American Business Culture in Novel and Film -- Wall Street, Martha Stewart, and a Cookbook Mix of Greed and Gracious Living
Perhaps the quintessential film about American business culture is Oliver Stone's 1987 drama "Wall Street." The film's infamous Gordon Gekko, as portrayed by Michael Douglass, is shown as a hollow charlatan whose ethos that "greed is good" highlights the corruption of American business culture. However, quite often, breaches of American business ethics are not nearly so obvious. The protagonist of the film, as portrayed by Charlie Sheen, is a callow and easily corrupted young man, eager to make money, and easily swayed by the promises of American capitalism.
However, although the general American business culture's lack value of ethics may 'feel' accurately portrayed in the film, in reality, quite often a lack of ethical norms is not quite so raw nor so obvious on Wall Street. Business people's reasons for starting a business are often more complex than Gekkos'. For a business to succeed, even on cut-throat Wall Street, corporate leaders may have to be "greedy, but we want them to be greedy on behalf of the shareholders, not on behalf of their own yachts and Gulf stream jets," said Nell Minow, editor...
(Harrigan, 2004) A businessman or woman as transparent as Gekko would have little
success in raising capital today.
Not all of the most public scandals today involve the narrow and greedy pursuit of
money for its own sake. Even those individual deposed CEOs, for instance, like Martha Stewart, who may seem like power-hungry characters made for Shakespearean tragedies a la Lady Macbeth, or at very least TV movies of the week, had to have a vision to begin their companies. Stewart developed a company and a
brand name that stretched beyond mere money making. Stewart was born the daughter of a relatively poor family. She worked her way through
college. Her homemaking business both bridged her new personal interests as well as satisfied her desire for advancement.
Her passions for hands-on work and perfect and gracious living were spawned by the enthusiasm for the cultured and mannered life she married into. Only an…
