padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
the important difference between AP/Wall Street and something like Nathan Barley is the amount of power the subjects have

Nathan Barley himself undoubtedly has a mountain of clueless privilege and (potential) cultural capital, but virtually no power

i.e. Shane Smith is a billionaire but I assume Vice is overwhelmingly freelancers operating in relative economic precarity
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
if American Psycho were to be written today it would 100% have to be set in the world of private equity, rather than on Wall Street
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I just started watching Succession, and funnily enough the two things it immediately reminds me of are Nathan Barley - the bro-iness, the dickhead banter, the amoral pranks - except, of course, a supercharged American version about multi-billionaires - and American Psycho.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I thought Harron's approach to those scenes was brilliant
yeah definitely. more of the last third or so could've done with that approach, it does become too much of straightforward did he/didn't he thing.

tho idk how that feasible that is for budget or filmmaking reasons

I'd agree Defoe is badly midcast, in a film that mostly casts pretty damned well

the character is supposed to be around Batemen's age or just a bit older, not middle-age, close to a peer

and Defoe (great actor) has too much inherent weirdo energy. that's should've been someone like Casper Van Dien (but better than that), cut-rate Bateman.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Succession
I watched the first episode and was like wow do I have zero interest in these people. I'm just not interested in dynastic squabbling, I think.

I'm not surprised at AP overtones. less stylized ofc. the patriarch gives off some of that Fortune 500 CEO psychopath vibe.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Tom Wolfe is trash btw. his novels certainly are. appalling politics too, or cultural politics you might say, and unlike Ellis they infest his work.

I can't stand him tbh. the affected white suits. everything about him screams self-appointed cultural gatekeeper.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
New Journalism in general - besides Hunter S., his own thing for better/worse - is pretty much a bust, no?

in retrospect it looks mostly like a self-promotion hustle by Wolfe, Capote, Gay Talese, etc, not to mention often ethically dubious

and it pretty directly leads to most of the problems of Foster Wallace style essay journalism noted above
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Mailer is cancelled for me. pretty rare when it comes to art but in his case, yeah, no fucking thanks. what an actually terrible person.

having said that, unlike most of New Journalism he has genuine insights, but they're overwhelmed by all his hangups on race/gender/sexuality.

as far as fiction, I read The Naked and the Dead as a teen. I recall it being alright? Albeit no patch on Thin Red Line.

Didion is female Tom Wolfe (or he's male Didion). what's the famous essay say, "her only subject is herself"? yeah.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
on the plus side: HST when his self-indulgence is reined in. Terry Southern as a screenwriter.

from the same era and a fellow traveler but not really "New Journalism", David Halberstam was the best and I'm a huge fan
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I have mixed feelings about Susan Sontag. more properly a social critic I guess, but in that same topical essayist generation.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But that was the same with Wall Street, which simply made the film even better. The fact that it is adored by the people it satirises doesn't necessarily mean it has failed.
But that's satire... the eternal problem of that genre. People love being satirised.... occasionally someone lands a nasty blow but it's rare.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Something you can forget whilst reading it is none of them are ever really seen working. It's just a whirl of lunch meetings, dinners and so on.
This is very important to the whole thing I think. Patrick Bateman doesn't know about interest rates, futures... black-scholes.... anything.... but when you read about Nick Leeson... the bosses knew nothing, that's why it happened, the guys with big offices and salaries and what not spent their time socialising and expecting the grunts to do the stuff that they completely didn't understand but make money for them. Bateman is a guy from the right place who has come in above the level of doing stuff... that rings true to me.
What We Do In The Shadows... have you seen the series? I like the episode where the vampire/guy who pretends to work in an office gets called in by his boss and he says "I'm probably getting fired, I don't even know what this company does" but he gets promoted. It's perfect.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
But that's satire... the eternal problem of that genre. People love being satirised.... occasionally someone lands a nasty blow but it's rare.

The trajectory of Gordon Gecko has always fascinated me. It seems clear that Stone wanted to create an unambiguous morality play, but in the hands of Douglas and the logic of the production itself he lost control of the character, which took on a life of its own. It was like Milton being seduced by his own Satan as he was writing. Gecko became one of the great fictional characters of the era, a gargoyle and a role model, which is also why Wall Street is still such a masterpiece.
 
It seems clear that Stone wanted to create an unambiguous morality play, but in the hands of Douglas and the logic of the production itself he lost control of the character, which took on a life of its own.

this thing happens a lot doesn't it? Bateman in the big short, cumberbatch as cummings spring to mind. And then these fictionalised versions become aspirational
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
in the hands of Douglas and the logic of the production itself he lost control of the character, which took on a life of its own. It was like Milton being seduced by his own Satan
that's very interesting. Platoon of course being a literal morality play.

it's perhaps a lack of artistic discipline? Platoon is also a relatively disciplined film but it's also the last one he really made.

letting the logic of a production and/or story take over - JFK, Natural Born Killers, Alexander - with varying results

also the problem of aestheticization, portraying a Gekko without glamorizing him. Scorsese certainly failed. Ryan Gosling in the The Big Short.

it seems like a charismatic movie star will inevitably turn these assholes into amoral antiheroes

Stone also pulled his punches on Wall Street, enough to get the unofficial Wall Street stamp of approval
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Boiler Room does a pretty good job of portraying financial fraud in an unsexy way, the petty grubbiness of the actual thing

but its protagonist is an audience surrogate rather than would-be master of the universe (and character actor rather than big star)

all the financial guys in The Big Short, besides Gosling, are both not crooked (so, can't be antiheros) and deeply uncool

Pitt taking pains to downplay his natural beauty as much as possible

Margin Call is a great, relatively austere film, but even there Paul Bettany is giving sexy monologues about money, it's all stylized
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
but I agree that those conflicting drives - the morality play and the snake offering apple seductiveness of Douglas - are what make Wall Street great
 
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