Why the movies never got over Gordon Gekko

This wasn’t an anti-capitalist screed,” says Stanley Weiser, of Wall Street, the 1987 drama he co-wrote with its director, Oliver Stone. The film is about a young stockbroker named Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) who insinuates himself into the inner circle of crooked alpha investor Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) — a man “rich enough not to waste time” for whom profit is “better than sex” — only to be sold out himself.

Wall Street, particularly its ruthless villain, has for more than three decades served as a touchstone for young men in finance. Some of them were at a recent screening of the film, part of a tribute to producer Edward R Pressman, who died in January. Weiser was there too, watching Wall Street in its entirety for the first time since it came out.

We joke that not much has changed in the past 36 years. In the 1980s, deregulation brought boom times amid the bust of insider traders. A prosperous decade followed, built on a house of cards that came tumbling down in 2008, followed by a bailout of its instigators, in the wake of which we are living now, a time when the culprit is clear, the alternative less so. But before the crash of 1987 — Wall Street is set in 1985 — the financial markets and those who would become known as “finance bros” like Bud, were heroes, the personification of the era’s acquisitiveness. “The whole code of life was gain,” says Weiser. “They had been glamorised.” Corporate raiders were being arrested left and right, but it didn’t matter. In disgraced investor Ivan Boesky’s words, later refurbished for Gekko, greed was all right.

“No one was looking to do a business film,” says Weiser. More specifically, no one was looking to do a critical business film. But it was hard to ignore a zeitgeist steeped in financial scandal. And having just won the Academy Award for Platoon, Stone had “carte blanche,” according to Weiser. But even though Stone’s dad — to whom Wall Street would be dedicated — had been a stockbroker, neither Stone nor Weiser had a business background. They looked to the 1957 media-business noir Sweet Smell of Success for its tale about two men using each other, its dialogue —“You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried,” — and gritty New York milieu. And after three weeks of research, visiting brokerage firms and interviewing investors, they had their story. Carl Icahn, who cannibalised Trans World Airlines, inspired Gekko’s cannibalisation of Bluestar Airlines, the company that employs Bud’s union rep dad (effortlessly embodied by Sheen’s real-life father, Martin). Another corporate raider, Asher Edelman, inspired the film’s art theme, which includes Bud’s love interest and Gekko’s ex, interior decorator Darien (Daryl Hannah). And Michael Ovitz, Stone’s agent at the time and co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency, who was known for being power mad, Weiser recalls, and a fan of Sun Tzu, enriched Gekko. After Weiser’s first pass at the script, Stone, whose own baroque style of speech influenced Gekko’s, punched up the technical details and the dialogue.

While Wall Street’s infamous “greed is good” speech has been connected to Boesky’s 1986 commencement address at University of California, Berkeley, Weiser only really riffed off its “greed is all right” line. “I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them,” Gekko says. “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” Weiser used Gekko’s big moment to not only expose the obfuscation of the stock market’s upper echelons, but their corrosion, a corrosion in which Gekko himself colludes. “He’s basically double talking — he’s a master at that,” Weiser explains. “But in doing so, he’s exposing the mindset of everybody in that world.”

And what is the Wall Street mindset? On that, the film is not entirely coherent. In one version, Stone had Hal Holbrook’s character Lou Mannheim, the honourable broker and stand-in for his dad, succumb to insider information. “I wanted to show the ambiguity of everything,” he explains in James Riordan’s biography, Stone. “Even my father took tips. But it would have left the wrong impression.” And yet this is fundamental to modern finance — that all who work in it are complicit — and would have kept Wall Street consistent. Instead, in the director’s commentary, over Gekko’s speech, Stone admits, “I cannot really disagree with anything Gekko is saying.” The message of Wall Street — in Weiser’s words “Everything has its price” — implies capitalism can be virtuous. But how is that possible when the economy is defined by men like Gekko?

In a 2019 article for the journal Postmodern Culture, academic Mark Steven describes a “jockish masculinisation of financial labour” that seems intrinsic to the market and the films it has inspired since Wall Street — from American Psycho to Dumb Money. (The finance film is a genre so green that up until now, analysis has been largely relegated to academia.) At the end of Wall Street, for instance, an irate Gekko seethes to the double-crossing Bud, “I gave you your manhood.” In the film, the ultimate expression of man is the finance bro and the pater familias is Gekko, who has what Steven describes as the “weird virility” of “a vaguely threatening middle-aged man stuffed into an expensive suit”. Self-interest, aggression, arrogance, acquisitiveness — these are the characteristics that define not only toxic men but a toxic market. To confront the latter on film, one is forced to confront the former.

Director Mary Harron saw Wall Street when it came out and appreciated how Stone handled a period she had mixed feelings about. In Gordon Gekko, “he was creating a charismatic villain, but a villain”, she says. “At the time, it was refreshing to see that.” So when she read Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, a satirical takedown of Reagan-era materialism in the guise of a serial killing stockbroker named Patrick Bateman, she was taken with it as well — but in a different way. She found Bateman hilarious. “I did think, at the time, that he was the essence of everything that was crazy about late 20th-century capitalism,” Harron says. “Obsessive greed, accumulation, consumerism, an obsession with surfaces, and he turns violent with rage, because none of that was satisfying.” But the book’s brutality, which caused Harron to take a reading break, sparked such an uproar that, despite being paid a $300,000 advance, Ellis’s promotional tour was cancelled. Ironically, he had been compelled to write American Psycho because he felt isolated by his increasingly consumerist lifestyle. “It was definitely a criticism of male values that were around me,” he told MovieMaker magazine on the 20th anniversary of the film’s release.

In 1996, Harron had just premiered her first feature at Sundance, I Shot Andy Warhol, about radical feminist Valerie Solanas (whose SCUM Manifesto called on women to “eliminate the money system” and “destroy the male sex”). At the time, Wall Street’s producer Edward R Pressman was searching for a director to adapt the “hot potato” — in Harron’s words — that was American Psycho. Her name came up, and she agreed to take a stab at it. Harron sought out Guinevere Turner, who had just co-written the lesbian romance Go Fish and had a similar sense of humour: “We both found the book to be a satire of masculinity.”

That tone, the mix of sharp comedy and horror that got the book into trouble, would similarly hamper the film. (It was released in 2000, post-Columbine, in an era once again questioning violence on screen.) All of the actors who tried out for Bateman seemed to think he was cool. Except for one. An up-and-coming former child star from Britain, Christian Bale, thought he was a dork. “To me, that was the essential part of the humour and also the soul of it,” says Harron, “that [Bateman] is a lonely monster like Frankenstein.”

But Bale wasn’t famous yet. In the first of a series of turns tangling all these finance films together, there was a brief period when the studio was willing to give Leonardo DiCaprio a pay cheque that soared far beyond the film’s budget to play Bateman. But Harron didn’t want him. He was too boyish, his power on set would have been too great. So she was replaced by Stone as director. He and DiCaprio reportedly planned a Jekyll-and-Hyde interpretation, to temper the anti-hero; but soon it all fell apart, Harron and Bale returned and Bateman was back to being an alien who had to learn how to be a man. “Christian’s acting a character who’s acting,” Harron says. Because of that, they spoke not of Bateman’s psychology or his past, but only of his emotions: fear, insecurity, anger. One of her favourite lines, when Bateman is asked why he has a job when he doesn’t need one — Harron says he is never shown working to keep him from ever being engaged — is: “Because I want to fit in.”

Bateman fits in by super charging his masculinity. He exercises like he’s in the military. He sports designer power suits (one of them an obvious homage to Gekko). He duels over everything, from restaurant reservations to the paper stock of his business cards. He does not converse, he lectures. He has sex like a porn star. His violence is explosive. Bale modelled his bearing on the maniacal hyper-physicality of Tom Cruise. It makes sense then that Bateman is entirely undone when a colleague makes a pass at him.

Harron further subverts his false virility with the camera’s female gaze. Bateman is filmed like an object — in the shower, having sex — the way women often are. His perspective is also traded in at one point for that of the sex worker (and soon to be victim) he picks up in the Meatpacking District. Harron made this decision early on in the process — that the scenes with Christie (Cara Seymour, cast for that face that says so much) would be the only ones where the point of view shifted. Even though Christie dies horribly, Bateman’s fate is somehow worse. In so far as he can fit in, not only he but his murders, even amid confession, are invisible. “My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone,” he says in the end.

After American Psycho, with the country on shaky ground post-tech bust, post-9/11, film-makers got serious about money. No fewer than four documentaries — The Corporation (2003), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) and Inside Job (2010) — addressed the pervasive amorality at the heart of the economy. Some serious dramas and thrillers also tapped into the anxiety unleashed by the global financial crisis. Oliver Stone returned with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), then there was Margin Call (2011), Too Big to Fail (2011), Arbitrage (2012) and Cosmopolis (2012), adapted from Don DeLillo’s novel.

Patrick Bateman exercises like he’s in the military. He sports power suits. He duels over everything, from restaurant reservations to business cards

A dour decade informed by a very real feeling of instability may have been one reason the next era would have filmmakers blending their narratives with a proliferation of data, explainers and illustrations. This was a savvier audience, increasingly used to factual entertainment and knowledgeable about the capitalist economy that was destroying them. You didn’t have to invent Gekko any more, reality was crazy enough.

Enter 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street. That Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of convicted stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s book about founding the pump-and-dump penny stock brokerage house Stratton Oakmont is also a satire suggests the only way to really get at the core of finance is to expose its absurdity in all its nakedness. Not to mention Scorsese’s record of breaking down the nuances of machismo in tight milieus like the mob. In his Film International essay “2008 and After”, writer Carl Freedman described Wolf as a companion to 1990’s Goodfellas, another film that finance bros apparently fetishise.

In what is no doubt a nod to the fact that nothing has changed, Wolf has plenty of call backs to Wall Street, including likening Jordan to “fucking Gordon Gekko”. In one of the last scenes of Stone’s film, Bud’s dad tells him to “Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others.” As though in response, a senior broker in Wolf tells Jordan: “We don’t create shit. We don’t build anything.” And in both films the rising finance bros justify flaunting their wealth with the boast, “There is no nobility in poverty.” It is no error that Scorsese has Belfort himself appear at the end of Wolf to usher in his on-screen double, and flips the camera on to the audience, revealing our complicity in his continued success. It is no error that the film includes the line, “Stratton Oakmont is America.” On Hollywood news site Deadline, Scorsese says of his audience, “I wanted them to feel like they’d been slapped into recognising that this behaviour has been encouraged in this country, and that it affects business and the world, and everything down to our children and how they’re going to live, and their values in the future.”

The 2015 film The Big Short appears to have had a similar goal. Adam McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book on the housing bubble that led to the global financial crisis is heavy on collages and fourth wall-breaking. A friend of mine describes it as a Vox Explainer, a reference to the US news site that specialises in making complex stories easily digestible, and that is the film’s strength and its shortcoming. Margot Robbie taking a bubble bath, Anthony Bourdain making a stew and Selena Gomez playing poker — all made me understand arcane financial concepts a lot better, but that’s about it. “I felt like the whole point of the movie was, yes, it’s all this esoteric language, and oh, God, it’s so boring. But guess what? It’s not boring. You can get it, and look what it did to the world,” McKay told — you guessed it — Vox in 2016. And then what? Robbie, who played Belfort’s wife in Wolf, and Christian Bale, this time a financier who anticipates the coming crash, can only imbue so much depth from their previous performances. Otherwise it’s hard to care about all these money men, even with their family tragedies. Especially when they admit they are playing the game — they claim to be “outsiders and weirdos” but they are the consummate insiders. “You just bet against the American economy,” they are told, before the American economy gives them a huge payout.

One of the latest finance films, Dumb Money, a lively romp about taking down The Man (but not really), shares similar limitations. “You never bet against Wall Street,” our hero is told, echoing The Big Short. The film is based on a book by Ben Mezrich about Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, leading a group of Redditors to squeeze a couple of hedge funds by betting on GameStop (the title refers to individual investors rather than the smart money of institutions). Screenwriters Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum, who were able to talk during the Hollywood writers’ strike because they were acting in their capacity as executive producers, told me they were particularly interested in a David-and-Goliath story for the social media age. “We also spent a lot of time studying [director Frank] Capra and studying the tradition of populist cinema,” says Angelo, “to look at an ordinary person put into extraordinary circumstances and rising to them.” The difficulty with emulating Capra in the current context is that the values to aspire to now are less apparent or unifying than they were during the Great Depression.

More fitting is that the sports language of finance — way back to Wall Street, Gekko watches his stocks like a scoreboard — inspired Dumb Money’s writers to structure it like “an underdog sports movie”, according to Blum. While they initially had Keith Gill (Paul Dano) using chicken nuggets to explain shorting to the camera (à la Big Short), they changed their minds when they thought about the way the collective had actually educated themselves. “It was a big moment in the course of our writing and a big creative discussion of realising the way people actually learn these concepts,” says Blum, “and not trying to commit the same sin of the way that Wall Street is so opaque.”

There’s a reason Cardi B’s song “Wap” — “He got some money, then that’s where I’m headed/Pussy A-1, just like his credit” — opens the film. If you repeat the line “There’s some whores in this house” enough times, it starts to lose all meaning. But maybe that’s the point. Is Keith Gill any better than the Gekkos he bet against? He may not look like a finance bro, but isn’t that basically what he is in the end? Maybe the point is that there is no way out of this noxious capitalistic stew and we are simply all Patrick Bateman sitting under a tiny sign that reads: “This is not an exit.”

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