PROFILE: GORDON GEKKO: Michael Doublas's portrayal of a reptilian trader summed up the 1980s. But few who watch the 'Wall Street' sequel will buy the greed-is-good slogan, writes DONALD CLARKE
GORDON GEKKO is back. It’s like opening your front door to discover Miami Sound Machine squatting in the porch. It’s like glancing downwards to discover you’ve accidentally put on a puffball skirt. You can see where this is going. When television shows compile montages to illustrate the 1980s they rarely fail to unearth a clip of the iconic corporate raider. Look, there he is, between Danger Mouse and Leslie Grantham. Twenty-two years after he slimed across the screen in Oliver Stone’s
Wall Street
Gordon Gekko, again played by a reptilian Michael Douglas, returns for the same director’s
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
. After premiering to mixed reviews at the Cannes film festival, the sequel will grace commercial cinemas from October 6th.
It hardly needs to be said that the time is right for another pondering of the Wall Street cesspool. For all the booms and busts of the 1980s, nothing quite so catastrophic as the 2008 banking meltdown occurred. Lehman Brothers survived Black Monday with its honour largely intact. Recently unemployed bankers were not forced to parade their gonks and hole punches before the world’s media. Yet Gordon Gekko seems so very much of his time. Is he the right figure to examine the recent depravity? A middle-aged Beelzebub with slicked-back hair and striped braces, he came, in the 1980s, to represent a particular class of unabashed acquisitiveness.
Gekko was such a persuasive villain that his notorious mantra – "greed is good" – was soon adopted as justification for any financial atrocity. Such aspiring yuppies as Derek Trotter, hero of the BBC's Only Fools and Horses, began wearing braces and declaring that lunch was for wimps. It was as if, in the mid-1960s, the young all aspired to be Auric Goldfinger rather than James Bond.
This was certainly not what Oliver Stone had in mind. The son of an old-school Wall Street trader – model for the Hal Holbrook character in the first film – the director claims to have been slightly appalled by the fetishisation of Gekko and his squalid values. Speaking after the Cannes screening, Stone explained that, when making Money Never Sleeps, he worked hard at ensuring the villains were properly repulsive. Played by the increasingly ubiquitous Josh Brolin, Bretton James, a malevolent hedge-fund manager, is just as slick as Gekko but is not allowed the same rhetorical flourishes. Meanwhile, Gordon, ever so slightly chastened following a second spell in prison, advises caution ahead of gung-ho acquisition. The dynamics have certainly altered.
So who is this Gekko fellow? Raised on Long Island, graduate of a humble college, he became a terrifying exemplar of that class of aggressive parasite known as the corporate raider. By the time he met Bud Fox, an ambitious kid from a blue-collar background, Gordon had established a relationship as the most fearsome shark in the pool. Using information innocently proffered by Bud’s dad, a union chief in the aeronautics industry, he bought into a firm named Bluestar Airlines and saw his holdings soar in value. Aware that Fox (sounds a bit like “Faust”, does it not?) was open to manipulation, Gekko persuaded the young man to abandon his efforts to earn money honestly and to seek out sources of illicit information wherever they lurked. Champagne, trophy blondes and expensive shirts were soon everywhere about. When, however, one of Gekko’s schemes was shown to have involved the sacking of Fox’s dad and his workmates, Bud turned. After recording an incriminating conversation with his former mentor, he ensured that Gekko went to prison.
Stone’s new film begins with his anti-hero being discharged. It’s a rather wonderful sequence: the guard hands him an empty money clip and a huge mobile phone. The director is, however, canny enough to know that men like Gordon Gekko do not often go to jail for 20 years. It transpires that our Mephistopheles became embroiled in even greater financial infelicities after his first spell inside and was sent back for another, more substantial portion of porridge.
Original members of the Gekko fan club will be depressed to hear that their hero is (or appears to be) something of a changed man. The film begins in the months before the great meltdown, and Gekko, never anybody’s fool, now spends his time talking about bubbles that are sure to burst. While he has been inside, his daughter has become involved in some vague form of green activism and taken up with a similarly well-meaning young financier. Inevitably, the fresh-faced youth falls under Gekko’s spell. Equally inevitably, the older man turns out to have evil on his mind.
“In this film, Gekko has a heart,” Stone said recently. “He’s torn between truly wanting his daughter and a sense of family back in his old age – and his desire for money and power.”
The posters, depicting a suited Douglas standing malevolently beside his new Faust (played by a wide-eyed Shia LaBeouf), promise viewers that the old rogue is set to stomp his way through the film. Sadly, that is not quite the case. For most of the picture Gekko refuses to jump on babies or bite the heads off hamsters. Money Never Sleeps allows Douglas just a fleeting moment as the oiled, Armani-wrapped Gekko of yore.
Stone is, perhaps, implicitly acknowledging how attitudes to financiers have changed. For all the hatred of yuppies in the 1980s, they still retained a degree of frightful glamour. Young people might be surprised to learn that, just as they secretly long to be blood-sucking vampires, their parents once guiltily yearned to be blood-sucking asset-strippers.
That’s all gone. The disasters of 2008 and the subsequent cuts and lay-offs have led to financial cavaliers being loathed and ridiculed. It would, in the present climate, be as difficult to make an aspirational film about the financial services as it would to make an aspirational film about people-traffickers.
Stone has, of course, stated that he never wanted Gekko or his successors in Money Never Sleepsto appear as attractive characters. But for all his bluster, the director is wise enough to know that glamorous villains have always sold tickets. A kinder, less wicked Gekko may cause the director fewer sleepless nights than the earlier version, but he is not nearly as interesting to be around.
And yet. There is something comforting about returning to an icon that lurked so conspicuously around your callow years. Douglas won a best-actor Oscar for playing Gekko, and, though the part was really a supporting role, it is hard to deny that the award was earned. It is evidence of an emblematic character’s success that he or she elbows aside genuine historical personalities in the collective imagination.
Stone based Gekko on Ivan Boesky, the notorious stock trader arrested for insider dealing, and Carl Icahn, a master of corporate raiding. Yet when commentators seek to describe the era, they more often reach for Gekko’s name than that of Boesky or Icahn.
Seeing the jowly, slightly creaky Douglas, increasingly reminiscent of his father, Kirk, ambling on to screen is to be reminded that even masters of the universe, as Tom Wolfe famously characterised the 1980s financial hoodlums, must eventually succumb to the bear market that is old age. The knowledge that, since unveiling the film at Cannes, Douglas has been diagnosed with a serious strain of cancer makes that realisation more poignant. Maybe even Gordon Gekko would now admit there’s more to life than money.
On second thoughts, probably not.
CV: Gordon Gekko
Who?Fictional corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street, Oliver Stone's era-defining 1987 film.
Why is he in the news?Gordon is about to return in a sequel, also directed by Stone, called Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
Most appealing characteristic?A near-supernatural ability to predict which way the economic wind will turn.
Least appealing characteristic?Where to begin? Dishonesty. Amorality. Arrogance. Misanthropy. At the end of Wall Streethe even demonstrates a propensity for physical violence.
Most likely to say?"Greed is good." (Duh!)
Least likely to say?"Money can't buy you love."
