"The Personification of Capital"

"Stone was more equivocating. ('I think of "Wall Street" as a "Scarface" of business,' he wrote in 2000, with 'Gekko replacing Tony Montana.') But, as with Tony and, as in 'Paradise Lost,' the Devil got the best lines. Gekko's infamous 'greed is good' speech combines a warning against America's decline with an attack on unaccountable, overpaid corporate managers, arguing that in a system that promotes 'survival of the unfittest,' naked self-interest is an evolutionary positive. Gekko later elaborates, telling his protégé Bud that the richest 1% in America control half the wealth and make the rules: 'You're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy?' Thus did the movie's arch capitalist offer the movie's most stinging attack on capitalism."

Twenty-five years after Oliver Stone's Wall Street, J. Hoberman in the Los Angeles Times discusses the cultural legacy of Gordon Gekko.