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Chris Bowers Jr.

Dr. Erin McLaughlin
Multimedia Writing and Rhetoric
24 November 2015
Real Life Villains: Popular Culture Representations of Wall Street
Throughout the history of America, our popular culture has helped define who we are as a
nation. It is a representation of our diverse lifestyles, tastes, and opinions that change as the
world around us changes. As technology has advanced, so have the mediums, the influence, and
the effectiveness of our popular culture as it comes to us through our newspapers, radios,
televisions, and movie theaters. That being said, it is more influential than ever in the twenty-first
century and it has the tendency to sway the opinions of the general public towards certain people,
institutions, and ideas. One such institution that has been directly affected by this influence is
Wall Street. Wall Streets significant role in the American economy has inevitably landed it in the
way of the curiosity and criticism of the general public, and consequently American popular
culture has undertaken many efforts to portray Wall Street. I plan to examine in this research
paper how Wall Street has been portrayed in popular culture throughout different periods of
American history in order to investigate how those portrayals may affect or correlate to the
general publics view of Wall Street as an institution.
Wall Street and big banks have almost always been viewed rather negatively by the
American public, but to understand why, we must look into the history of Wall Street relations
with the public. The New York Stock Exchange was established in 1792 in New York City on
Wall Street, which was, and continues to be, the financial capital of the United States (Sobel 16).

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Until 1929, the stock market and Wall Street were seen as an opportunity for wealth and
investment by the public rather than a problem. The booming economy of the early 1900s caused
a record number of Americans to begin investing on credit, which was a horrible idea because
that meant that they were buying these stocks with money that they did not even have. So in
1929 when their stocks began to drop and they tried to sell all at once, the market crashed and
they were left with enormous amounts of debt as they now owed even more (Bernanke 21).
Other events before and after the crash made the situation worse and culminated into the Great
Depression. Needless to say, the people were angry, and the majority of blame fell on the banks
of Wall Street for their careless selling and buying of stocks. Throughout the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, there have been scandals that involved people cheating the stock market
with insider information and shady finances, which have only worsened the publics opinion.
Then finally in 2008, after Wall Street banks gave out unpayable mortgage loans to people trying
to buy houses and then subsequently selling those loans as securities to make money, the stock
market nearly collapsed and for almost two years the American people had to endure the Great
Recession. Although not as severe as the Great Depression, the Great Recession made Wall
Street look even worse, despite the fact that its actions were not the sole factor in causing the
recession. All these events and distrust have culminated into the publics current opinions toward
Wall Street.
At the same time that Wall Street was changing throughout American history, technology
was changing dramatically as well. The ways in which Americans distributed and received
information were moving from newspapers and mail, to radio and television. One of the most
overlooked beneficiaries of these technological advances was American popular culture. The rise

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of radio shows, television shows, and movies gave popular culture new mediums that were more
effective, had more potential, and had wider influence. Newspapers had previously been the
primary medium for popular culture in America. News, opinions, and cartoons featured in
newspapers characterized American culture at the time and served as the main way for
Americans to keep up to date on things and have opinions on them. Around the time of the
Depression, newspapers frequently featured cartoons and articles that criticized Wall Street and
labeled its banks as carrying the majority, if not all, of the blame for the severe state of the
economy. Since most people had industrial jobs which required no knowledge of how the stock
market works, they absorbed everything they read about in the newspaper and formed their
opinions based on that. The people wanted change that would help to ensure that something like
this never happened again, so in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the New
Deal, which effectively increased government involvement in nearly all facets of financial life in
the U.S. and helped the economy recover (Smiley). In this case, popular culture, in the form of
newspapers, influenced the general public into blaming Wall Street through media framing,
which is defined as the way in which news media coverage can shape mass opinion by only
presenting certain details or sides of a story to help guide their reader to understanding (Cissel
67). By not reporting other factors that caused the Great Depression, blame fell solely on Wall
Street.
With the rise of television and radio, popular culture changed and spread like wildfire.
News channels, television shows, and movies replaced newspapers as the main mediums for
popular culture due to their even further reach and better overall effectiveness. Geraldine Moohr
states in her article White Collar Movies and Why They Matter that movies are directly

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affected and shaped by contemporary popular culture, and vice versa (123). Therefore, it did not
take long for Wall Street to become a prime subject of movies and the news with its numerous
trading scandals throughout the 1980s. The production of movies such as Wall Street (1987)
during the 1980s birthed the movie genre of white collar films, which Moohr defines as
movies that depict non-physical fraudulent takings of money or property. Wall Street and its
characters are based off of the scandals of the 1980s, especially the one that involved the
investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1986 in which Drexel employees were involved in
insider trading. The film follows Bud Fox, an aspiring Wall Street employee, and Gordon Gekko,
a Wall Street financier, as they team up to find and utilize insider trading information to
massively profit off of investments. The theme of the film is how greed is good, which Bud
ironically believes until Gekko buys out Buds fathers airline company and then tries to sell it,
leaving his father jobless. The movie ends with Bud using Gekkos own tactics against him to
stop the sellout of the airline and then giving evidence to the FBI of Gekkos crimes. More
movies like Wall Street have followed, more specifically Margin Call (2011), Boiler Room
(2000), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
Each of these movies have certain similarities and differences, but they all share the
common plot of evil bankers who willingly do things that harm others for the sake of their own
goals. Additionally, their differences in their plots and conflicts has evolved over time as public
opinion has changed. Movies like Wall Street focus on the problem of individuals within firms
committing the crimes without the firm knowing; The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room have
conflicts that examine situations in which the firm actively knows about and supports the illegal
trading actions of their employees; Margin Call highlights some of the pitfalls of the world of

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investment banking and how those pitfalls often force banks to make decisions that end up
hurting others. Each of these movies has a conflict that can be related to an actual scandal or
event that took place: Wall Street is based off of the Drexel scandals; The Wolf of Wall Street and
Boiler Room are based off of the aggressive telephone boiler rooms of the 1980s and 90s;
Margin Call is based off of the Great Recession.
So what does this show us about public opinion and popular culture portrayals of Wall
Street throughout these scandals and events? In order to derive a hypothesis, we must look at the
time periods in which the movies were made and what events were taking place around those
times. Wall Street was released in 1987 amid the financial scandals of the 1980s. These scandals,
especially the one that the movie is based on, involved a small group of people who used insider
trading to massively profit off of investments right under the nose of their firm. This could
clearly show what the public thought of these scandals at the time: small, evil groups of bankers
trying to cheat the system and subsequently getting what they deserve. However, the conflicts of
white collar movies changed from a few employees doing illegal things to entire firms
supporting their employees illegal tactics in The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room, which
were release in 2013 and 2000, respectively. These plots end with a few getting away free or with
reduced sentences by giving up information. Moohr points out that this change in resolution of
conflict shows something about the publics confidence in the governments effectiveness in
punishing and dealing with corporate fraud, as it is unsettling for the viewer to see the characters
commit such heinous and selfish acts and then get away either unscathed or with a reduced
sentence, as opposed to receiving justice like Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko. This could show that
since the 1980s scandals, the public has lost much of its confidence in the government in dealing

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with corporate fraud, since people like Jordan Belfort made millions . Margin Call has a very
different conflict than the other movies in that nothing illegal was committed. It was released in
2011 and takes place during the Great Recession in 2008 when the executives of a bank that is
about to go under must make a tough decision that would either harm a huge amount of their
associates but possibly save the bank, or do nothing and face the possibility of bankruptcy. They
decide to save the bank and harm their associates, highlighting some of the inherent flaws of the
banking system that drive firms to use illegal tactics. Although nothing illegal happened in this
case, it showed that bank executives and employees will do anything necessary to keep their
banks alive. If they were willing to harm the public, their trade partners, and their competition,
what else would they be willing to do to keep the bank alive? This could show that the American
public has come to think of bankers as ruthless, selfish businessmen who will stop at nothing to
make money, even at the expense of the entire American economy.
There are many examples within pop culture that portray Wall Street as evil that exceed
movies. Even today as it did during the Great Depression, the news most often reports stories on
Wall Street with a very negative connotation, so much so that they have frequently referred to
bankers and banks as evil. As Robert Peckham wrote in A History of Evil in Popular Culture,
after the 2008 financial crisis, discourse within the news focused on the role of financiers as
agents responsible for driving the system our of kilter and Wall Street movies featuring
financiers have proliferated, harkening back to the heyday of unscrupulous and predatory
bankers in the fiction and movie of the 1980s and 1990s (238-239). For example, multiple news
sources put out headlines about Wall Street and some of its scandals in 2008 and 2009, such as
when New York magazine had an article titled Is Goldman Sachs Evil? In the trial of Bernie

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Madoff in 2009, the mastermind behind historys biggest multibillion dollar Ponzi scheme, the
judge gave him 150 years in prison and called his actions extraordinarily evil (Peckham 237).
The rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement only supports the idea that the American people
have come to despise and vilify Wall Street, their main argument being income inequality and
calling for action to be taken against the one percent. Additionally, one cannot help but notice
that most of these spikes in popular culture portrayals of Wall Street seem to come after an event
has happened that has to do with Wall Street. Wall Street came out after the slew of insider
trading scandals in the 1980s while The Wolf of Wall Street and Margin Call came out after the
2008 recession. Other documentaries and books have followed suit in defaming Wall Street after
economic downturns, and even today the streak of Wall Street in popular culture continues as the
movie The Big Short, a movie about how a group of bankers predicted the Great Recession and
profited off of their prediction, is coming out in the near future following the recovery of the
Great Recession.
There most definitely seems to be a correlation between Wall Street shortcomings and
popular culture portrayals of Wall Street. Every movie about Wall Street involves bankers being
portrayed as evil or bad in some way and each movies release date correlates to contemporary
events that transpired which may have made the public angry with Wall Street, and consequently
this showed through popular culture through the nature of news reports and white collar movies.
The degree of which the public vilifies Wall Street in popular culture has changed over time as
different events have transcribed and technology has improved, showing how much the public
has come to learn about what goes on in Wall Street. As America continues into the future as an
economic powerhouse, white collar movies and other forms of popular culture will play a

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significant part in educating the public on the backbone of our economy, Wall Street, and
therefore help them to understand and form opinions on it as an institution in the future.

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Works Cited
Peckham, Robert. "Nightmare on Wall Street: Zombie Bankers and the New Contagion." A
History of Evil in Popular Culture: What Hannibal Lecter, Stephen King, and Vampires
Reveal About America. By Sharon Packer and Jody W. Pennington. Vol. 1. N.p.: ABCCLIO, n.d. N. pag. Print.
United States. National Bureau of Economic Research. Non-Monetary Effects of the Financial
Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression. By Ben S. Bernanke. Cambridge
(Mass.): NBER, 1983. NBER. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.
Gene Smiley, "Great Depression." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. 2008. Library of
Economics and Liberty. 24 November 2015. <http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/
GreatDepression.html>. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.
Sobel, Robert. "Introduction." Introduction. Inside Wall Street. New York: W.W. Notron, 1977.
N. pag. Print.
Moohr, Geraldine S. "White Collar Movies and Why They Matter." Texas Review of
Entertainment and Sports Law 16.2 (2015): 119-39. Web. 21 Nov. 2015.
Cissel, Margaret. "Media Framing: A Comparative Content Analysis. Elon Journal of
Undergraduate Research in Communications 3.1 (2012): 67-77. Elon University. Web. 22
Nov. 2015.