ARTS

Wall Street: Lots
of questions —
no answers

WALL STREET. Directed by
Oliver Stone. Starring Charlie
Sheen, Martin Sheen, Michael
Douglas and Darryl Hannah.
1987. Twentieth Century Fox
Film Corp.

Wall Street is a good film to see
if you don’t know a lot about how
the stock market works. In par-
ticular, considering it was made a
couple of years before Meltdown
Monday (October 19 when stock
markets around the world plum-
metted), it shows how fragile the
system really is: why it fluctuates,
why it can crash, why it will crash
more and more often. In fact the
open market is not able to
“regulate itself’ to ensure fair-
ness, or even survival of the
fittest, another libertarian maxim.

More likely is the survival of
the richest. I never understood
before how value created can
simply disappear, or why money
can suddenly become worthless
with a stock market crash. I still
don’t know the exact ins and outs
of it (and you don’t have to follow
the movie), but I understand bet-
ter that a few rich people think.
they can gamble with the econ-
omysand stack the deck so they
become even richer.

Gordon Gekko (played beauti-
fully by Michael Douglas) seems
too evil a tycoon to be real until
you find out that his character was
based on three real men on Wall
Street. These men don’t live di-
rectly off the wealth created from
surplus value, but off the specula-
tion and manipulation of that
wealth.

“One per cent of this country
(the U.S.) owns more than half of
the wealth,*’ Gekko tells his new,
young and upcoming stockbroker
Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen). -‘‘I
create nothing. I own.”’ :

This is a good movie to see

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what Wall Street is like; unfortu-
nately the storyline is just not
believable. A fresh, unbelievably
innocent stockbroker from a
working class family, aspires to
join the leagues of an equally
unbelievably callous, capitalist
class. And Fox only realizes
halfway through the film that his
dealings actually affect workers’
lives.

Martin Sheen plays Bud Fox’s
father; a union chief steward with
an airline machinists’ union. Bud
tries to get his father involved in
selling out to Gekko, the wheeling
dealing monster, who is about to
take over the airline company. It
doesn’t seem possible the kid got
so little class consciousness from
his militant dad, but more alarm-
ingly, it doesn’t seem possible
psychologically that Bud Fox
stays so innocent while aspiring to
be corrupt.

Or is Oliver Stone making a
statement, not only about the

richest of the capitalists, but also
about the American working
class?

Women are not part of Wall
Street. It’s nothing if not macho.
In this I think Stone is accurate, if
not consciously so. The only two
women characters of substance
(if you can call their roles sub-
stance), Gekko’s wife and Bud’s
new, upwardly mobile lover, are
both perfectly illustrative of cor-
porate wives’ role in maintaining
the class. Corporate wives ensure
the adequate backdrop: Society,
prestige, philanthropy, art and

culture. They stay out of
‘*business’’.
For instance, when Bud

reaches success with Gekko, he
not only gets new clothes, a fancy
new condo, and a new office; he
also gets a new woman courtesy
of Gekko. Darien Taylor (Darryl
Hannah) has the class, she’s an
interior decorator, and can
immediately provide Bud with

chic furnishings to suit his new
life. But when Bud ‘‘sees the
light’’ Darien rapidly falls out of
love. ‘‘You don’t understand; I
don’t just want enough, I want it
all,’ she tells him and moves on.

One of the most important
points this film makes is onthe role
of art and culture in this capitalist
racket. Gekko’s office and man-
sion are dominated by huge, ugly,
expensive works of art. Gekko
delights in showing it off. ‘‘This
piece here,”’ he tells Bud, ‘‘cost
me $6,000; now it’s worth
$40,000.’ Art is not only an im-
portant investment, it is also an
important symbol of power and
wealth on Wall Street.

In one scene Gekko is shown at
an art auction outbidding New
York dealer Richard Feigen.
Later Darien explains to an in-
credulous Bud that Gekko has
“impeccable taste’’ as she shows
off Gekko’s art collection. It is
hard to see, in this world of specu-

Above: Charlie Sheen plays Bud Fox, Martin
Sheen his trade unionist father. Left: Michael
Douglas as the manipulative Gordon Gekko.

lation, how value is created in the
buying and selling of art. Has
Gekko acquired the art because of
its impeccable taste, or is the taste
impeccable because Gekko has
acquired it? Who sets the stan-
dards here for judging art? And is
the fact that this art is now worth
millions have anything to do with
its true value?

This film is really concerned
about the new ‘‘crisis in business
ethics.”’ Stone had a slew of cor-
porate advisors intent on trying to
reform Wall Street and bring it
back to the good, old boys club
days, when people played by the
rules. What’s missing, and we
shouldn’t expect it from Oliver
Stone, is realizing capitalism is
not ultimately reformable It’s not
just a question of a few bad boys
spinning out of control. The crisis
is extending to the whole
capitalist world and suddenly
there is a plethora of articles and
books, and now cinema, worrying
about a trend away from business
ethics. Wall Street is really about
the capitalist class trying to see a
way out of its own crisis. It’s quite
well done, fast paced entertain-
ment, but of course it doesn’t
have any answers.

— Marie Lorenzo

Poetry
for the
future

Almost At The End. By Yevgeny
Yevtushenko. Henry Holt and
Company. 1987.

I hated poetry when I went to
high school. It meant what
seemed like endless hours of
studying elaborate verses about
wilted flowers or dying rocks.
Mostof it made no sense. It would
be a few years before I overcame
the almost fatal consequences of
this education. A friend lent me a

‘Yevgeny Yevtushenko

couple of books of poetry by a
couple of Russian guys named
Mayakovsky and Yevtushenko.
A bit skeptical I nonetheless took
them home.

Well, there was no clap of
thunder and no angels sang but
still anew world was opened up to

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JANUARY 13, 1988

me. Here was poetry that made
sense, that was direct, powerful,
easy to understand, and yes,
courageous.

It was revolutionary and for
someone with a natural aversion
to textbooks it explained things in
a way no dry, theoretical book
could. Poetry didn’t have to be
dying rocks, it would be life with
all its contradictions and its strug-
gles.

I finally had a chance to see and
listen to Yevtushenko read when
he came to Toronto last spring
while on a promotional tour of his
latest book of prose and poetry.
Almost At The End. A couple of
thousand people crammed the
room to hear him and he did not
disappoint. He read his poetry —
poems about love and hate, about
work, about war and about peace.
Most of all the underlying theme
of his work rang true — a love of
humanity and a profound faith
that a better world lies ahead.

There were many in the audi-
ence who came to hear
“*Yevtushenko the dissident’’ and
I suspect they were disappointed,
as they would be by Almost At
The End. Yes he railed against
bureaucrats and toadies, those
who climb backs to get ahead and
those who abuse power. But he
also spoke of the Russian revolu-
tion, of the sacrifices made to
build socialism and of the hope of
creating a world without poverty,
want or fear. This was not the
preaching of a dissident but of a
poet committed to the revolution.

Almost At The End contains
some of the strongest writing of
Yevtushenko’s career. The book
comes at a time of tremendous
change in the Soviet Union,
change that Yevtushenko had cal-
led for in his writing. Now, in the
era of glasnost there are new chal-
lenges and new responsibilities.
How important a role Yev-
tushenko will play remains to be

seen. Can the populist poet who

was often battered and beaten

during the years of stagnation,
adapt and help push forward the
revolution? The poem Comrade

Butwhatifers gives evidence the

old veteran won’t be content, just

yet, to retire to the sidelines.

Comrade Butwhatiferinsky, to
protect his dear fellow citizens

from so-called harmful tricks,

saw in all cybernetics only
obscurantism and mysticism

and robbed computers from our
future children.

And denying everything that’s new,
the procrastinators, the”
shoverouters

menacingly wave their rubber
stamps: “But there is no
precedent,”

forgetting that, with granddad’ s old
rifle,

in lice, barefoot, in rags,

the October revolution also had no
precedent! ...

— Paul Ogresko

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