New York Movies by Mark Asch

Author:Mark Asch [Asch, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

On the morning of December 15, 1989, an 18-foot, 7,000-pound bronze statue of a bull—muscles rippling, nostrils flaring—was discovered outside the New York Stock Exchange. Sicilian-born sculptor Arturo Di Modica deposited his “Charging Bull” in front of the spiritual home of global commerce, he said, in tribute to “the strength and power of the American people.” Over the years, tourists have burnished the bull’s testicles to a golden shine, though it was hard to reach during 2011’s Occupy Wall Street protests, as the NYPD kept watch against symbolically potent vandalism.

Wall Street is full of charging bulls—in his oleaginous Oscar-clip “Greed is good” speech, Michael Douglas’s corporate raider Gordon Gekko posits his personal brand of stock-market swashbuckling as a recipe for Making America Great Again. Too, there is stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a class-climbing NYU grad still reliant on cash handouts from his mechanic father to support his high-turnover lifestyle. Bud’s naïve materialism slides frictionlessly into amorality as he ascends from bottled lagers at a Queens tavern with his dad’s union buddies, to a yuppie-paradise penthouse with a sushi machine, though he pays more attention to the Bloomberg terminal at his desk than to the Schnabel canvas on his wall. Stone’s trading montages unspool in a headrush of scrolling stock tickers, brokers barking buy and sell orders, and floor traders in frantic open-outcry bidding. The film is set in 1985, during the Reagan bull market, when Donald Trump was but a gold-plated mascot of trickle-down economics. It’s dedicated to Stone’s stockbroker father, who died that same year; paternal bonds and the Protestant work ethic are the moral compass buried under a Gatsby-esque pile of baby-blue contrast-collar shirts.

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