Greed never left. Also, it's legal. But is it still good?

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

If anyone is still wondering why I'm making such a fuss about Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps -- a fuss that is is, I'll clarify, two parts irony  and one part rampant enthusiasm, with just a sprinkle of schadenfreude --this piece in Vanity Fair by Michael Lewis will brighten all the dark corners. 


An excerpt: 

What [Oliver Stone] wanted to do, it appeared, was to prosecute the values underpinning American capitalism. He cast Michael Douglas as a diabolical money manager named Gordon Gekko, and Charlie Sheen as a young stockbroker named Bud Fox, who, seduced by this devil, abandons his ideals, betrays his family, and is destroyed.

As social documentary, even as art, the original Wall Street was a great success. It did well at the box office, won Michael Douglas an Oscar for best actor, and remains one of the very few financial movies ever made in which financiers see anything like a realistic version of themselves.

As a vehicle for social change, however, the movie was a catastrophe. It did not show Wall Street in its best light, yet Wall Street was, by far, the movie’s most enthusiastic audience. It has endured not because it hit its intended target but because it missed: people who work on Wall Street still love it. And not just any Wall Street people but precisely those who might have either taken Stone’s morality tale to heart or been offended by it. To wit, not long before hedge-fund manager Seth Tobias was found dead in his Florida swimming pool, with an unlucky mixture of cocaine, Ambien, and alcohol in his bloodstream, he gave an interview for Wall Street’s DVD bonus reel, in which he said, “I remember when I saw the movie in 1987. I recall saying, That’s what I want to be. I want to start out as Bud Fox and end up as Gordon Gekko.”

Read Greed Never Left at Vanity Fair.

Loves it.