The historian Per Hansen recently published a study tracking Hollywood's changing depictions of corporate America over most of the last century—a revealing, if crude, measure of the broader cultural mood. Through the 1950s, Hollywood generally championed Main Street's role in bolstering local communities and lambasted out-of-touch bankers who exploited those businesses to line their own pockets. But by the 1980s, a heavy disillusionment had crept into the narrative, epitomized by the 1987 satirical hit Wall Street, in which a conniving Gordon Gekko, portrayed as something of a demigod of greed, ends up in jail.
In 2010, a version of Gekko's amorality was again on display in the film Margin Call, only this time, the heroes become fantastically wealthy fleecing public institutions, pensioners, and the middle class—and get away scot-free. “Nothing happens,” Hansen said in a recent radio interview. “The cynicism and disillusionment is complete.”
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