where Darien and Gekko confess to having been lovers during the time when she is dating Fox. By this point in the film, the confrontation scene between Gekko and Fox, the villainy of Gekko is meant to have been devastatingly revealed and part of this revelation is transmitted by the objectification and "branding" of Darien.
Stone, like many film-makers in America, resorts not only to creating a stereotypical character to stand in Wall Street as the microcosmic representation of an ambitious and young woman, but he uses that "cardboard" character to forward traditional misogynistic perceptions of women. Far from establishing a viable (and universal) social microcosm by positing Darien as the lead female character in the film, Stone mocks his own theme:
"Instead of celebrating the values of work, self-denial, and repressive authority, the films that struck a responsive chord concentrate on attacking the negative forces of excess projected onto women. Once women are constructed as the source of social problems, their expulsion offers an imaginary solution.
(Traube 1992, 121)
This aspect of the social microcosm comprised by the minor characters of the movie is, itself, enough to rob the film of any serious claim to universality. Instead of representing the vast real-life experiences of women in America during the 1980's, Wall Street offers a cardboard figure of a "femme fatale" one whose weapons are sex and money and one whose rejection means the simultaneous embrace of "moral character." Far from finding a universal expression for a cultural consciousness of note in American society, Stone merely followed other "Hollywood filmmakers[who] returned to the moralistic version of the success myth, which had seemed to have been superseded" (Traube 1992, 121) and where this moralism is conveyed in Stone's Wall Street, there is an implied "appeal in their various ways to fears of moral breakdown, and they assert the need for moral restraint" (Traube 1992, 121). For Stone, in Wall Street, part of this "restraint" has to do with the implied rejection of women's ambition and women's sexuality and continues a traditional mind-set, beginning as far back as "Adam and Eve" of blaming women for the faults men discover in themselves.
If Stone fails to embrace or even acknowledge the experience of women during the 1980's even in limited relation to his theme of corporate greed during a notorious bull-market, how does he fare in describing or portraying the actual Wall Street brokers and "movers and shakers" who were involved with 1980's boom? First off, Stone's attempt to embrace what has come to be known as "Yuppie" culture was not predicated on a strictly middle-class and widespread experience of the phenomenon, but limited, by necessity, to the portrayal of Wall Street insiders whose work was conducted primarily in the financial districts. That said, it is incumbent on Stone and not on his viewers to eliminate the feeling of esotericism which accompanies his chosen locale and story. The idea that insider-traders could possibly represent the popular experience of Americans during the 1980's is, in itself, a preposterous contradiction. After-all, for Gekko's "zero-sum" game to even have any cultural relevancy whatsoever it is crucial that those who are involved in the financial game at its highest level and in closest contact with the financial "boom" to be few in number.
As if this were not enough to destroy any illusion of universality ion Stone's film, there is the fact that "Yuppieness" was, itself, a representative culture that impacted the select, rather than the mean-average: "Yuppieness became a form of protective coloration against the economic and status threats from ethnic minorities and the poor, from a questionable national economy, from an increasingly competitive world" (Palmer 1995, 280). The whole idea of Yuppieness was an "us versus the rest of the world" mentality which wholeheartedly precludes universality
Seen in this light, a representative scene from Stone's film, such as the one mean tot reveal the utter desolation of the "Yuppy" lifestyle, when Fox and Darien have dinner together in his stylish apartment becomes, not a catharsis of universal experience, but a sad commentary on the arguably neurotic preoccupations of a very small number of exclusionary people. Although the viewer witnesses the reality that "after a perfect dinner cooked with the help of every possible yuppie kitchen appliance in his perfect apartment, and after perfect sex with a perfect woman, Bud Fox finds himself out on his balcony looking at the city skyline and asking, "Who am I?" (Palmer 1995, 290) the ensuing realization that "The ultimate nightmare of the yuppie dream is that one must give up all that they are to attain it" (Palmer 1995, 290) may be of interest (and consequence) only to the "Yuppies" themselves.
In addition to the exclusionary and decidedly rare experience of the Yuppies themselves, there is the historical reality of the 1980's Wall Street boom, fueled by corporate raiders and junk binds, to contend with. The historical reality lends little credence to Stone's portrayal of broadly painted good versus evil. In reality corporate raiders used acts such as "greenmailing" to buy stocks from expanding companies only to sell them back at inflated prices :"Carl Icahn, the soft-spoken yet predatory greenmailer, made almost $100 million from his approaches to companies such as Hammermill Paper, Tappan, Marshall Field, and Phillips Petroleum" (Geisst 2004, 339); other raiders such as "Thomas "Boone" Pickens [...] realized about $100 million by acquiring stock in Cities Service and General American Oil Company before selling both holdings back to the respective companies" (Geisst 2004, 339). the reality of this situation is that not only do most Americans -- and by most I mean 99% -- have an understanding of how to create financial exploitations of this magnitude, most Americans do not even understand the events or explanation of the events such as "greenmailing" after-the fact.
Obviously, Stone's film speaks to the experience of only a very small segment of American society and attempts to remedy this reality by enclosing the story in a traditional moralistic package. The fact is that Stone's movie is represented, sometimes even by critics, as being of a universal intent and theme, but it is in reality, like so many other Hollywood films based not on the experiences of its potential mass-audience. In reality, "audience preferences are only one of many factors that influence production decisions. Producers also shape their work to conform to dominant sensibilities and values, including those of the producing community itself" (Traube 1992, 69) and in the case of Wall Street, although the film represents itself as being "An intended return to the countertradition of moderate success through honest labor," the film is more appropriately regarded as a narrowly defined and very personal vision of greed.
An extremely telling point regarding the actual popular embrace of the film is that it was the character of Gekko, rather than Fox, which found widespread cultural resonance and enthusiasm: "Douglas's performance (which won the film's only major Oscar) overpowers the plot. It is as if a transformer from the other pole of success mythology had somehow wandered into a cautionary tale and then proceeded to wreck it, as easily as Gekko wrecks the companies he buys" (Traube 1992, 105). And this latter reality is, after all is said and done, the most obvious indication of all that what little universal resonance Wall Street generate was in direct contradiction to its proposed, highly moralistic theme.
Works Cited
Geisst, Charles R. 2004. Wall Street: A History : from Its Beginnings to the Fall of Enron. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Mackey-Kallis, Susan. 1996. Oliver Stone's America: Dreaming the Myth Outward. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Palmer, William J. 1995. The Films of the Eighties: A Social History. Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press.
Traube, Elizabeth G. 1992. Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s
Hollywood Movies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
