Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique

INTRODUCTION

At least I don’t measure a man’s success by the size of his wallet. —      Wall Street Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy are you, buddy? It’s a free market and you’re part of it. —      Wall Street INTRODUCTION The two clips of dialogue above, which are taken from director/cowriter Oliver Stone’s  film, suggest issues that are critical to American career ideology as it has functioned under a capitalist system. In Wall Street, college graduate Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) must choose between the opposing economic viewpoints and character of two paternal figures: his father, Carl (Martin Sheen), who represents a tradition of lifetime corporate service; and his chosen hero Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), who represents the Reaganomics decade of deregulation , greed, and profiteering scams. Bud’s dilemma for his time also highlights a prime concern of this book, which addresses the way characters in Hollywood business films define themselves and their career success in light of their given social and ideological contexts. Business career life has been central to American experience, and Hollywood has produced so many significant films on the subject that they deserve special consideration in their own right. Looking back, business films can be seen to reflect great shifts in economic and technological conditions, and thus attitudes toward career. Following the Great Depression in the s, and the World War II era of personal sacrifice and industrial expansion in the s, America gave birth to a new age of corporate culture based in mediated promotionalism and mass consumerism. This study concerns those American corporate and entrepreneurial business films released between  and  that focus on culturally signifi- 2   cant middle-class careers and their relationship to personal and national growth and meaning. Historically, this important body of films represents the way business has provided individuals with opportunities and challenges, but has also at times left them in distress, disillusionment, and alienation. The ever-present American Dream of increased affluence through hard work is obviously not guaranteed, any more than business career advancement and monetary success is necessarily indicative of personal fulfillment. Because of often conflicting public and private views of success , one can find fulfillment in a career or calling that may appear to society as financially unrewarding, or be financially successful in a career that leaves one indifferent, unhappy, ethically compromised, or like Bud Fox, legally culpable. On the individual level, work fulfillment can be seen to require first of all opportunity, but also commitment to the correct career choice, to the correct career approach in a given setting, and to the ability to find satisfaction in one’s accomplishments. Bud Fox chooses Gordon Gekko as his mentor and boss despite his awareness of the man’s legal transgressions. Bud bathes in the financial power and celebrity of Gekko’s public notoriety right up to the point that the young man is arrested on felony charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bud’s rapid career rise under Gekko is shortlived simply because he just happens to get caught for overstepping a thin line between legal and criminal business activity. This also makes Bud’s legal come-uppance less than reassuring, even though he manages to provide state’s evidence against Gekko. Oliver Stone’s morality tale is finally less concerned with legal retribution than with the troubling reality of a widely accepted model of success that is increasingly characterized by predatory attitudes and behavior. Through Gekko, the film evokes the enduring appeal of audaciously ego-centered money power. The seductiveness of this personal empowerment myth represented by Gekko captivates Bud and, by association, American youth generally, further distancing individual career success from links with family and community. Bud’s two fatherly career models in Wall Street also represent a s version of a conflict that has always existed in American business That conflict is between laissez-faire enterprise entirely free of government oversight, and business that is sufficiently regulated by government to actively prevent the kinds of financial and social abuses that are demonstrated by Gekko here. President Reagan’s fiscal policy in the s preached the indirect, ‘‘trickle-down’’ benefits of private, Darwinian I Wall Street (). Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) listens to the advice of wealthy and powerful corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, bottom) rather...