Back in November I got to spend time with one of my friends who had moved to Indiana. It’s been a weird transition for him, a Brooklyn native, to move so far away. He was telling me that in his English class, they had to write down something they wanted to do for Christmas. One of his classmates wrote that she wanted to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center and he had to stop himself from laughing. All of these “New York” things really just draw in tourists; few New Yorkers actually go and see them.
The glorification of New York is everywhere in popular culture. From music to movies, New York is always the place to be. It’s the center of the universe to many. But is it really?
My favorite movies from this semester were The Muppets Take Manhattan and The Producers. They were both lighthearted and hilarious, and a nice breather from the heavy, drudging films that otherwise filled our syllabus. Even though they were comedies, they both still had a heavy dose of reality in both. The Muppets showed us that you have to work hard to make it, but you still can in the end. The Producers showed us that there are cons out there that want to exploit art for a profit.
However, I don’t think either of those works showcased the true New York City. Why? Because in Muppets, the good guys win out and the show is a hit and in The Producers Max and Leo just keep doing their thing (in prison, but still). The only film that really captured New York was undoubtedly Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Stone shows New York as the urban jungle that it is, and more importantly shows the people who live here accurately. Deep inside, we all have bits of Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko in us. We’re like Bud because we want to get ahead in life; we’re like Gekko because sometimes we don’t mind stamping on others to get there. We’re even like Darien in that we’ll use others as a means to support ourselves.
Wall Street forces the viewer to examine him or herself. If you weren’t riveted by Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ speech, it was probably because you were too busy trying to deny that he was right. In a world where money is everything, greed is natural. It’s even good! Without greed, we’ll just get stuck where we are, no upward mobility for anyone. Maybe greed for money itself is negative, but greed for a better life isn’t so negative. However, the issue comes with the realization that more often than not, a better life is facilitated by more money. So how do you get money? If you’re Bud, you play the stock market game with an unfair advantage. If you’re Gekko, it takes you a while to get caught, but you live the life you want for the time that you’re under the radar and that’s not so bad. Wall Street is the truest reflection of New York because it has brutal honesty without being sensationalist or superfluous. Every person wants to get ahead and in the urban jungle of NYC sometimes you can’t do that by keeping your hands out of the mud. Sometimes you’ve got to get elbow deep in it. And sometimes you get caught.
