The Sin It Can't Stop Admiring

The genre's official position is moral, and it has held that position for a century. Erich von Stroheim's Greed is a vast jeremiad against avarice, its characters destroyed in a desert clutching their gold; John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre watches prospectors rot from the inside as the gold takes hold; Citizen Kane gives a man everything money can buy and ends on the one thing it could not, a sled and a lost childhood. The lesson is always the same, and always severe: wealth is hollow, greed is a poison, the love of money is the root of the thing. The money film knows exactly what it is supposed to say about money.

But watch how the films actually play, and the condemnation keeps slipping. Oliver Stone made Wall Street to indict 1980s greed, and gave Gordon Gekko the "greed is good" speech — which a generation of future financiers took as inspiration rather than warning, because Gekko, on screen, is magnetic, powerful, winning. Martin Scorsese made The Wolf of Wall Street as a three-hour bacchanal of fraud and excess so kinetic and pleasurable that audiences cheered the very debauchery it meant to expose — the same problem as his gangster films, the camera making the sin too seductive to read as a sermon. Glengarry Glen Ross and The Big Short and Margin Call are sharper, colder, more disgusted — and even they cannot help making the deal, the play, the killing, a little exhilarating.

This is not a failure of nerve but a structural truth the genre keeps running into: greed is appealing, and an honest film about it has to show you why, which means showing you the high. Nobody chases money for the misery; they chase it for the rush of winning, the power, the freedom, the yacht — and a film that depicted only the hollowness, never the lure, would be lying about the thing it claims to understand. So the money film, like the addiction film and the gangster film, must seduce you with the very appetite it condemns, must make you feel the pull of wealth in order to indict it, and in making you feel the pull it always, slightly, validates it. The trap is identical: you cannot warn against a temptation you have not first made tempting.

That is why the money film is one of cinema's most morally compromised and most honest genres at once. It is compromised because it keeps producing folk heroes out of monsters — Gekko, Belfort, the killers who close the deal — and honest because that compromise reflects a real ambivalence at the heart of the culture that produces it: a society that officially deplores greed and actually rewards it, that puts the warning on the screen and the winner on the magazine cover. The money film is the dream-life of capitalism arguing with its own conscience, condemning the appetite it cannot stop admiring, and the gap between what it says about money and how it makes money feel is the truest thing it has to show us. We go to be warned, and we come out a little envious. The genre has never solved that, because the culture hasn't either.

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The line: Greed → Citizen Kane → The Treasure of the Sierra Madre → Wall Street → Glengarry Glen Ross → There Will Be Blood → Margin Call → The Wolf of Wall Street

This line crosses:

• The American Dream's Dark Twin — the money film and the gangster film are siblings: both stage the pursuit of wealth as the American Dream taken at its word, and both make the appetite too seductive to condemn cleanly.
• The Camera That Loves the Sin — The Wolf of Wall Street is the genre's purest case of Scorsese's trap: the greed filmed as an irresistible high the audience is made complicit in.

Read through: writing on the Hollywood "Wall Street" film and the GFC cycle · critical work on the cinema of capitalism.

A note on the argument: these films and their reception are documented record (the "greed is good"/Gekko-as-idol phenomenon especially). The framing of the genre as unable to condemn the appetite it must make appealing — the dream-life of capitalism arguing with its conscience — is this essay's reading.