Wall Street" is a movie that seems to spark much debate. Basically, it is the working out of a moral struggle within young Wall Street trader Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) between the values with which he was raised of hard work and success through actual creation, versus those of his mentor Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) who succeeds through corporate raiding and "creative destruction". From Bud's viewpoint his dad's (Martin Sheen's) road map for success and happiness seems old-fashioned to the point of being prehistoric compared to Gekko's, until Gekko sets his sights and his wrecking ball on his father's company, and Bud is forced to choose.
Many people associate this film with a liberal versus conservative viewpoint on business, a wild-west economy versus a planned economy and relegate this film to 1980's era nostalgia, like the now humorously giant cell phone Gekko is talking on as he walks along the beach. It is said that neither extreme works and that we've gradually settled towards something in the middle. However, the Gekkos of this world are smarter than that, and over the past 20 plus years they have set up an economic system that serves them well. What we now have is a situation where the haves and have-mores have a planned - almost Soviet - system in which the rules stratify them at the top. I cite the changes in bankruptcy law as exhibit A. The members of the labor force that serve them, however, are in the wild-west economy that was once advocated for everyone. Some will rise to the stratified top in this situation, but the vast majority will remain at the bottom shooting it out with each other - for scarce good jobs, good health care, education, etc. Thus, to me, Wall Street is just an opening chapter in the saga of how economic forces and attitudes toward them have changed, not the portrait of a 25 year-old fad that has come and gone.
