Conversation.": Framing the Economic Narrative from "Wall Street" to
"Reality Bites"
Post Script - Essays in Film and the Humanities Go to Journal Record
19:2 (Winter 1999-Spring 2000) Go to Journal Issue, p. 19-33
*Julian Crockford*
''And they wonder why those of us in our twenties refuse to work an
eighty hour week, just so we can buy their BMWs. Why we aren't
interested in the counterculture that they invented, as if we did
not see them disembowel themselves for a pair of running shoes. But
the question remains, what are we going to do now? How can we repair
the damage we inherited? Fellow graduates, the answer is simple ...
the answer is ... the answer is ... I don't know.''
In this, her valedictory speech, /Reality Bites/ Lelaina succeeds in
capturing her generation's marked anxiety about employment patterns and
job security, and their growing resentment of the post-war boom
generation in which their parents were raised. During her speech, the
camera pans across her fellow graduates, lingering on the legend, ''Will
work 4 food,'' taped to the top of a mortar board. From its very
opening, then, Ben Stiller's film self-consciously offers itself in
terms that are virtually paradigmatic of contemporary attempts to
identify and describe the phenomenon of Generation X, that segment of
the population who came of (working) age as the eighties merged into the
nineties. As a character in Douglas Coupland's <#COUPLAND1991>
/Generation X/ suggests, ''... maybe we were all promised heaven in our
lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in
comparison'' (7). Neil Howe and Bill Strauss <#HOWEETAL> observe a
similar disenchantment, noting that Baby Boomers were seen by this
demographic, ''as a generation that was once given everything--from a
/Happy Days/ present to a Tomorrowland future--and then threw it all
away'' (45). This generational angst is perhaps understandable given
that many commentators note a general shift in the nature of late
capitalism during this period. Scott Lash and John Urry <#LASHETAL> ,
for example, point to, ''structural shifts in employment from
maufacturing to services'' (162). Likewise, David Harvey suggests that,
''the rapid contraction in manufacturing employment after 1972 has
highlighted a rapid growth of service employment'' (156). Inevitably,
this shift fed into changing patterns of working practice, contributing
to a
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steady erosion of job stability and prestige. Harvey suggests that
consequently there was an, ''apparent move away from regular employment
towards increasing reliance upon part-time, temporary or subcontracted
work arrangements'' (150). In this sense, as Lelaina suggests, the
generation gap is as much economic as it is cultural, and for this
reason it seems pertinent to consider Generation X alongside the yuppie
culture against which it defined itself. Consequently, in the rest of
this paper, a reading of /Reality Bites/ (1994) is played against an
analysis of Oliver Stone's epic portrayal of yuppie greed and hubris,
/Wall Street/ (1987).
In many ways, although for different reasons, Stone's film seems to
anticipate the fragmentation and increasing uncertainty of the
employment market were the result of the increasing dominance of a
service economy. Less than a decade separates the youthful characters of
/Wall Street/ and /Reality Bites/ but their employment prospects were
remarkably different. In 1985, Bud Fox, the youthful protagonist of
/Wall Street/, launches himself enthusiastically into a career as a
stock broker. His confidence is unshakable, not only in his own
abilities, but also in the job market to sustain him for as along as it
takes to achieve his ambitions. ''I think that if I can make a bundle of
cash before I'm thirty and can get out of this racket, I'll be able to
ride my motorcycle across China.'' However, at the same time, the film
is also careful to reveal the fractures beneath the buoyant economy that
underwrites Bud's mercurial rise. Behind the conspicuous flash of Bud's
yuppie lifestyle the security of the workplace was beginning to
fragment. As Gordon Gekko's attempt to take over and break up Bluestar
Airlines reveals, the aggressive accumulation of late capitalism meant
that the era of stable, life long employment enjoyed by the Baby Boomers
was coming to an end. By 1994, the year in which /Reality Bites/ is set,
it had become increasingly clear that it was the workers who were paying
the price for capitalism's move into the service industries, in terms of
longer working hours, lower wages, and increasing job insecurity. The
growth of the service economy had also encouraged the rise of the
symptomatically named ''McJob'', in Coupland's <#COUPLAND1991> words,
''[a] low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in
the service sector.
*''and they wonder why those of us in our twenties refuse to work an
eighty-hour week, just so we can buy their bmws.''* Frequently
considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held
one'' (5). With the concept of job satisfaction seeming increasingly
anachronistic, their wages provided the only source of consolation for
those forced into this deadening employment. They were, in the words of
Howe and Strauss <#HOWEETAL> , forced to, ''look at work
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differently--as a means of survival, as an opportunity to prosper, as
something that doesn't mean anything but just has to get done if
anybody's going to get paid'' (107). Therefore, when Lelaina's father
opines that, ''the problem with your generation [is] you don't have any
work ethic,'' he is in many senses correct. Given the situation sketched
out by the film, this lack of commitment is understandable, for it
reflected the treatment they were receiving at the hands of their
bosses. Troy loses his news-stand job for stealing a Snickers bar, while
Lelaina is fired from a TV research post because her employer didn't
like, ''having to look at her pointy little face all day,'' but not
before being told that, ''we're laying people off around here, and I
could find an intern who'd do your job for free ... [snap of fingers]
like that.'' In fact, by the mid nineties the situation has deteriorated
to the extent that /Reality Bites/ finds itself unable to offer any hope
for change. Like Lelaina's stumbling speech with which it opens, the
film points to the contemporary economic and employment malaise, only to
suggest that in the end, ''the answer is ... I don't know.''
In contrast, /Wall Street/ aims confidently right at the very heart of
mid-eighties yuppie culture. While contemporary multiplex fodder, films
like /9-1/2 Weeks, About Last Night, The Secret of My Success/, and
/Something Wild/, were content to capitalize on the yuppie lifestyle as
a hip accoutrement to, rather than as the focus of, their narratives,
/Wall Street/ went further in its search for the economic foundations of
yuppie culture. Essentially a coming of age tale loaded with Faustian
overtones, it traces Bud's aspiration to work with the notoriously
amoral, but incredibly successful stock broker, Gordon Gekko. The plot
traces Bud's economic rise and slump, alongside his contingent ethical
fall and revelation, whilst at the same time probing the mechanisms of
the stock-market. The synchronicity of the stock-market's increasing
cultural prominence and the period of Reagan's tenure in the White House
is not
*jeff daniels, director jonathan demme and melanie griffith work on a
scene from* */something wild/**. © 1986 orion pictures. photo by s.
karin epstein.* coincidental. The yuppie culture prominently associated,
at least in the popular mind, with Wall Street, embodied the economic
individualism implicit in Reagan's trickle down economic policy; his
belief that ''a rising tide lifts all boats'' (Morgan <#MORGAN1994>
205), and as such, for a time, became the symbol of a new, apparently
attainable, prosperity. However, this same stock-market economy was also
responsible for obfuscating what had previously been the common-sense
relation between money and work. To the inhabitants of the American
''Main Street,'' these huge swathes of conspicuous wealth were being
generated apparently from nowhere. This is a mystification that Gekko
seems keen to perpetuate. ''Money itself isn't lost or made,'' he tells
Bud, ''it's simply transferred, from one perception to another, like
magic.'' He points to the idiosyncrasies
p.21
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of the stock-market economy when he boasts, ''I create nothing, I own
it.'' In /The Limits to Capital/, David Harvey <#HARVEY1982> demystifies
this process, dissecting it from a Marxist perspective.
Corporations organized according to the joint stock principle raise
money by selling stocks, shares and bonds to money capitalists. The
money raised is put to work as capital to produce surplus value
(assuming that is, the venture is intended as something more than
''pure swindle''). Investors hold titles of ownership and receive
interest (fixed or varying as the case may be). The titles are
simply marketable claims to a share in future surplus value
production. Investors can retrieve their money at any time by
selling off their stocks, shares and bonds to other investors. This
buying and selling leads to the creation of a special kind of
market--the /stock market/. This market is a market for fictitious
capital. It is a market for the circulation of property rights as
such (Harvey 276).
Harvey's description serves to distinguish between two possible sources
of the investor's profit; the regular dividend paid back to the investor
depending upon the actual productive success of the company, or
alternatively, the profit derived from selling the share to other
dealers. In this latter case, the precise value of the share is purely
speculative, for it is determined by the anticipated productivity of the
corporation, and thus its predicted future profit. Marx <#MARX1976> uses
the term fictitious capital to distinguish between money used in this
way and the productive capital invested directly in material commodity
production. This distinction complicates Marx's <#MARX1976> original
observation that the foundation for money's value lies in abstract acts
of human labour. ''Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of
appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities,
namely labour-time'' (Marx <#MARX1976> 188). When money is thrown into
the stock-market system it is effectively removed one further step from
this origin in labour. Hence, the financial market exists as a second
order process, because it effectively shares in the division of the
original surplus rather than creating a new source of wealth. In
Harvey's terms, it is ''parasitic in the sense that [... it] creates no
value but merely appropriates it'' (71). What is articulated in /Wall
Street/, then, is a dual economic logic which opposes parasitic and
productive forms of money. The film embodies these ideologies,
respectively, in the figures of Gordon Gekko and Bud's father, Carl. As
a union representative for Bluestar Airlines, Carl is opposed to Gekko's
parasitic appropriation of the surplus, telling his son at the film's
conclusion, ''Stop going for the easy buck and produce something with
your life. Create, instead of living off of the buying and selling of
others.'' Carl has been immersed for many years in a labour market in
which the value of money is explicitly tied to his pay cheque and is
thus firmly rooted in specific incidences of labour time. His antipathy
to Gekko implicates him in a longstanding historical opposition between
financial and industrial capitalism. In /Looka Yonder/, Duncan Webster
<#WEBSTER1988> describes the late nineteenth-century ''Populist''
movement, which was motivated by an individualist fear of big business.
The movement served as the expression of a contemporary economic
anxiety, for it was, ''grounded on an agrarian suspicion of finance
capitalism. Both politically and symbolically, the farmer stood opposed
to the financier; the growth of real products was juxtaposed with money
making money via city speculation on the commodity exchanges'' (12). In
many ways, /Wall Street/ offers nothing less than a 1980s return to this
Populist ideology, drawing on its ''central themes.'' ''[F]inance
capitalism verses manufacturing, paper (''notes, contracts,
certificates, coupons'') verses production, making something'' (Webster
<#WEBSTER1988> 140). These concepts clearly provide the basis for Carl's
mistrust of Gekko, although the film replaces Populism's
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otherwise right wing rhetoric with its own liberal agenda.
It is clear, therefore, that Bud's father operates as the moral core of
/Wall Street/ and it is through him that the film articulates its
liberal ideology. However, it is in precisely this mode of expression
that the limitations of its critique appear. For the complex social and
political reality of an economic system founded on, ''a totality of
[...] heterogeneous forms of useful labour, which differ in order,
genus, species and variety'' (Marx <#MARX1976> , /Capital/ 132), is
addressed in /Wall Street/ only through the simple opposition of Gekko
and Carl, and their divergent interests.^1 <#1> This kind of
reductionism is founded on Populism's emphasis on the individual, but is
also integral to both the typical narrative structure of the mainstream
studio movie, and the logic of capitalism itself. In his work on the
star system, for example, Richard Dyer <#DYER1987> points out that the
heightened individualism of the film star serves an economic purpose.
''Stars are made for profit. In terms of the market, stars are part of
the way films are sold'' (5). He goes on to show how this individualism
also serves a specific ideological purpose.
[...] the idea of the individual continues to be a major moving
force in our culture. Capitalism justifies itself on the basis of
the freedom (separateness) of anyone to make money, sell their
labour how they will [...] The openness of society is assumed by the
way that we are addressed as individuals as consumers (each freely
choosing to buy, or watch, what we want) [...] Thus even while the
notion of the individual is assailed on all sides, it is a necessary
fiction for the reproduction of the kind of society we live in. (10)
In /Wall Street/, this emphasis upon the individual occurs at the
expense of a more fully realized description of political reality.
Therefore, in the film's narrative economy, the individual might be said
to repeat money's function in the exchange process. A single character,
Carl, becomes the ''universal equivalent'' for all the abstract labour
relations that take place in the wider political context of a globalized
capitalism. What this means, for both /Wall Street/ and /Reality Bites/,
is that political and economic tensions will ultimately have to be
resolved in terms of a limited cast of specific characters rather than
by a wider reference to class, and consequently by emotional closure
rather than political critique. Because the frame of reference of these
political issues exceeds the scope of the character based individualism
of mainstream narrative logic, neither film is able to resolve the
economic questions that they begin by raising, and are instead forced to
turn to more manageable terms in order to achieve some kind of closure;
the reconciliation of Bud and his father in /Wall Street/, or the
fruition of Lelaina's romance with Troy in /Reality Bites/. The
political issues with which they had been struggling are simply left
hanging. This kind of closure is typical of Hollywood's attempt to avoid
alienating any potential audience demographic, by maintaining the
broadest possible band of political consensus. Richard Maltby
<#MALTBY1952> points to this kind of negotiation in his discussion of
films structured around heroic individualism.
The affirmation of the myth of men of good will, and the embodiment
of the possibility of a solution in the individualist terms of that
myth by the specific resolution of the film's narrative, permit the
films to avoid an engagement with the issues which their plot
situations raise. The film's theme is stated rhetorically in
generalized terms, by characters who can resolve its individual
formulation in the story. By a concealed but false logic, it moves
from the statement of a general issue to a particular manifestation
of it.... (186)
The narrative of /Wall Street/ is particularly marked by this shift from
the general to the specific. Its liberal agenda identifies the injustice
inherent in advanced finance
^*1* For the purposes of this paper no distinction is made between
workers in the service and manufacturing sectors because both industries
are based on the appropriation of surplus value from their labour. It is
assumed in economic terms that the service worker produces something,
even if this creation is not material.
p.23
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*michael douglas as corporate raider gordon gekko and charlie sheen as
bud fox, an ambitious young broker in* */wall street/**. ©1991 fox
broadcasting co. photo by andy schwartz.* capitalism but chooses to
address it from an individualist perspective. The moral failings of the
general stock-market system are reduced to the amorality of Gordon
Gekko. The film's liberal critique is likewise manifested thorough the
characters of Carl Fox and Sir Larry Wildman, who point to the human
cost that Gekko ignores. Of his projected take over of Anacott Steel,
Wildman declares, ''[i]t's not a liquidation, I'm going to turn it
around ... I'm not the only one who pays here, Gordon. We're talking
about lives and jobs.... Three or four generations of steel workers.''
Bud eventually aligns himself to their liberal agenda when he realizes
that the broker's profit is indeed, as Gekko freely admits, the product
of a ''zero-sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses.'' The events
leading up to Gekko's eventual defeat are predicated on this move from
the general to the specific. Bud finally recognizes that Gekko intends
to break up Bluestar and pillage the Union pension fund and is forced to
acknowledge that the loser in this transaction is no longer an
abstracted entity, but has a specific identity, his own father. In this
sense, /Wall Street/'s critique of the amorality of the financial market
is reduced by being placed in this context of one man's struggle for his
job, meaning that character dynamic displaces a wider political context.
This substitution occurs in /Reality Bites/ also. Having, from its very
beginning, set up an agenda in which the steady erosion of job security
is addressed in terms of an entire generation, the film then calls upon
just four members of this demographic to represent it. In so doing, this
gener(ation)al frame of reference is allowed to take a back seat to the
individual (romantic) problems of just two of those characters. The
eventual conclusion of this subplot serves to obscure the fact that the
economic uncertainty with which the film began remains unresolved.
The individualism that carries so much economic weight in the narratives
of /Wall Street/ and /Reality Bites/ is also manifested at the visual
level, where it becomes the locus around which the visual frame is
orientated. As Stephen Heath <#HEATH1981> points out, the filmic frame
is usually anthropomorphically structured, being organised predominantly
around character movement.
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In fact, composition will organize the frame in function of the
human figures in their actions; what enters cinema is a logic of
movement and it is this logic that centres the frame. Frame space,
in other words, is constructed as narrative space. It is narrative
significance that at any moment sets the space of the frame to be
followed and ''read'', and that determines the development of the
filmic cues in their contributions to the definitions of space in
frame [...] space becomes place--narrative as the taking place of
film. (36)
This is not to suggest that the visual and narrative frames are
necessarily always in agreement, however. In /Wall Street/ this becomes
clear in the moment when Bud finally recognizes the distance between the
economic ideologies of Carl and Gekko. Having confronted Gekko about his
plan to break up Bluestar, Bud storms out of his office and into the
Manhattan street. The visual frame follows and is oriented around him
even as he walks through a milling crowd of pedestrians. While the other
inhabitants of the street move across or through the frame, Bud remains
its focus and its
*carl fox (martin sheen, right) tries to set an ethical example for his
son bud (charlie sheen).* centre. He pauses against a tree, and the
frame moves in on him in close up. This moment coincides with his
realization of Gekko's ethical lack, and consequently the social cost
integral to the zero sum game. However, the way in which this sequence
is visually framed actually works against this moment of epiphany. While
Bud finally acknowledges that Gekko's ''magic'' conceals the wider
social effect of his financial dealings, his position in the centre of
the screen and the fact that the other pedestrians are excluded from its
frame effectively undermines this narrative foregrounding of a broader
social context. Therefore, even as the narrative gestures beyond the
individualism typical of the mainstream film, /Wall Street/'s visual
codes re-inscribe it, literally focusing on a single character at the
expense
*corporate raider gordon gekko (michael douglas) discovers that he has
been betrayed by his own protégé, bud fox, in* */wall street/**. ©1987
twentieth century fox.*
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of the collective. Thus the viewer is distracted from both the meaning
of Bud's epiphany and the film's subsequent narrative shift in which the
filial relationship of Bud and Carl is promoted over its economic
interests.
This tie between the politics of narrative space and visual framing can
be extended by a brief reference to Richard Linklater's /Slacker/
(1991), a film that proved as influential as Coupland's <#COUPLAND1991>
/Generation X/, when it introduced yet another demographic label into
popular use. The looping, episodic nature of the film means that it
partially escapes from the binary system of economic logics that
structure the narratives of
*four characters retain affection for music, tv, and media in* */reality
bites/**. ©1994 universal city studios. photo by van redin.* both /Wall
Street/ and /Reality Bites/. Because there is little narrative
progression as such, /Slacker/ lacks their central dramatic conflict
between money and social responsibility. In addition, the close tie
between its visual and narrative frames enables /Slacker/ to partially
escape from the individualism that ultimately determines their
ideological meaning when it forces closure in terms of character rather
than politics. While it is clear from even the most cursory viewing of
/Slacker/ that the film doesn't entirely break away from the kind of
visual anthropomorphism described by Heath <#HEATH1981> , what it does
do is broaden out the conventional narrative focus upon a small set of
main characters. Rather, the film employs a shifting focus that takes in
a series of separate groups or single characters who may bear no
relation to each other, other than being spatially contingent.
/Slacker/'s open narrative is carried by the visual frame, which each
character occupies for a time before passing it on to another group or
individual who then becomes the temporary centre of the frame and thus
the film. The result is that the narrative is democratized and the film
is able to gesture towards a whole subculture, rather than limiting
itself to a small group of supposedly representative figures. The
individual is thus placed in a much wider social context than is
possible in the other two films, and thus /Slacker/ is able to dilute,
if not banish, the individualistic ideology typical of mainstream film
production.
Generation X culture is commonly defined in terms of its relation to
consumer capitalism, being frequently cited as either a reaction to the
overt materialism of the 1980s, or as a result of its hyperbolic process
when it is understood as nothing more than a niche advertising label.
James Annesley <#ANNESLEY1998> , for example, takes the first position
when he notes that in Generation X, ''[Douglas] Coupland <#COUPLAND1991>
describes the experiences of individuals who, in response to what they
regard as the alienating materialism of the modern world, try to
withdraw from it and find a space untouched by its seemingly degraded
influence'' (118). In contrast, an article in the British magazine /The
Face/ asked, ''What is this Generation X? It's the
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phrase that launched a thousand magazine articles--in America now,
coming here soon. It's a marketing niche for books and films. But does
it really exist? As a media phenomenon, yes. As a way of people
describing themselves, no. Generation X is the name of a book [...] It's
a handy term for twentysomethings who refuse to be categorised any other
way, and it's a current buzz word in advertising agencies'' (40-42). The
characters in /Reality Bites/ firmly locate themselves within this
marketing niche,
*bud fox (charlie sheen, right) introduces his father carl (martin
sheen) to darien (daryl hannah) in* */wall street/**. ©1991 fox
broadcasting co. photo by andy schwartz.* eagerly eulogizing their
commodity fetishes. Lelaina enthuses about her 44oz. ''Big Gulp'' drink,
''the most profound, important invention of my lifetime,'' while Troy
points to the personal significance of his, ''quarter-pounder with
cheese'', and his, ''camel straights.'' In the same way, all four
characters retain their affection for certain media commodities, the TV
programmes and music of their youth. However, even given this
orientation around consumer culture, what seems ultimately more
determining is their recurrent anxiety about the interrelation of work
and money. Missing out on the eighties boom that underwrote the wealthy
and leisured lifestyle depicted in many books and films of the period,
Lelaina and her Gen X contemporaries can't even guarantee their ability
to pay the rent on a regular basis.
The blank generation described by writers such as Bret Easton Ellis
<#ELLIS1996> had the financial means to surf effortlessly among the
detritus of consumer capitalism, ''I get up and drive to a record store
and walk down the aisles, look through the record bins, but I don't find
anything I want that I don't already have'' (/Less/ 94). However, by the
mid-nineties this wave of excess and plenitude had passed, forcing its
youth to focus on the essentials rather than luxuries. In Jeff Gomez'
<#GOMEZ1994> Gen X novel, /Our Noise/, Dave relies on the small income
from his independent record label to supplement his meagre earnings as a
waiter. ''The check is for twenty-seven dollars [... it] came in the
morning's mail to his post office box, and Dave's plan for the day was
to cash the check, buy some greatly needed groceries, and have a decent
meal, events that hadn't occurred in weeks'' (17-18).
This impoverished condition results in a different attitude to
education. For Ellis' <#ELLIS1988> characters, who live well on trust
funds and copious parental contributions, college operates as little
more than a flimsy peg on which to hang the simulacrum of existential
purpose. ''I was reading an article on the postmodern condition (this
was when I was a Lit major, before I became a ceramics major, before I
became a Social Science major) for some class I failed ...'' (/Rules/
95-96). In /Our Noise/, however, a college education is seen as both a
necessary first step on a vaguely conceived career ladder, but also, at
the same time, as a means of deferring this step. ''It's just ... what
the fuck am I
p.27
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doing with my life? Why didn't I stay in school? [...] I mean, I was at
the University of Virginia, and my diploma, I mean it was in fucking
sight! And I just freaked out. [...] It's just that every time I thought
of graduation as being just around the corner, it freaked me out,
because what was behind that corner? I knew I'd have to get a real job
and that if I didn't, everyone would look at me like a loser'' (25-26).
Despite its almost compulsive references to brand names and cultural
commodities, a similar concern with the post-graduation void animates
/Reality Bites/, and this anxiety has its basis in exactly the same dual
logic of money that structures /Wall Street/. Oliver Stone's film
distinguishes between the quest for money in itself, Gekko's
unselfconscious reason d'être, and Carl's attitude that money implies
some kind of social responsibility. This opposition is extended and its
ethical component highlighted by David Mamet's <#MAMET1985> comment on
the affinity of crime and big business. Like Carl in /Wall Street/,
Mamet <#MAMET1985> suggests that there is a moral integrity to be
derived from participation in the productive economy. Interestingly, the
three terms in the final sentence of his argument can't help but point
directly at the kind of Gen X slacker ideology embodied by Troy in his
refusal, and failure, to remain in employment.
As Thorstein Veblen says, the behaviour on this level, in the lumpen
proletariat, the delinquent class, and the behaviour on the highest
levels of society, in the most rarefied atmosphere of the board room
and the most rarefied atmosphere of the leisure class, is exactly
identical. The people who create nothing, the people who do nothing,
the people who have all sorts of myths at their disposal to justify
themselves ... they steal from us.'' (Mamet <#MAMET1985> quoted in
Webster <#WEBSTER1988> 141)
Mamet <#MAMET1985> seems to imply that the failure to produce
necessarily involves exploiting those who do. This exploitation might be
a case of outright material theft or alternatively the indirect
appropriation of the surplus that the financial market claims as its
profit. Troy is clearly in danger of occupying this parasitic role, and
in her criticism of him Lelaina comes close to articulating Mamet's
<#MAMET1985> ethical perspective. Sick of Troy's persistent
unemployment, his ''couching'', TV remote ''fondling,'' general ''time
suckage,'' and of him turning her flat into a ''den of slack'', she
couches her critique in explicitly financial terms, accusing him of
irresponsibility. ''Money ... Oh, but what's money to an artist, to a
philosopher? It's just green coloured paper that floats in and out of
his life like snow. It's nothing you actually have to, I don't know,
actually work for.'' What /Wall Street/ and /Reality Bites/ share, then,
is a morality founded upon a set of ideal relations between money, the
individual and society. What ultimately constitutes the ethical distance
between parasitic and productive economies is a difference in the way
that their respective money forms are conceptually framed according to
this morality.
Recent critical theory has pointed out that the analysis of any object
automatically involves imposing some kind of framing process. Operating
on its borders, the frame effectively constitutes the subject of
analysis by determining what is and is not relevant to it. However,
Christopher Norris <#NORRIS1987> points out that, for Derrida, what is
artificially eliminated in this way always comes back to haunt the
subject text. ''[...] something must always escape in the reading of a
text, no matter how subtle or resourceful that reading. Any commentary
that aims to speak the truth of a text will find itself outflanked or
outwitted by a supplementary logic which defeats the best efforts of
criticism'' (116). It is not, however, necessary to go as far as
deconstructing these films in order to demonstrate that their narrative
logic is dependent upon this double system of framing money. The
difference between the parasitic and the productive economies, appears
as a kind of nested structure in which the political and ethical
elements framed
p.28
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out of parasitic money are incorporated in the larger frame of reference
of the productive. Once in the stock-market system, money can do its
work only by refusing to acknowledge the political reality of the labour
from which it was originally derived. To do otherwise would mean
revealing its real source, and thereby undermining the broker's delusion
that their profit was derived solely from his or her sharp business
practice. The ''magic'' of which Gekko boasts is, then, essentially a
sleight of
*lelaina (winona ryder) and troy (ethan hawke): ''this is all we need, a
couple of smokes, a cup of coffee and a little bit of conversation.''*
hand by which the vicissitudes of material production are hidden,
thereby ignoring the processes that generated that money in the first
place. In the logic of /Wall Street/'s narrative Carl Fox is effectively
placed to break this frame by pointing to its illusionism. ''What else
have you got in your box of tricks, Mister Gekko?'' His role as a Union
negotiator means that he has a larger frame of reference from which the
reductive nature of Gekko's economic formulations becomes clear.
If /Slacker/ is more successful than either /Wall Street/ or /Reality
Bites/ in its attempt to describe a whole subculture, this is not to
suggest that it is ultimately any more successful in resolving this
conflict between parasitic and productive economic logics. For, while
/Slacker/ champions the unemployed and the unemployable, it is unable to
resolve the problem of existence outside of paid employment. This
dilemma appears in the film as a disjunction of narrative and visual
codes. At one point the film appears to engage directly with this
question of subsistence, but because the visual frame and the dialogue
work against each other, no stable position can emerge. The camera
follows a man as he begs a lift into town and shadows him as he saunters
alongside a café, pausing only to beg a cigarette from one of its
customers. He takes two from the proffered packet, saving one behind his
ear for later. He is then approached to take part in a survey, and is
asked what he does for a living. ''You mean work?'' He responds. ''To
hell with the kind of work you have to do to make a living. All it does
is fill the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. Hey, look at me! I'm
makin' it. I may be living badly, but at least I don't have to work to
do it.'' As he makes this speech the cigarette behind his ear remains
visible, testifying to the fact that in making this living he is at
least partially dependent on others. Therefore, he is effectively
aligned at this point with Gekko's economic ideology, which is founded
on a refusal to acknowledge the origin of his gain. However, the film
does not chose to pursue this point any further, preferring instead to
pass its narrative frame on to another set of characters. So therefore,
while anarchist or socialist tendencies are given voice at a number of
places in /Slacker/, at the level of text it fails to articulate any
coherent economic critique, retaining the narrative
p.29
------------------------------------------------------------------------
uncertainty that is symptomatic of /Wall Street/'s political indeterminacy.
This same dual structure of economic framing is clear also in /Reality
Bites/. As noted above, at the beginning of the film, Lelaina occupies a
similar ideological position to /Wall Street/'s Carl, and even voices a
labour value theory that approximates his, in her insistence that money
is ''something you actually have to [...] work for.'' However, as the
film progresses, her development increasingly mirrors that of Bud, for
she also experiences an economic rise and fall that coincides with a
moral wane before her eventual rehabilitation. However, if Bud is
redeemed by his recognition of the social cost of the zero sum game, the
grounds for Lelaina's redemption effectively reverse this trajectory.
Her wholesale rejection of the world of work brings her closer to Troy's
slacker idealism and while this enables the resolution of the film's
romance sublot, at the same time it a repudiation of her own philosophy
of social responsibility, a process which shifts her from the larger
frame of reference of the working world into the reduced perspective of
the slacker economy. In order to forsake her unseemly ambition and
aspiration she must, at the same time, ignore her original observation
that money and labour are inextricably tied. This shift, and the
mechanism by which she achieves it, effectively brings her closer to the
economic ideology of Gordon Gekko.
Given the tendency of mainstream narratives to resolve their political
problems in terms of character based drama, it is perhaps unsurprising
that the scene that comes to bear the weight of this economic struggle
describes a moment of filial transaction. Lelaina's escape from the
productive economy is achieved only by utilizing her father's graduation
gift of a gas card for which he promised to pay the bill for a year.
Having been fired, Lelaina finds the job market substantially less
forgiving than she'd anticipated. Following a whole series of
unsuccessful interviews, and failing even to get a McJob at the
''Wienerdude'' fast food outlet, she finally admits defeat. Collapsing
onto the couch, she switches on the TV, cementing her new found affinity
with Troy, and prompted by an advert, she befriends a telephone psychic,
a relationship that continues until Lelaina is confronted by evidence of
its commodified nature, in the form of a $400 phone bill. Clearly unable to
*bud fox (charlie sheen) with gordon gekko (michael douglas), his mentor
in* */wall street:/* *''it's all about bucks kid. the rest is
conversation.''* pay, she turns to her father for help, who simply urges
her to ''use her ingenuity.'' This she determines to do and begins to
exploit the gas card he'd given her. By using it to purchase fuel for
strangers in exchange for hard cash, and secure in the knowledge that
her father will settle the bill, she effectively generates money without
selling her own labour in the productive economy. This process is
possible only because, like Gekko and the cigarette begging character
p.30
------------------------------------------------------------------------
in /Slacker/, she refuses to acknowledge that the responsibility for
generating this money is deferred elsewhere, effectively framing off its
source. The film itself, at least, attempts to draw attention to this
displacement. Lelaina receives a phone message from her father asking
her to explain a $900 gas card bill. If this call, which Lelaina and
Troy treat as a joke, serves to address the fact that money must always
have an origin, then its political weight is effectively dismissed by
the characters'' failure to take it seriously, a refusal that, due to
their narrative prominence, subsequently becomes the film's own. This
refusal is repeated in the film's failure to answer the implicit
question of how Lelaina and Troy are to continue to subsist. As in
/Slacker/, the dilemma of survival outside of the productive economy is
never resolved, and the fact that they have no apparent means of support
no longer seems to concern them, or indeed the film. The character's
anxiety about jobs and money that the film began by positing as a
generational characteristic, has been completely eclipsed by its own
closure in conventional romantic terms.
Despite its failure to tackle these economic questions head on, however,
/Reality Bites/ doesn't entirely ignore them. Instead, it collapses the
distinction between parasitic and productive money into other areas of
the text, sublimating it into the film's opposition of money and
communication. This is most obviously realized in the difference between
the supposed realism of Lelaina's original video documentary and the
stylistic changes imposed by the producers of ''In Your Face TV.''
Lelaina conceives her original verité footage as an artistically pure
attempt to communicate the reality of life for her generation. She
opposes this attempt to the economic demands of the market place,
claiming that, ''I kinda made this promise to myself that I wasn't going
to think about where it was going to end up, 'cause I didn't want to
unintentionally commercialize it.'' However, despite this unintention,
the corrupting effect of the TV network's money effectively undermines
her video's supposed realism, framing off its sociological purpose and
reinventing it as a heavily stylized teen soap. This transformation is
achieved by fragmenting its narrative into ''reality bites'', and by
inserting cartoons, witty juxtapositions of dialogue and, worst of all,
Pizza Hut sponsorship. /Wall Street/'s opposition between money and
social responsibility is thus re-articulated here, in this distinction
between the demand for profit and the purity of art. This art is broadly
conceived in terms of a pure reflection of social reality, and as such,
as an attempt to communicate this reality. Ultimately, it is this
process of communication, in both films, that offers the most decisive
resistance to the dehumanizing process of capital accumulation. Verbal
interaction is understood as a means of re-establishing the social bonds
that money, especially in its parasitic form, works to dissolve or
obscure. This is most fully realized in the confessions of the film's
male protagonists. Bud's atones for his economic sins when he tells his
father, ''I guess I never told you, but I love you, Dad.'' So saying, he
heals the rift caused by Carl's objections to Gekko's Bluestar deal.
When Bud goes on to suggests that he can save the airline, he describes
his plan in terms that emphasis their strengthening bond. ''I need to
speak to the Union members. Can I speak for you? Your words, not mine.''
The grounds for his redemption are clear, by adopting his father's
language he is conclusively distancing himself from Gekko's economic
greed. Language offers salvation in similar terms for Troy, when drops
his arch, ironic distance for a new sincerity founded upon verbal
clarity. He tells Lelaina, ''... what I wanted to tell you was that I
love you ... and, er ... I just want to make sure that that was clear,
so there wouldn't be any confusion.'' This clarity represents Troy's
attempt to clear away all the obstructions to their relationship, the
various distractions that included a mismatched economic ideology and
the presence of Michael. At another level, Troy's return to claim
Lelaina actually serves to make the narrative more opaque.
p.31
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Because /Reality Bites/ can offer no resolution to the economic
situation of Generation X, it thus refocuses its attention on this
moment of romantic bonding. For the liberal ideology of /Wall Street/,
these two terms, money and bonding, are already mutually exclusive. If,
by the end of the film, Carl's ideal of social conscience is weakened by
being incorporated into this process of emotional responsibility, his
idealism still remains alien to Gekko's overriding concern with making a
profit. At one point he tells Bud, ''Give me guys that are poor, smart
and hungry ... with no feelings [...] and if you need a friend, get a
dog.'' Later, he goes so far as to articulate his preference for money
rather than relationships. ''... it's all about bucks kid. The rest is
conversation.'' In /Reality Bites/, Troy seems to echo this statement,
but crucially, reverses its sentiment. ''This is all we need, a couple
of smokes, a cup of coffee and a little bit of conversation.'' In these
episodes which bridge the two films, money and speech are placed in a
mutually exclusive relation, and one which serves as an indication of
the precise difference between Generation X and its Yuppie antecedents.
Given this apparent incompatibility between cash and conversation, and
having rejected the previous generation's material greed, Generation X
culture is forced to found itself instead on verbal achievements. Its
core values are expressed in a respect for the erudite and the
articulate. In /Reality Bites/, this is played out in the antithesis of
the two men competing for Lelaina's attention. Michael is described by
Troy as a, ''yuppie-head cheese-ball,'' and is therefore perfectly
positioned to act as a foil for his intellectual abilities. When they
cross verbal swords Michael proves himself woefully inadequate. ''You
know what you are, man? You know what you remind me of? ... You, you're
like that guy, that guy ...'' He flails, his words failing him, as they
frequently do elsewhere in the film. ''You know with the hat and the
bells, and the little ... you know ...'' Troy, previously seen sitting
in a café reading /Being and Time/, fills him in, apparently unable to
resist the opportunity to patronize him. ''The court jester. Where'd you
hear that, a Renaissance festival?'' While Michael's economic success is
marked in terms that might well have solicited Gekko's appreciation; his
designer suits, sports car, etc., by setting him against Troy, /Reality
Bites/ implies that this wealth was accrued at the expense of his
cultural and verbal skills, and that he thus represents a hangover from
the economic excesses of the previous decade.
Ultimately, though, what characterizes all three of these films is a
failure to resolve the opposition of the productive and parasitic
economies. In /Wall Street/, while the latter is considered morally
suspect, both positions are possible. But for ideologies such as Marxism
or Populism, capitalism is structured in such a way that to occupy
anything other than a productive role is necessarily to exist in a
parasitical relationship to the original surplus generated by labour.^2
<#2> The problem for Generation X culture, and the problem with which
both /Reality Bites/ and /Slacker/ grapple, is that by the mid-nineties
the terms of employment available within the productive economy have
become so disadvantageous that it seems as if the only possible solution
is to withdraw completely from the world of work. This apparent
resolution is, however, paradoxical, because such a withdrawal would
necessarily involve stepping outside of capitalism itself, which, short
of abandoning society all together, would clearly be impossible. Thus,
Gen X protagonists who do opt out can do so only partially, escaping
from the productive economy, rather than from capitalism as a whole, and
are thus, consistent with its logic, forced into a parasitic role. A
mainstream film articulating a liberal ideology similar to that of Carl
Fox or David Mamet <#MAMET1985> , would regard this position as morally
dubious. As such it would be unable to endorse it as acceptable for the
protagonists upon whom its narrative is founded. While /Slacker/ can get
away with its multiple characters occupying this ethically uncertain
role due to its ''arthouse''
^*2* For reasons of clarity, I have omitted a consideration of
capitalism's structural need for unemployment, the reserve army of
labour that it maintains in order to justify keeping wages as low as
possible by pointing to the plentiful supply of labour. ''The industrial
reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity,
weighs down the active army of workers; during the periods of
over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their
pretensions. The relative surplus population is therefore the background
against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work.
It confines the field of action of this law to the limits absolutely
convenient to capital's drive to exploit and dominate the workers''
(Marx <#MARX1976> , /Capital/ 792). As Lelaina's employer tells her, ''I
could find an intern who'd do your job for free.'' Instead of
complicating the issues by addressing this kind of structural
unemployment, this paper is more concerned with those, like Troy, who
actively decide, or have the means like Gekko, to withdraw from the
productive economy.
p.32
------------------------------------------------------------------------
status, a bigger studio picture, such as /Reality Bites/, cannot afford
its leniency. However, at the same time, Ben Stiller's film finds itself
unable to betray the situation of its Gen X characters by forcing them
into successful employment for fear of alienating its core audience,
who, it is assumed, will have some affinity with Generation X culture.
Instead, it is forced to seek some way of diverting attention from the
economic circumstances with which it opened, by offering a more
satisfying closure elsewhere. It is ironic then, that by adopting this
very process, the film is forced to frame off the economic foundations
that helped to make Generation X a distinctive subculture in the first
place.
**
*J. Annesley*
*DATE: *1998
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Novel/. London: Pluto Press.
*D. Coupland*
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*R. Dyer*
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*B. E Ellis*
*DATE: *1996
/Less Than Zero/. London: Picador.
*B. E Ellis*
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/Rules of Attraction/. London: Picador.
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''The Generation Game.'' /The Face/.
*J. Gomez*
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*D. Harvey*
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*D. Harvey*
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/The Condition of Postmodernity/. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
*S. Heath*
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''Narrative Space,'' in /Questions of Cinema/. Basingstoke: MacMillan.
*N. Howe*
*B. Strauss*
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/13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?/ New York: Vintage.
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*J. Urry*
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/Economies of Signs and Space/. London: Sage.
*R. Maltby*
*DATE: *1952
/Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus/.
Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press.
*David Mamet*
*DATE: *1985
Interviewed by Christopher W. E. Bigsby in C.W.E. Bigsby /David Mamet/.
London: Methuen.
*K. Marx*
*DATE: *1976
/Capital/, vol. I, trans. by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.
*I. W Morgan*
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*C. Norris*
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*D. Webster*
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Routledge.
p.33
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