Dear Dr. Blankenship,

I can honestly say that I am very proud of this paper. This is one of the very few papers in which the rough outline in my head made its way perfectly onto the computer screen. I touched upon all of the points that I had in mind and feel that I used excellent support.

For the paper, I decided to stick with the books and movies that were already in the paper. As you recommended, I tried to elaborate more on the existing sources, which I hope I succeeded in doing. Another correction I made was paraphrasing the synopsis and placing them into the paragraphs. After doing so, I can see how much more coherent the paper is.

I truly hope you enjoy reading this paper just as much as I enjoyed writing it.

With gratitude,

Zouhare

I want you to close your eyes for a minute. When you hear “Wall Street”, what image appears? More likely than not, you see a fairly young white male, in his mid-twenties, wearing a navy suit, white shirt, and red tie, with his hair slicked back. Now, make this person come to life. How would he be? Many would imagine he would very arrogant, uncaring, insensitive, selfish, cutthroat, and the list keeps going. This is the image of a typical Wall Streeter in our social culture. They are portrayed as money-hungry, overpaid, drug addicts who spend more on cocaine than they pay in taxes. In a way, they are seen as villains, responsible for everything that is wrong in our free markets and capitalistic society. It not just a single movie that created this representation; there are numerous movies that shed bad light onto Wall Street. In fact, it is not just movies either; there are books and news articles that falsely represent the true nature of Wall Street.

The Wall Street stereotype really began in the 1980’s and has taken off since then. According to an article from The Street, titled Wall Street, Then and Now, the 1980’s was “a decade signified by opulence and nowhere was the American dream more present at the time than on Wall Street”(The Street) . During the eighties, almost anyone, educated or not, that went to work on Wall Street as stock broker reaped massive riches (the reason why is beyond the scope of this paper). The massive hype led to the film Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone and released in December 1987. The movie centers on Bud Fox, a Wall Street stockbroker in early 1980’s New York. While working for his firm during the day, he also spends his spare time working an on angle with the high-powered, extremely successful (but ruthless and greedy) broker Gordon Gekko. Fox finally meets with Gekko, who takes the youth under his wing. Taking the advice and working closely with Gekko, Fox soon finds himself swept into a world of shady business deals, the “good life”, fast money, and fast women.

As the article in The Street put it, despite “its romanticizing of the immoral and illegal sides of Wall Street, the movie resonated with American society”. Everybody wanted to be Gordon Gekko; they were willing to embrace the villainous stereotype all in the hopes of making millions. Greed did not have a negative connotation associated with it shortly after the release of the film. This is because during the movie, Gordon Gekko, in addressing a mass of people, said, “The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. The idea that “greed is good” was emphasized throughout the movie. It was made clear that greed is part of human nature. Gordon Gekko said it “captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit”. The audience of the movie now saw greed as natural; there was no shame in being greedy.

The whole social stigma of Wall Street quickly flipped by late 1987. As it turned out, greed was not very good. One year after the release of the film, the stock market crashed. Those who wanted to follow in the footsteps of fictitious Gordon Gekko and went to work on Wall Street were being laid off by the minute. Also, to mention, these were the same people responsible for the crash (not solely responsible; there were many reasons for the crash). But, nobody likes to put the blame on themselves. As a result, they turned the blame to the remaining employees of Wall Street. The American society saw them as “Gordon Gekkos”; their greed led to the mess of the late 1980’s. If that movie was not enough to tarnish the reputation of Wall Street, out comes Michael Lewis, a former bond salesman at Solomon Brothers. Lewis wrote a book titled Liar’s Poker, where he relayed his time at the behemoth bank. Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of, what one movie critic calls, “an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune”.

Notice one part of the quote: “greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune”. That is very close to the theme of the film Wall Street. Interestingly enough, the book was published two years after the film and a year into the recession. The American society had already developed this negative image of Wall Street; Lewis’s book ended up solidifying this portrayal. The book portrayed the lack of transparency and the secrecy of the industry. Lewis writes, “A big bonus was about as well concealed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor as the results of a hot date in a high school boys’ locker room” (146). This is what especially angered Americans; they had no idea what the Wall Streeters were doing behind the closed doors. Lewis then comes out with an over-exaggerated and highly dramatized depiction of what it is Wall Street does.

Aside from the lack of transparency in the industry, Lewis creates a very unflattering portrayal of Wall Street culture even before he is on the job. He was taken aback by the incredibly childish behavior of the trainees in his class. They used to shout obnoxiously while the senior members of the firm were speaking, shoot spitballs an one another during the training sessions, and call sex lines using the company phone to broadcast it over the trading floor’s intercom system. Lewis noticed that his fellow trainees had an insatiable appetite for an exorbitant amount of money; they scoffed at any position that could not satisfy this appetite. This behavior, as he noted, spurs from the need of bond traders’ and salesmen’s need to take advantage of others’ weaknesses.

Fast-forward to just a few years ago to mid-2010, and what seems to be an unconnected follow up to Liar’s Poker spurs up. Just when it seemed the “over-the-top” books had died down a bit, Turney Duff writes a horrific account of his time on Wall Street in The Buy Side. The book portrays an after-hours Wall Street culture where drugs and sex are rampant. Billions in trading commissions flow to those who dangle the most enticements.  The book is based on Duff’s “story” of his time on the Street. The Buy Side encompasses every single cliché of a typical Wall Street memoir. As one Buzzfeed article put it, the book is “little more than one finance cliché after another”. The Buy Side starts off with Duff “stumbling onto Wall Street” with absolutely no knowledge of finance. That may have been the case if it were the 1980’s, but in a time where investment banks are as elitist as ever, with a majority of their hiring done at Ivy League school, just stumble onto Wall Street and landing a job is close to impossible. Every memoir about Wall Street includes a terrifying colleague who throws things when he is mad. Of course, Duff embraces that cliché and talks about Davis Slaine, a trader whose “hair-trigger temper is legendary on the floor” (Duff 203). The memoir would be incomplete without the cliché of an obsession for bonuses. Duff spends much of his narrative focused on his bonus. He writes how “his low $200,000 salary barely covers the bills”(135). In the next chapter, he puts a picture of a check for $1,864,999, which is the amount he “took home” in 2003.

Duff does an excellent job of touching upon the two biggest stereotypes of Wall Street that triggers society’s hatred: ridiculous excesses and drugs. In his book, Duff becomes, as one New York Times article said, “a caricature of the arrogant young Wall Streeter that so much of America loves to hate”. In the book, he writes about his battle with cocaine addiction, which he was introduced to upon his arrival to Wall Street. One specific story that Duff relays was when he a few coworkers were waiting on long line outside of a Manhattan nightclub. Having had enough of the wait, he barges past the bouncers and screams, “I don’t stand on lines. I snort them” (228). Throughout the book Duff would elaborate on how he and his coworkers would consume cocaine on the job, and handle multimillion dollar trades being placed into the marketplace. Bryan Burrough, a writer for the New York Times, said “I just wanted to smack the guy” after reading the book. The Buy Side is enough to make even an avid Wall Streeter hate Wall Street.

It is fairly difficult to think that anything could make Wall Street look as bad as The Buy Side did. Two years after the publishing of Duff’s book, famed director Martin Scorsese directs a movie on the life of Jordan Belfort that The Guardian calls a “depiction of the debauched rise and fall of a wayward Wall Street broker is an exhilarating riot of bad taste”. The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is based on the “true” story of Jordan Belfort, from his rise to a wealthy stock-broker living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption, drugs, and women.

This single movie has made Wall Street look like the root of all evil. New York Times writer A.O. Scott describes the movie as a “three-hour bacchanal of sex, drugs and conspicuous consumption”. The movie opens up with a quick, repulsive tour of Belfort’s vices and compulsions, all while he crash-lands a helicopter on his estate. Introducing himself, Jordan Belfort states:

“On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my “back pain”, Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine… Well, because it’s awesome.”

This character has “become the handsome cinematic face of extreme capitalism”, according to the New York Times. Jordan Belfort has taken on a more modern role of the 1980’s Gordon Gekko; he is everything Gekko is, only on a much grander scale. Hollywood has evolved significantly during the eighties; movies portraying sex, drugs, and alcohol are much more common now. Martin Scorsese is notorious for creating movies with very liberal uses of profanity. It is no surprise that he took on the role of directing this film.

The Wolf of Wall Street is based on an entertaining memoir of Jordan Belfort’s life, which he wrote in 2008. The book soon became a New York Times Bestseller and was praised as “raw and frequently hilarious” by the Times. Forbes calls the book “a rollicking tale of Jordan Belfort’s rise to riches as head of the infamous boiler room Stratton Oakmont”. What is interesting is that the book was published in late 2008. Nobody made a big deal out of the story until 2014, when the movie came out. Why did it take six years for people to start talking about and really noticing the “story” of Jordan Belfort? Although the book included a lot of references to drugs and partying, it was not nearly as grandiose as the movie. The evidence to this is how the New York Times reviews of the book and movie differ. As previously mentioned, the book was seen as hilarious. On the contrary, the movie was claimed as a “three-hour bacchanal of sex, drugs and conspicuous consumption”. It is not only the New York Times that found this mockery of Wall Street to be revolting. David Denby of The New Yorker said the movie is “meant to be an exposé of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene behavior, but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking”. Hollywood has once again outdone itself by ingraining into the mass’s minds the horrific stereotype of Wall Street.

It is remarkable to think about how one fictional character in a movie has led to not only an abominable stereotype, but to other books and movies that contribute to it decades later. What this demonstrates, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stated in her TedTalk titled The Danger of a Single Story, “is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story”. That is indeed true. The American society over the past few decades has used fictitious movies, books, and memoirs to structure their image of Wall Street. In seeing the increased popularity of hatred towards Wall Street, the entertainment industry has crafted storylines to satisfy the people’s needs for confirmation of the stereotype and reasons to loath. What I find to be most grotesque is how the entertainment industry uses the natural occurrences of bottoms in an economic cycle to create a story that blames Wall Street for such occurrences. Recessions are commonplace in a capitalistic economy. By this theory, the people should blame the meteorologists for an earthquake in California or a blizzard in New York. It just does not make sense.