It's got to be one of the dozen most famous, iconic, carved-into-Hollywood-history catch phrases the movies have ever given us, a line to quote right along with "I coulda been a contender," "You talkin' to me?" and "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!" Yet back in 1987, just after the stock market had toppled, when Gordon Gekko announced to the world that "Greed…is good," it had the super-intense, camera-flash zing of topicality: a cheerleader mantra for a go-go decade that would also serve as its epitaph. So when I went back, recently, to watch Oliver Stone's Wall Street again, wondering if the movie, with its addictive celebration of money fever built right into its hurtling information-age rhythms, would have anything to say to us as we try to recover from our own age of go-go delusion, I was curious as to whether Gekko's mythic words would now sound trapped in the bubblewrap of time.
Actually, his words are still timely as hell -- though not in the way you expect. Standing before the shareholders of the Teldar paper corporation, trying to explain why he'd be the perfect guy to take over their company, Gekko, played by Michael Douglas as the world's most handsome, gleamy-skinned cobra, makes a speech sensible enough to sound like it was written by Barack Obama, with an assist from Donald Trump in his tough-love Apprentice mode. Gekko starts off with a stern warning about the growing national debt, and then -- wait for it -- he excoriates the Teldar vice presidents who are seated behind him for taking so much wasteful executive pay. (He gives them the kind of face-to-face slapping down that the A.I.G. bonus crew haven't yet had to endure.) By the time he gets to "Greed is good," it's offered not merely as the self-justification of a reptile in suspenders but as badly needed medicine -- the hunger for revenue, for profit-as-lifeblood, that will get the company surging again. You almost wish he could make the speech on Wall Street today. Except for one thing: The speech is a big, fat lie.
The moment when Gekko finally tells the truth comes later in the movie -- and it's this speech, delivered to Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox as the two stand in Gekko's high-ceilinged, black-tower office lair, that now seems to reach across the decades to diagnose, with visionary flair, the poison that infected America: not just greed, but the toxic greed of wanting money so much that we could start to see it piling up even when it wasn't there.
Bud, who has begun to glimpse the rot inside the devil he made a deal with, wonders, "So where does it all end, Gordon?" And then he asks: "How much is enough?"
"It's not a question of enough, pal," replies Gekko. And then he lets the kid in on his real philosophy, the metaphysics of liquidity that his empire is built on: "Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply…uh, transferred, from one perception to another. Like magic." With a glass of Scotch in hand, Gekko gestures toward the looming green-and-black abstract monstrosity on his wall. "This painting here," he says, "I bought it 10 years ago for sixty thousand dollars. I could sell it today for six hundred. The illusion has become real. And the more real it becomes, the more desperate they want it." Then, with a rare confessional twinkle, he says: "What I do, stocks and real estate speculation" -- he smiles slightly and offers a disbelieving shake of the head -- "It's bull---!” Then he hits us with the dirty secret, the real Greed Is Good: "I create nothing!"
And there you have it, 22 years ago, from the cinematic hand of Oliver Stone -- a prophecy for our era, when leverage would be stretched to insane degrees because perception became reality, and such pesky inconveniences as debt and loss were transferred from one perception to another, all within the flow of creating nothing. As a movie, Wall Street still gives off an electrifying hum, even when it's dated (the primitive glowing-green computer screens, the hideous sponge-painting-by-Salvador Dali decor that Daryl Hannah's vamp designer inflicts on Bud's new apartment). But it also reveals something now which it couldn't back then: that the Gordon Gekkos of the world weren't just getting rich -- they were creating an alternate reality that was going to crash down on all of us.
Get it on Blu-ray or DVD:
No comments:
Post a Comment