on Wall Street

Wall Street is an approximation of the 80’s alright, but it’s also to quote Richard III a grim visaged view, where Michael Douglas’ character has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and where the rookie stock trader played by Charlie Sheen, who in a sense works for the devil, realizes that he has been performing evil deeds, only after his father is laid off because of his actions. Couldn’t he have realized that what he was doing beforehand was wrong as well, or is a person being laid off who isn’t related to you a good thing? This is the negative stance of the 80’s, where greed begets greed to the point where even the main hero of the piece is naive up until almost the very end, and where he needs to use his knowledge of ruining company’s (he has very good experience) to ultimately ruin his surrogate father’s business. He even goes to jail in the end to learn from his mistakes; he’s all for it. At that time, did Reaganittis and Thatcher’s conservatism really seep into the culture that much? I don’t think so, but this is the ultimate 80’s movie so it has to show these types of things to the 10^th degree, (there’s nothing else in this movie to show but greed) so that people watching the movie today could feel how terrible it was to live in the 80’s; to warn us all that we could become greedy any minute (as if success was a bad thing; there’s a difference between being successful and greedy). As if we didn’t have the commonsense to not be greedy ourselves. Wall Street is a case of 80’s conservatism infusing with the moviemaking itself.

Wall Street is not the only case of this, and the reason that for the most part moviemakers didn’t take chances on their work (this still appears to be the case) was because the businessman took over from the artist in this particular field. Narrative chances were bylined by commercial considerations for the profit value. Wouldn’t it be really audacious if the filmmakers agreed with what Michael Douglas meant when he said in Wall Street; Greed is Good. It would be even more risky if the audience liked the movie. However, this almost anarchistic tendency would give Wall Street some energy that it desperately needed. This kind of thing happened all the time in movies; an example being that the greatest woman director of all time was a Nazi, and her name was Leni Riefenstahl. 30’s film nourished the idea of impudence. It’s what sustains art in my opinion. Maybe the problem with the 80’s wasn’t so much the greediness that was being propagated at that time (greed will always exist) but rather that the selling out of personal vision was going on all the time. Sheen will still not have a personal vision after the movie’s over (he probably had more original ideas when he was corrupt) because we have no indication that he could be capable of handling other forms of business, and yet Stone shows him to be the perfect role model.