Wall Street

In honor of Occupy Wall Street, and in honor of a really bad mood I was in yesterday, I went to the movie store and allowed myself to grab the first two movies that appealed to me, one of which was Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s 1987 magnum opus about money, fancy suspenders, and such-and-such.

I had only seen this film once before, and it was years and years ago. A few days ago my old man asked me something about it and I realized that in my memory this movie is just a strange wash of neon colors, that weird green computer font of the 80’s film world, and oily men screaming at one another. I decided to revisit it and see if I could make head or tail of it with the benefit of adulthood and several advanced degrees. In this, as in so many things, I was to be sorely disappointed.

Yes, just like the actual historical Wall Street, “Wall Street” continues to baffle me. I could not follow the plot or anything that was happening, aside from just the broadest strokes of the melodrama. “Martin Sheen is father. Martin Sheen disappointed in son; classic battle. Michael Douglas rich, mean, has cell phone, did not know there was cell phone in 1987. Somebody in hospital; somebody sad got fired”

The stock-broking drama in film is something I can never follow, because what even IS THAT. I can’t even follow the climax of 1983’s “Trading Places,” for Christ’s sake. This is probably just because I don’t understand stock broking in real life. Everyone’s just screaming at each other for 9 hours a day and flinging paper onto the ground, phones are ringing off the hook, and incomprehensible numbers are scrolling across screens, making grown men cry like babies. Buy! Sell! I guess there’s something about how Martin Sheen wants to fly airplanes and be a good company but the stock brokers are going to ruin his airline and make a bunch of money somehow off the stocks they bought. That’s not capitalism, that’s not what America is all about. Charlie Sheen must go to jail to learn his lesson. Just like real life!

But what I did find comprehensible, and WONDERFUL, about this film, is that it is like the perfect amalgam of the 1980’s. Or, not even the actual 1980’s–it’s a perfect amalgam of what everyone thought was cool in the 80’s. Did any of it actually exist, or did it just exist in films? Did anyone really live in a penthouse apartment with gold and silver paper glued to the walls and mirrors everywhere and weird pink and gray stripes on top of fake plastic brick walls? Did people really drink white wine while running two different kinds of pasta-making machines? This movie has it all. There is nothing you can think of when you think of “the nineteen eighties” that is not represented in this film, with the sole exception of “punk rock.”

– slicked-back hair that’s real long in the back and real wet all the time
– suspenders under business suits
– people saying “talk at ya, baby”
– cocaine in the backs of limosines with fancy hookers
– people talking about abstract art
– Darryl Hannah / Sean Young
– enormous cell phones
– dune buggies
– high-cut bikinis
– high-cut bikinis plus high heels
– gratuitous silhouetted naked boobs
– high-powered millionaire calling someone a “turkey” in anger
– ditto “wimp”
– high-powered millionaire literally having a painting of a burning 100 dollar bill covering entire wall of office
– men only calling one another “sport,” “pal,” or “buddy”
– mournful union representatives
– refrigerator filled exclusively with Haagen-daz ice cream
– off-the-shoulder blouses
– someone saying “oh how ghastly, you should SUE” in response to a nightmare bikini-waxing story
– the line “it’s called ‘pasta’ now, dad, nobody says ‘spaghetti’ anymore”
– really gross all-silhouette sex scene with sexy music playing and two people moving in ways I’m pretty sure are not ways anyone has ever moved when fucking
– the Talking Heads
– people smoking inside hospitals
– cool young hip people being republicans instead of democrats
– “interior design” being a hip artistic business for young people
– mirrored walls in private home
– unusable coffee table with no top
– Charlie Sheen ordering “an Evian” and pronouncing “Evian” with a French accent and that’s just normal, a normal thing to say and order in a restaurant
– a plate of food that’s just an enormous pile of meat with a raw egg on top
– heated business conversations taking place in steam rooms
– men flirting with their secretaries and the secretaries laughing huskily
– somebody named “Darian”
– cops with enormous mustaches

Oliver Stone is a maniac but he can sure write a script that is 90% just men delivering long speeches! Some of which take place on beaches at sunrise, and then the man breaks off his speech about greed to rhapsodize about how beautiful the ocean is at sunrise. And how come Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen meet at the end in a rainstorm in the middle of central park, just so Douglas can punch him in the face? And then Sheen has an enormous portable tape cassette recorder taped to his belly and he got Douglas in trouble because Douglas said the names of some companies out loud. Then Sheen goes to jail and his dad is finally proud of him. Insider trading, offshore accounts, $50,000 a year.

The whole time I was watching it I couldn’t stop wondering if old-school Charlie Sheen was handsome or totally boring-looking. I still can’t decide.

There is also a scene where he’s standing on his balcony looking out at the Manhattan skyline and then he LITERALLY SAYS: “Who am I?”

I damn near bust a gut laughing

Are these stock broking movies incomprehensible because they are poorly made or because the stock market is itself incomprehensible? Who are all these assholes with MBAs screaming into phones at one another and roaring around New York in ostentatious sports cars? Did you see THIS?

“Everything is fucked up and bullshit”

*I decided to write this entry in lieu of finishing the New Yorker’s harrowing article about nuclear power in Japan after being unable to get past this window into post-Hiroshima and -Bikini Atoll Japanese nuclear trauma: “In less than a year, Japanese filmmakers had released ‘Godzilla,’ about a creature mutated by American atomic weapons…Godzilla’s radioactive breath and low-budget special effects were campy to the rest of the world but not to the Japanese, who watched the film in silence and left theatres in tears.” Because why would I want to finish reading something that makes me want to GNAW OFF MY OWN ARM