by: Cameron MacKenzie
You might not have known that the original title of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was Greed. That title is a little too on the nose, however, especially given the film’s most memorable scene, where impeccably-coiffed Gordon Gekko tells us that “greed...is good.” I love that bit, especially for how it flips the idea that one of the Seven Deadlies is actually necessary--how greed is, Gekko’s words, a purifying fire that “clarifies, cuts through, and catches the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” But what makes it an all-time classic scene is that it's a bad-guy who’s saying a bad thing that, if you really think about it, might just be right.
This is a Hollywood movie, so the bad-guy’s got to go to jail and Bud, the pasty-faced good guy, has to have a sudden realization about what’s “really important.” This is a typical movie plot: interesting bad guy grooms dorky good guy, dorky good guy starts to act like the interesting bad guy, and then changes his mind and takes the bad guy down. See Boiler Room. See Devil’s Advocate. See 21. See every mob movie, gambling movie, finance movie, drug dealer movie, and most prestige television. Audiences like that plot because we identify with the dorky good guy, and the tidy ending supports the ho-hum life that most people lead. And so in spite of what Gekko’s preaching, Wall Street’s message is: don’t be greedy or you’ll screw up your life. Greed, in essence, is bad. And I'll go so far as to say that it is, but not in the way you might think.
There’s a classic short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, “The Dead Man,” that’s a little more honest about greed than a Hollywood movie could be. On one level Borges's story seems like it’s about a man who’s betrayed over a woman, and it is, but the betrayal that lies at the heart of the story goes deeper than taking someone’s girl. It touches on the nature of the relationship between the powerful and the powerless in a way that shows the actual danger of greed more than anything cooked up by Oliver Stone.
“The Dead Man” follows the life of a young punk from Buenos Aires, Benjamín Otálora, who finds himself in a knife fight where he saves the local strongman, Azevedo Bandeira. Bandeira thanks the young punk and offers him a place in his band of smugglers. As the story goes on, Otálora rises in the ranks, becoming more ambitious, taking more risks, making more decisions, becoming a leader, and eventually aspiring to replace Bandiera at the head of the gang. Otálora is obsessed with what the bossman has, particularly his horse, his saddle, and his woman. After a battle with a rival gang, Otálora is wounded and finds himself riding his boss's horse back to the ranch and, once he's there, he sleeps with the boss's woman. At the end of the story, the gang are at a huge party and, at the stroke of midnight, the boss demands that his woman kiss Otálora in front of the entire gang, which she does, crying. As the boss draws his pistol and aims it at the young man, Otálora realizes that he had been set up from the very beginning--that he had only been permitted the pleasures of power because in the end, to the boss Bandeira, Otálora was never anything more than a dead man.
It’s a weird story (and most of Borges’s stories are weird) because what, exactly, did Otálora do wrong? He saved the leader; he showed ambition; he took initiative; he took command. As such he took what those in command may enjoy, here: horses, saddles, women. But Otálora got greedy, and what he got greedy about is really the key to the story. Otálora saw what he wanted, and his greed made him want to have it, but these things were never his to begin with--they all belonged to someone else. Otálora never asked the question what he wanted, he only saw what someone else wanted, and he decided to want the same things.
In Wall Street we can watch Bud--simple soul that he is--begin to admire Gekko, and then gradually take on the trappings of Gekko: the tony apartment, the tony girlfriend, the big suits, the slick hair. Of course Gekko doesn’t really care about Bud, he’s just setting him up for a betrayal. So Bud flips to the feds, wears a wire to a meeting in Central Park, and Gekko goes down. And this is where Wall Street cheats: it lets Bud get away with it by appealing to a higher power: to the cops, to his own dad, to a supposed morality, to the DA of the Southern District of New York. Borges doesn’t mess around with all that--he tells it straight, and in doing so he gets closer to the truth.
The truth is that in the logic of these stories, greed is really nothing other than the attempt of a half-made person to be the boss. Greed, here, is a word for a lack of creativity, for a lack of self-knowledge, for an absence of character. Borges's Otálora doesn’t know how to be a man, he just knows how Bandeira is a man. A man has an excellent horse and saddle and woman. So, if Otálora wants to be a man he must also have all three. Wall Street plays this same trick, but doesn’t have the stomach to follow it through to the logical conclusion. The movie side-steps the messy truth about Gekko, and by extension people like him. But of course Hollywood execs know a money-maker when they see one, so here comes Gekko again in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, playing exactly the same game. If Michael Douglas stays alive they could run this scam forever.
Borges, on the other hand, wasn’t so greedy. In his five page story he tells us the truth about the haves and the have-nots. He shows us the man who lives his own life, the man who knows himself, the man who is truly alive. Then, with Otálora, he shows us all the rest: the arrogant, the ignorant, the naive, the shallow, the greedy, the dead.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.