Cinematic Amnesia #2-Wall Street

Wall Street:  Lavish Hubris

“My God!  What have I done…” -David Bryne and Brian Eno, Once in a Lifetime, 1980.

The Reagan era can best be summed up musically with the band, Talking Heads.  The melodies brought vibrancy to the inherent ridiculousness of the eighties which David Byrne’s lyrics were so keen to bring up.  The Talking Heads were punk without the destruction.  The music created something out of the vast nothingness so many felt.  Very fitting then that the Talking Heads’ song “This Must Be The Place” became a default theme song for one of the most typified eighties-in-excess movie, ‘Wall Street.’  “Greed is good” became the iconic motto of Regan era self-indulgence spoken from the most attractively conniving characters written in the last twenty years.  Oliver Stone’s film and his monster Gordon Gekko became intricately linked to that decade with those words.  I would argue, however, that it was another unforgettable line that encapsulated the mood, “It’s a zero sum game…money itself isn’t lost or made; it’s simply transferred from one perception to another.”

Besides the motivation to catch myself up before the sequel is released later this year, I wanted to truly watch ‘Wall Street’ for the first time in a way that would have been impossible in any other time in my life.  It’s now 2010 and the United States has been going through a roller coaster of ups and downs in the stock market since the internet balloon busted in 2000.  I know this and have personally felt this for all of my working life.  The question I always come back to when considering the absurdity of relying the entire economic outlook on a gambling racket fraught with corruption and deceit is; why do we keep insisting on getting everything for nothing?  In the past, Oliver Stone has rightfully been accused of having a heavy hand.  Well, in this picture, his aim was and still is on target.

Perception is a damaging foe in ‘Wall Street.’  It is the perception of the good life that entices Charlie Sheen’s character Bud Fox into Gordon Gekko’s empire of fast deals, insider information, and backroom liquidation.  Michael Douglas has always brought a good amount of smarminess to his roles.  I don’t think it was mere coincidence that the two roles he will forever be known for were from the same year.  Douglas personified the man of the eighties, having it all and destined to lose it by his own vices.  It is classic tragedy and Oliver Stone played it up.  But I would also say that Stone points an accusing finger at the whole system.  Gekko and Fox had just enough hubris to get caught.  The system itself doesn’t get caught.  The Wall Street in the movie and in reality continues unscathed producing more Gekkos more Maddoffs and more schemes to create something out of nothing.  A factory manufacturing unregulated greed.

But I digress, the movie quickly unfolds the crime of securities fraud with the use of multiple split-screens, shown ‘24’ style fifteen years before ’24.’  In this early scene we see how information, the most important commodity, is used to manipulate perception and push the stock price in a company to the point where it is most profitable to the people doing the pushing.  The energy is frenetic when insider information turns to buy, turns to sell-off, and then turns to profit by the end of the day.

Also fascinating in ‘Wall Street’ was the use gold as an overall color motif for the film.  Everything was shown through a lens of a sunlit dawn.  Buildings were silhouetted by the rising sun, fashion accessories were blindingly gold, the hot girls were blond, the wives were not, high-rise apartment interiors glowed tacky gold leaf and tackier art, and money always folded into gold clips.  Oliver Stone perfectly encapsulated a world fixated by the possibilities, real or fabricated, within every “morning in America.”

I love this movie in a way that I love good heist flicks.  The characters are slick and know exactly what to say at the right moment.  I am very curious to see how Mr. Stone translates his fashionably corrupt environment of false perceptions into the internet-influenced utopian chaos that is now the modern market for the sequel, ‘Wall Street:  Money Never Sleeps.’ From the trailer, I don’t think I’ll be disappointed.  My only gripe; Stone only allows a glimpse of the human toll through Martin Sheen’s character of Bod Fox’s blue collar father caught in the middle of Gordon Gekko’s next easy money scheme.  Fox’s character transition also seemed a bit labored when he figured out the nefarious intentions of his mentor, whom he’s been following like a comic dachshund beside a bulldog for much of the film.  Seemed to me that Fox should have known he was screwed at the moment he accepted a check for a million dollars.  But that’s what perception does.  It simply transfers itself to the rosiest picture when it’s more convenient, which is the fault of most tragic heroes.  In David Byrne’s immortal words, he certainly bought some ‘wild wild life.’

-Mike Ruzicka, i-D.

Cinematic Amnesia #1-Sid & Nancy

Sid & Nancy:  The Beautiful Con

Sometimes I do feel like I’ve been cheated.  I was never hard core for the Sex Pistols.  In fact, I challenge anyone who claims they were.  They entered my consciousness much like anyone’s of my age group (32-36) through a friend with a beat up cassette, an older sibling who bequeathed their record collection to us before they entered rehab, or by the curious and obvious symbols of punk culture…mohawks, chains, shit-kicking boots, etc.  The existence of the movie “Sid and Nancy” was just inevitability.  It was only a matter of time before the great swindle was dramatized.  As a kid, I had always known of the movie, much like anyone always knows Christmas comes in December or that “Rosebud” somehow equals “sled in fire.”  “Sid and Nancy” was just there.  Why it took me over twenty years to finally sit down and watch it explains why I’ve always felt cheated by my Johnny-come-lately birth year.

You see, I was just a lad when the whole thing went down.  I was probably spitting up food all over my mother’s gold owl necklace when The Sex Pistols were spitting all over their fans.  I can’t turn back the calendar and be at the first gigs or the events that defined my musical taste at this time.  So yeah John, I guess I do feel cheated.  So the movie that dramatized the quintessential punk symbols destroying themselves with excess, drugs, and fuck all was never on my radar.  I didn’t live it…why would I want to see a hallmark copy?  Yet it was the symbols of punk that moved me to put the film on my Netflix queue.

Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen provided the punk generation its own Bonnie and Clyde.  They robbed and cheated, drank and snorted, and shot up their lives into self-destructed oblivion.  From the film, I got the sense that none of this was planned.  Here were two young bumbling assholes that lived out the con the Pistols inadvertently set up for everyone.  Twenty minutes into the movie I checked my DVD timer and was aching for Nancy’s nails-against-a-chalkboard-affected-NY-accent to be snuffed out….soon.  Chloe Webb was really the only choice for this part at the time.  Courtney Love, who auditioned for the part, would have killed the movie with melodrama much like she’s done with her own career.  What brought me to care about the movie were certain scenes when I knew I was being manipulated.  But it did not matter to me because those scenes were damned beautiful.  Two in particular stood out:

Sid and Nancy exiting the ferryboat concert broken up by the police:  This scene is so brilliant and so fake.  It really sums up The Sex Pistols for me.  Here we have the film’s idealized couple, now in actuality crossing the dock on the banks of the Thames, walking up the ramp to street level in loving embrace while the whole world collides around them but, at the same time, never touches them.  Yes, we are all pretty vacant and pretty gullible to fall for this, but I did.

Sid waking up in the Chelsea Hotel:  I think this scene typifies how many of us feel when we hit a certain age.  Sid and Nancy are in a hotel bed.  The window blinds are shut and there is hell strewn about.  Nancy suddenly realizes that she just can’t go on living like this.  Sid tries to assure her by saying everything will be alright once they get to New York.  After a pause Nancy squeals out that they are in New York and had been for a while.  Sid stammers up to his feet and opens the balcony door to realize, maybe for the first time, that he is in New York.  Gary Oldman is a great actor.  This is a fact to me.  This scene alone should prove it to anyone.  Looking at this scene with a younger version of a soon-to-be-great-actor I can see in Oldman’s face that his Sid has no idea how he got to New York, in the Chelsea Hotel, or what has transpired the entire time before he woke up.  We all have moments like this.  I hope for most or our sakes that they’re not laced with heroin.

There are other moments in the film that are disgusting, shocking, and stunning.  I have never seen trash fall around a kissing couple with so much choreographed joy.  We all know of these images.  It’s the typical rock-til-you-stab-someone-and-overdose-in-a-figurative-pizza-joint-heaven.  Somehow I think back in 1987 when the movie came out these images weren’t really new.  Yet there is always an exception when you see a movie for the first time well past its prime.  Watching Sid walk across a concrete wasteland with the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers hovering over a morning haze was something I did not see coming and left me with shed tears for something lost.  Something we can never recapture no matter how young we feel.

-Mike Ruzicka, i-D.