Nightmare on Wall Street

As I write this, a majority of the moviegoing population will, plausibly, be lining up to buy tickets for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. It’s fascinating that it took Oliver Stone 23 years to unleash this sequel to Wall Street, a film that portrayed the heady tenor of the late 1980s, as a job in high-level finance is anything but aspirational today. But before I could even think about catching the follow-up — Shia LaBeouf has come a long way from Even Stevens, hasn’t he? – I had to start from the beginning. That meant sitting through the original for, like, the very first time.

To be quite honest, I find it extremely challenging to watch movies made before 1998, Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer notwithstanding. Wall Street was released in 1987, when I was a Disney creature barely out of kindergarten, so it’s not just a classic in my book — it’s a certified period piece.

First, there’s the style. The Reagan era was over-the-top in many areas of popular culture and Wall Street epitomized it. With his slicked-back hair, contrast collar shirts and suspenders, Gordon Gekko — superbly essayed by Michael Douglas, who won an Academy Award for his performance — was Satan in pleated pants. His smarminess complemented his lizard-like name, making him Chuck Bass v1.0.

The young Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), meanwhile, was the Smithers to Gekko’s Mr. Burns. Starting off as an overly ambitious stock trader from a blue-collar background, he cold-calls his way to the top. Now that I think about it, his rags-to-nouveau-riches story was best symbolized by his move from a dingy studio apartment to an Upper West Side penthouse. The former may have been small, but it had heart and soul — kind of like how his character began. The latter — a pastiche of tacky moldings and artificial brick walls — was Bud Fox at his endgame, a caricature of the so-called good life.         

It’s the dude from Two and a Half Men!: Who knew that Charlie Sheen was once a serious actor?

Then, there are the quotes. Set within the insider trading scandals of 1985, Wall Street made common currency out of douchey lines like “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good” and “Lunch is for wimps.” Of course, there’s the supposedly famous verse uttered by Lou Mannheim (Hal Holbrook), the movie’s resident voice of reason: “Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.” I played this scene three times and this cheesy nugget of wisdom is still as clear as mud to me. Help.

Anyway, from what I’ve Googled, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War exploded in popularity following Wall Street’s run at the box office as it was Gordon Gekko’s favorite book. For a fictional character, he certainly had Oprah-like powers.    

Last, there are the values. Oliver Stone, himself the son of a stockbroker, wanted Wall Street to be a less than flattering portrait of unbridled capitalism. Instead it became a sensation on business school campuses, inspiring legions of would-be dealmakers to ape Gordon Gekko’s moral bankruptcy. Even if traces of it come back as short-lived fashion trends, the 1980s was a lifetime ago; the ones who were most influenced by Wall Street’s perspective on greed are probably those who are most responsible for the mess the world is currently in.  

See, previous generations may have seen Wall Street as a template for future success. Young people now, however, will only perceive a cautionary tale loaded with bad karma, like The Devil Wears Prada for bankers. 

Oliver Stone’s decision to continue Gordon Gekko’s story within the context of 21st-century finance is both shrewd and timely. Again, with CEOs in the hot seat and bankers’ pay under intense government scrutiny, it would be quite interesting to see how the unscrupulous corporate raider fares in a changed world, brick-like cell phone and all. I have yet to see Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, but I can already predict that the more discerning among us will treat it not as a series of crib notes on climbing the corporate ladder but as a mirror of our times, one that unfortunately still reflects the ugly side of making bank.

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