alt Hacker NewsThe whole character and his role in pop culture I find very frustrating.
The guy is the antagonist in the movie so you're not supposed to like him and he's written that way. He's a strawman and his whole speech is how the real version of him would sound filtered through the ears of someone who disagreed with him.
So you end up with people holding him up as an example that disagree and agree with him but the both of those groups are choosing the sides of a caricature that doesn't understand the point he's trying to make. It's weird.
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But is it the people who misunderstand the movie, or is it the movie which fails to make the point you think it should make?
It is a classical hollywood trope to preset a “bad guy” protagonist as cool, charming, and resourceful and with a glamorous life.
Hollywood know how to make you like a character and how to make you dislike one.
Do you remember the context of that speech? He was presenting a takeover offer to the shareholders of a poorly run company with a bunch of useless execs with no skin in the game. He may be the villain of the movie, but not of that scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHnZi87272U
Gekko is the lead character and therefore the protagonist. Antagonists are faceless bureaucrats and later his mentee.
The Corleone family is also who viewers identify with in The Godfather.
Contrast with an Eastwood western, where he is the good guy or a guy better than the rest or at least with consistent morals.
There's a disturbing number of people who watch movies like RoboCop and Starship Troopers and don't realize they are satire.
I have a running joke with my closest friends that we are in a post-satire world because real news today is frequently indistinguishable from satire from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes The Onion headlines just bleed into the monotony of the news cycle, but it's not because they are any less satirical.
Two problems:
1) Michael Douglas is extremely attractive and charismatic, so people like him even if they're not supposed to. Gekko seduces the viewer to the dark side like he seduced Bud Fox.
2) The movie never shows Gekko in jail, so you never see the true consequences.
It's the problem with most Oliver Stone movies, Scorsese movies, and many other directors: the premise of the film requires a charismatic antihero, and therefore the "bad guy" becomes cool and popular.
The directors always try to avoid this criticism by saying, "Well he goes to jail in the end," but I think it's a bit of a cop out.
I tend to agree with the idea that art should try to embody some moral values, which goes against a lot of contemporary thoughts on aesthetics. But I think it’s a basic fact that people look toward fictional characters as role models, directly or indirectly. Avoiding that responsibility is not good.