Wall Street: Doctor Faustas Meets Stock Exchange

            Oliver Stone’s Wall Street takes the audience through the intricacies of crooked Wall Street trading as we observe unethical action after unethical action.  At the core of the film the audience truly begins to understand the twisted ideology of those who take great pleasure in ruining other’s hard work.  Gordon Gekko’s of the world control typically engage in little risk of his or her own personal fortunes and relies on others to receive a large profit.  Of course what is Wall Street but greed mixed with post-modernity.

            In an inconceivable world of fixed exchanges and controlled information, and in order to attain and garner more potential wealth individuals such as Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) go to extreme versions in order maintain extravagance.  Ethics are surely out the window as spying and insider trading occurs frequently, and as Gekko says in his iconic speech “The new law of evolution in corporate American seems to be survival of the un-fittest…Greed, for lack of a better word is good.” meaning, that in order to survive in big business one must use others as a stepping stone in order to attain true greatness.  In Jack Boozer’s article The Commodification of Perception he says that “Gekko wants neither the responsibility of ownership nor the burden of management.” One of the most interesting ideas of the film is how risky and lucrative the business transactions are for the high-profile Wall Street traders. 

               High profile traders such as Gordon Gekko allow themselves to attain great amounts of wealth at incredibly low risk.  Often to gain startup funds, many companies at one time or another sold junk bonds to individuals wherein a stock-broker would sell an uneducated individual bad stock in order to gain a large commission while the investor lost nearly all of his or her personal money.  Little changes at a higher level, in terms of justice.  As seen in the film, Gekko controlled both the supply and demand of the stocks as information was leaked and demand either rose or tanked.  Gekko, also being the majority shareholder in a company also controlled the supply after he leaked information, as he bought or in turn sold stocks to make a profit.  It’s at this point where the market seems to be prejudiced in terms of the Wall Street traders who make large amounts of money considering the little personal investment, (and in the film’s case criminal activity that had occurred) where justice has eluded contemporary real examples of felony in terms of wall street traders.  An interesting story ark is where the audience follows Bud Fox down, dare I say it ‘the fox hole.’

            Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen) is seemingly an everyman who only wishes to fulfill his ambition of being a major player in the stock trading industry and take not only himself, but his family out of poverty and personal debt.  Bud Fox similarly follows his ambition and follows the father-figure Gordon Gekko to ultimately betray his real father Carl Fox (also played by Charlie’s real-life father Martin Sheen).  Bud, similarly to Doctor Faustas follows his ambition and is carried away as he signs a deal with the devil.  This post-modern/post-structuralist relation to the two allows the audience to make immediate judgments of characters and their actions, also while we relate to Bud on a visceral level of wishing to attain some ambition.  Although, unlike most real-life cases Bud grows a conscience and turns Gekko in saving the day and many people their hard work.

            Wall Street becomes an observation of never-ending greed as people use one another as stepping stones while putting up little personal risk.  As Gordon says as his stock begins to plummet and looking as though many will lose their jobs “So what if we only make 10 million dollars.”  It becomes essential that the illusion of power becomes a crooked Wall Street trader’s greatest tool, where they can fool an individual in to the idea where they control the power and their own money, while all the time power is in a crooked Wall Street trader’s back pocket.