Why Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a Truly Great Movie!

                While watching the much anticipated sequel to Oliver Stone’s original Wall Street, a truly great movie, I was struck by how truly painful that sequel is to watch.  I really wasn’t expecting much, yet Stone somehow couldn’t even rise to the diminished standard I had set for him.  Shia LeBoeuf’s Jake is unconvincing as a young Wall Street executive.  And Carey Mulligan’s Winnie is wholly unsympathetic, crying and whining throughout the movie for no legitimate reason, because she blames her father without any apparent justification for the death of her brother Rudy.  As a romantic couple they just looked tired, like high school sweethearts that have long since grown apart as their lives went in different directions.  So I found myself laughing when I was supposed to be crying, cheering when I was supposed to be groaning, and shaking my head when I was supposed to be appreciating the wisdom of some politically charged comment.  To be honest, I was disappointed when I left the theater, robbed of a couple hours of life that I’ll never get back.

                In the aftermath, however, while taking about the movie with a friend, I realized that Money Never Sleeps is in fact a truly great movie!  It didn’t suddenly make any sense.  It didn’t suddenly have a point.  It didn’t suddenly inspire.  To the contrary.  Money Never Sleeps is in fact a great movie because it illustrates just how confused and contradictory is the political left’s narrative on the financial crisis.  Oliver Stone, as committed a leftist as one can find in Hollywood, can’t decide if he loves or hates success, sympathizes with or loathes the fallen, or appreciates or detests the financial markets.  Consider the following (warning—some plot spoilers here):

Warmhearted failures are good, coldhearted successes are bad.  Perhaps the most bizarre character is Zabel, the leader of a Wall Street firm modeled after Bear Stearns which is struggling under the weight of its subprime securities portfolio.  Zabel is lamenting the market rumors (which we later learn to be true) that are killing his stock.  At a hastily called meeting of the New York Fed, Zabel is humiliated and forced to sell his firm for $3 per share to Bretton James’s (Josh Brolin’s) firm Churchill Schwartz.  For some reason we are supposed to sympathize with the hapless Zabel, who gives a 7 figure bonus to his protégé Jake (weren’t 7 figure bonuses to executives of failed companies supposed to be bad?) and later commits suicide.  We are also supposed to loathe the coldhearted James, who is clearly modeled after JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon but whose firm is clearly modeled after Goldman Sachs, apparently because he is a little mean (or greedy!).  The fact that James (as did JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs) succeeded where Zabel failed is irrelevant to Mr. Stone.

Spreading truths to make money is bad, spreading lies to get even is good.  After poor Zabel kills himself, Jake (and Stone) place the blame squarely on Bretton James’s shoulders.  To get even, Jake decides to spread rumors about one of Churchill Schwartz’s clients in order to cause its stock to drop.  Jake doesn’t personally trade on these false rumors, however, as even Oliver Stone understands how silly it would look for his hero to behave with such hypocrisy.  Jake is then summoned to Bretton James’s lavish apartment for a dressing down, and the brave Jake confronts Mr. James and blames him for the death of his mentor Zabel.  Jake angrily notes that James spread rumors about Zabel’s firm and profited when the stock price fell, and James doesn’t deny it.  James points out, however, that the rumors were in fact true, and that Jake’s rumors were not.  Clearly that fact is not relevant to Stone.

To me this is one of the most telling contradictions in the story.  To the liberal left, asset bubbles aren’t a problem at all.  Bursting those bubbles, on the other hand, is terrible.  The people who fed the asset bubbles (Zabel for example) are largely let off the hook.  But the people who spot bubbles, spread truthful and insightful information about the bubbles and profit from the collapse are to be loathed.

                Greed must be stamped out!  It is bad, bad, bad.  Unless you’re the greedy one.  One of the most ridiculous lines in the movie, which is all the more laughable because Stone decided to put it in the trailer, is when Gekko says to an audience “[s]omeone reminded me I once said ‘greed is good’, well now it seems it’s legal!”  The line gets an appreciative laugh.  HELLO?  Since when has it NOT been legal?  Has anyone ever seriously proposed to outlaw greed?  Can you imagine Congress debating where to the draw the line between felonious greed and simple selfishness?

                But, if you’re Gordon Gekko and you just want to resurrect your Wall Street career, stealing $100M from your daughter is just fine.  Of course you have to turn it into $1.1B by the end of the movie so you can return it interest free and keep a cool billion.  That’s not greedy.  Now I’m sure Ollie Stone will tell us how he was exploring some human nuance, but we all know he tried really hard to make Gordon Gekko a villain in the real Wall Street only to have everyone fall in love with the bad guy.  So now he’s succumbing to Hollywood reality and making him the softer side of greedy.  Gordo gets a pass after all.

                Speculation is also bad, bad, bad, unless it is the good kind (helping the planet).  We have heard that money is the root of all evil, as is debt.  But to the newly prophetic Gekko, it is “speculation.”  Speculation is defined as “engagement in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains. . .”.  So, like “greed,” “speculation” is very bad.  It is something similar to investing, only not as good.  I’ve been told that financing films is highly speculative, so perhaps Stone is backhanding his own industry.  In any event, taking chances are good as long as they’re not, you know, really big chances.  I sleep well knowing that the wildcatters who struck oil, the inventors who first took to flight and the Harvard dropouts who founded top technology companies didn’t do anything really crazy.

                This lesson is straight from the pages of the left’s political playbook.  It makes no sense, but “greed” and “speculation” are supposedly at the center of everything.  Clearly the Fed, the Treasury, the Congress and everyone else in positions of power in the World did nothing wrong.  This is just a case of healthy self-interest turning to evil greed and cautious investing turning into speculation.  Simple. 

                Green technology is good, as long as it is nothing more than a money-wasting fantasy.  One of the greatest subplots in our movie is our hero as the “green” financier.  His pet project is—I’m serious!—cold fusion!  That’s right.  Jake’s desperate client is trying to get a final $100M to complete a project that will revolutionize energy in the world.  And what does Jake advise a group of Chinese investors to forego in order to throw their $100M down the cold fusion drain?  Is it an oilfield?  Is it a natural gas pipeline?  Is it some mythical fossil fuel like unobtainium that can only be mined by abusing blue creatures from outer space?  No!  It is a solar project!  You see solar is a technology that actually works, while cold fusion is a hopeless dream of the far left.  So clearly an astute investor would be better off (and, ahem, the WORLD would be better off) if that investor’s $100M went into a cold fusion reactor than a solar project.  After all, solar is so corporate now.  It is run by guys in suits.  It can’t be any good.

                This is comical on so many levels it is hard to know where to begin.  First off, even if we’re to suspend our disbelief, the guy who needs this $100M is walking around a facility that must have cost about a billion dollars to build.  So if he only needs another $100M, why doesn’t he ask the idiots who already sunk a billion into his project for the money?  Come to think of it, given the fact that any green technology that is proven can get tons of money from investors and even the government, why can’t this guy raise a lousy $100M to finish it?  The answer (to Stone) is clear.  Sadly Wall Street is just greedy and speculative.  Or maybe they’re not speculative enough, because they can’t find it in their hearts to finance cold fusion.

                But, at some point, we’re all to blame.  Stone doesn’t let us off the hook though.  Phew!  He quickly nods to the notion that at some level we’re all to blame.  Jake’s mother, after all, is drinking the real estate Kool-Aid and trying desperately to flip house after house.  She continually runs to him for “bailouts” when she’s behind on her payments, and he keeps funding her even though he knows she is doomed to failure.  Corny, but actually not too bad a message given the rest of the film.

                Oh, but thankfully we have left wing websites to report the news.  Winnie Gekko, Gordon's daughter and Jake's love interest, has turned her back on her wealth (and her Swiss trust fund) in order to run a left wing website.  We have no idea exactly what she posts on her site, because apparently even Stone can't be bothered to explain what makes her tick.  But, in the end of the movie, Jake pens an explanatory narrative of everything that is wrong and is going wrong on Wall Street (presumably an epidemic of greed and speculation) and gives it to Winnie to post on her site.  Sure enough, Jake's article spreads around the world via the internet and causes everyone to wake up and understand the truth.  As you can see, we truly need some nameless left wing website to pass on this truth.  After all, we know that the regular news outlets completely dropped the ball on the financial crisis, failing completely to report on anything related to it.  Did you read about Bear Stearns in the Wall Street Journal?  Did you read about Lehman Brothers in the New York Times?  Did you hear about Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley on CNBC or CNN?  Of course not!  You had to turn to the Huffington Post for that big news, right?  OK, maybe not.  I guess left wing websites are useless after all.

                So now you see why Money Never Sleeps is really a great film.  A must see, in fact, for all who want to understand how truly misinformed people can be about the financial crisis.