The Moral Ambivalence of Gordon Gekko

And so Gekko spins his web. He rewards Fox with a first-class lunch, a trip to his tailor, and a rendezvous with a lady of dubious intention. He also plies him with money and the promise of a lot more. “I’m not talking about some $400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff,” Gekko affirms. “I’m talking about liquid, rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars, Buddy. A player—or nothing.”

Bud Fox is not exactly what you’d call a man of conscience, so the pangs of guilty misgivings are brief and fleeting. (“All right, Mr. Gekko. You got me.”) He makes a second career harvesting inside information for Gekko and spends his free time sampling the spoils—superficial relationships, art he doesn’t understand, and hobbies whose enjoyment seems inversely proportional to their expense—of his new life of white-collar crime.

Ultimately, Fox gets his comeuppance when the Feds catch on to the clairvoyant tendencies of his broker’s account, and having ridden Gekko’s coattails throughout most of the movie, in his fall, Fox grabs hold of his cashmere hem and pulls Gekko down with him. The turn of events, stylish if somewhat predictable, led Vincent Canby to dismiss the movie in the New York Times as “a gentrified Everyman, an upscale morality tale to entertain achievers who don’t want to lose touch with their moral centers, but still have it all.” Canby’s review seemed to suggest that, as a work of social criticism, the movie came up short by favoring character defects over a flawed culture. If viewers had seen Gordon and Bud as apogees, rather than unseemly aberrations, of an era defined by decadent consumerism, they might have been more inclined to have second thoughts about their own behavior.

Maybe so, but such reservations fail to reckon with the frightening logic of the film’s most famous scene and the declaration within it that saw Wall Street transcend the middling standards of a fairly effective potboiler to become a defining cultural moment.

A sermon on the mount for those with Swiss bank accounts, Gekko’s “greed is good” speech interrupts the stale pageant of an annual shareholder’s meeting. It begins as a conventional broadside against a tumorous class of complacent middle managers at Teldar Paper, a company Gekko’s targeted for a hostile takeover. He goes on to suggest that the company’s circumstances are emblematic of a more pervasive phenomenon. “The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest,” Gekko observes. “Well, in my book, you either do it right, or you get eliminated.”

Dubbing himself a “liberator” of companies rather than their “destroyer,” and noting the generous returns his takeovers have afforded shareholders, Gekko commences the homily that has made an enduring mark on the moral psychology of modern capitalism.

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good.

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.

And greed—you mark my words—will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Gekko’s call to arms is something like the St. Crispin’s Day speech of contemporary capitalism—and similar to that celebrated address by Shakespeare, it too was inspired by an historical figure. In 1986, Ivan Boesky gave a now-legendary commencement address to business-school graduates at University of California at Berkeley. In it, the white-maned rapscallion of risk arbitrage trading anticipated Gekko’s war cry, albeit with counsel that seems restrained, even cautious, by comparison. “Greed is all right, by the way,” he told the graduates. “I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”

Having just begun shooting a movie whose working title was Greed, Oliver Stone took note of the address by Boesky, who would be sentenced to three years in prison for insider trading just days after Wall Street was released. Importantly, however, Stone and Weiser would convert Boesky’s counsel from advice aimed mainly at preserving the self-esteem of strivers (and those who had already successfully striven) into an impenitent ethics of gross acquisition.

The change helps to account for the difference between the guilty pleasure afforded by some of the most charming villains in cinematic history and the peculiar admiration reserved for Gekko. At the time of Boesky’s homage to mammon, Newsweek noted, “The strangest thing, when we come to look back, will be not just that Ivan Boesky could say that at a business-school graduation, but that it was greeted with laughter and applause.” Such a titillating response seems consistent with reactions by movie audiences to highly charismatic criminals such as Hans Gruber, Hannibal Lecter, and Keyser Söze. But, as opposed to these and others on the list of the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest villains, it is Gordon Gekko alone at No. 24 who is at once a miscreant and a role model.

The reason for this is that Gekko embodies a moral irony that, motivationally speaking, has been the mainspring of capitalism at least since Adam Smith. As Smith famously said in The Wealth of Nations, even though every commercial agent “intends only his own gain” in his daily affairs, by “directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value,” he “necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can.” In other words, notwithstanding the fact that he “neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it,” by “pursuing his own interest[,] he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”

This, of course, is the logic and labor of Smith’s “invisible hand,” and the moral irony of the mechanism is well illustrated by an infamous episode that surely won’t be included in the “Greatest Hits” reel at the retirement party for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

In fall 2009, Blankfein opened the doors of his investment bank to a reporter from the Times of London. For decades, Goldman had been famously press shy, but the financial crisis had thrust it into the spotlight, largely because the bank seemed to be thriving amid a global recession it helped create.