Gordon Gekko, Wall Street and Appreciating The Past
I recently re-watched one of my favorite movies of all time, Wall Street, which stars Michael Douglas, who plays probably the greatest white collar villain of all time, as well as a young Charlie Sheen as his impressionable apprentice.
It’s really an incredible film that provided some powerful social commentary on Wall Street (and, in many ways, America) in the 80s and the movie is still as relevant and meaningful today as it was back then (despite the fact that some of the visuals are a bit dated now).
When I first watched the film more than three decades ago, I found it to be fresh and exciting - every aspect of it was, to me, well done. And while I still found it as enthralling when I watched it again a few days ago, I couldn’t help but notice one glaring issue. Specifically, I found the pacing to be a little too rapid.
I mean, parts of the film are perfect - Bud Fox’s first meeting with Gordon Gekko, Gekko’s pep talk to Fox from the beach and, Gekko’s greed is good speech, to name a few.
But some scenes just seemed a bit rushed. The scene when Bud goes to visit his dad in the hospital comes immediately to mind as do a few of the scenes relating to the Bluestar Airlines takeover. It’s almost as if the director and scriptwriters were in a hurry to get to closure but didn’t want to invest the time to get there.
I don’t know why that would have been the case - I can’t imagine it was budget related, not given the choice of director (Oliver Stone) and the star, at least. The best I can conclude is that perhaps that was the style of the day and that pace of movie is what made sense to those making the film and, clearly, resonated with those watching it.
So then it made me think about my own perception of the film and how and why that has evolved over the last three plus decades. Don’t get me wrong, I still love it, and I’ll watch it again at the drop of a hat but I no longer view it as “perfect” a film as I once did.
That’s probably to do with my own evolving tastes and the way I view and evaluate story development. It probably also relates to my desire to see more reality in these kinds of films (in reality, things don’t get tied up in nice, neat bows, not so quickly anyway).
So, now I notice a rush to conclusion more readily and prefer a bit more pacing, that is, a more reasoned, natural progression in terms of character and story development.
(As a point of comparison, I also watched the movie “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, another brilliant film and one where the pacing seemed, to me at least, just perfect.)
In other words, my tastes have evolved and, I’d like to believe, become somewhat more sophisticated. That doesn’t necessarily mean my taste was off back in the 80s (after all, Wall Street was a massive Box Office success back then). It was just fit for the times just as my tastes now are fit for these times.
It was a reminder that when I evaluate change over time, I need to manage the judgment and focus on context.
In a specific time and context, there is a value to a particular action or product. It tells us or teaches us or causes us to emote in a specific way. Over time, the situations, the technologies, the related context(s), etc., evolve - and so does how we evaluate it.
In these cases, I need to recognize the ‘shortcomings’ for what they are but still see the value and impact of the original product, without comparing it to today.
Bruce Springsteen would never write the lyrics for “I’m on Fire” today, the Apple IIe looks archaic compared to even the most basic PC today and the original Planet Of The Apes doesn’t compare (special effects wise) to what’s available these days.
But the thing is, those comparisons aren’t relevant, nor are they right. Those things were meaningful at the time and they served a specific purpose. They played a role in the evolution to where we are at. So it’s best to appreciate them within that context.
That, to me, is the key. There is real value in our history and within that context, it’s OK to appreciate that as much as we appreciate all of the developments of today.
