Wall Street: "Deceit Gets Results"

It seems appropriate that we watched Oliver Stone’s Wall Street in addition to Platoon this semester. Stone seems to provide a refreshing dose of realism in what can sometimes feel like a litany of postmodern films with hugely aesthetic focuses and with often tongue-in-cheek irony. Not to say that Wall Street isn’t postmodern or without its own fair share of irony; only, it demonstrates a postmodern world and is not itself a postmodern product (at least not as much as Platoon is on the technical side of the film). That said, in a lot of ways, Wall Street and Platoon parallel one another from anything as simple as the reuse of certain actors and the recycling of character archetypes, to things as thematic as both of Charlie Sheen’s characters struggling between, as Jack Boozer puts it in “Wall Street: the Commodification of Perception,” “two opposing father figures and two distinct sets of values” (93). Platoon rejects the revisionism of Vietnam and Wall Street exposes the dangers and realities of lucrative Wall Street wealth -- neither making a claim for which values are the correct one. For instance, even though Gekko is clearly the antagonist, he is not entirely condemned as evil -- or rather, even after such a condemnation he is still highly admirable like some glorified conservative hero.

Gekko remains this hero, or antihero I suppose, because the values of America, particularly the youth’s, have changed from the values of Carl Fox’s day. Some of Boozer’s most interesting comments were the ones that detailed the diminished patience in the American 80s with its redesigned values. “Carl’s world is the mythological realm of family values America would like to hold on to” but in reality there is much more individualistic motive. “So seductive is Gekko’s approach that we almost forget that father Carl's alternative advice, however ethical, doesn’t answer to Bud’s experience.” Similarly, there is an “overwhelming desire to enter even the bottom rung of the commercial power system.”

While the film may reveal the pitfalls of idealizing such values, it does not seek to dispose of them -- perhaps it even seeks to encourage them, especially the correct use of such values. Obviously, the correct use is that “greed is only good when one can get away with it by passing negative repercussions on to someone else.” Throughout Wall Street there is a “strong association between financial success and virtue.” Even after losing the battle, getting fooled by Bud Fox, Gekko never appears to lose his credibility or the image of his superiority. As Boozer has pointed out, an eighties American society has fostered viewers to appreciate and oblige Gekko’s speeches: “We are smart enough not to buy into the oldest myth running -- love” ; “If you need a friend, get a dog”; “It’s all about the bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.” Gekko never loses our reverence. Even after the film and the viewers have concluded upon his moral depravity, he is still a glorified conservative antihero -- one in which might lead us to ponder: what if we did have that money?”

Speaking of Gekko’s untarnished image, the brunt of Boozer’s observations and Wall Street’s main depictions are those that deal with image. Essentially, in order for one to maintain the right image, the profitable one, one must lose their originality and their identity. “Bud lose[s] any vestige of coherent private self separate from his economic standing.” Furthermore, “The particular discourses and signs of the media come to dominate both the actual event reported and the functional use value of the commodity advertised. The individual finds it nearly impossible to distinguish direct personal experience from mediated images of similar experience.” In this regard, Wall Street portrays some of the core components of postmodernism, namely Jean Baudrillard’s third stage simulacra: a copy that pretends to portray reality but is, in actuality, a copy without any original. Speculative projections of a company’s future worth are represented by numbers and information that people consider representations of a company’s actual worth. As Boozer channels Baudrillard: “free-floating signs… have increasingly replaced the initial social relations they purport to represent.”

In this sense, the ending of Wall Street either bothers me or it intrigues me. If Bud Fox is a representation  with a long gone original identity, and his resumption or rediscovery of his identity in the last act is due to the need for a conventional ending, then this seems to be an inconsistency in the film’s portrayal of postmodernism, and I am bothered. But, if Bud Fox’s relinquishment of the images of himself and of the insubstantial signifiers he consists of, and he is subsequently reassuming his old identity shaped by his father’s ethical values, then I am intrigued because now this film that has only depicted postmodern values has chosen to reject those values -- as if the film wishes to cast away postmodernism and it yearns for a real and tangible truth.