Point of View is written and spoken by Bob Santamaria for the National Civic Council, 254 Queen Street, Melbourne, Victoria, 3000.
Here now is Point of View, an independent news commentary by Mr Bob Santamaria on behalf of the National Civic Council.
How do you do? It's very rare indeed for this comment to be used to discuss a film.
One however which is doing the rounds at least of the various capitals deserves to be an exception.
It's Oliver Stone's Wall Street which has something of significance to say, not only in relation to the stock exchange but to the world of finance in general.
Wall Street suffers admittedly from the characteristic contemporary disease of letting the cameras run away in the name of realism with unnecessary obscenity in language and pointless pornography.
No doubt the main characters depicted are as foul-mouthed and promiscuous as emerges but audiences don't entirely lack imagination.
Wall Street's plot which centres around the peculiar frenzy of the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange represents the so-called way of life of the relatively new upwardly mobile class of money changes,
fired with the ambition to make their first million before they reach the age of 30 and prepared in pursuit of it to dissolve every social bond which gives life its meaning.
Wall Street's central character Gecko is brilliantly played by Michael Douglas who is the son of veteran actor Kirk Douglas.
He's obviously modelled on the disgraced New York investment banker and mega crook Ivan Bowski.
Just as his acolyte Bud Fox played by Charlie Sheen is the real Wall Street's Dennis Levine who blew the whistle on Bowski.
The plot of Wall Street has the simplicity of a medieval morality play, the corruption of the much younger Bud Fox who's only too ready to be corrupted by the promise of the millions before 30
and the harlots thoughtfully provided by Gecko as an acknowledged adjunct of the human satisfactions out of the high flyer.
What gives Wall Street its social significance are the excesses of the contemporary system of financial capitalism as distinct from productive capitalism,
a distinction becoming apparent to an increasing number of Americans if not to Australians.
The frenzied mania of the stock exchange has never been more stridently proclaimed than in several of the shots of the floor with which Wall Street is interlaced.
Gecko is the philosopher as well as the chief operator.
In one of the film's more memorable moments he turns around the shareholders meeting which might have sided against him,
not with a statement of the dividends they may anticipate from him but with a declaration of his and of their implicit philosophy.
Greed he says is good. Greed is right.
Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary urge. Greed has motivated the upward surge of mankind.
And I thought that the flavor of the month was there is no nobility in poverty anymore.
GK Chesterton once remarked that what was worth doing was worth doing badly.
Gecko puts it very differently. What's worth doing is worth doing for money.
The younger Bud Fox's father the Union Shop Steward has a more traditional philosophy of money. The savers.
Money is something you need in case you don't die tomorrow. Not so says Gecko.
The main thing about money is that it makes you do things you don't want to do.
A lot of young men and women in the United States must be learning very quaint philosophies indeed.
You may recall the TV series Dynasty which represented this new establishment.
Wall Street depicts the next chapter after Dynasty in the history of the stock exchange and its inhabitants.
It's conceivable that the viewing of Wall Street may bring belated repentance to some of the stock exchanges youthful high fliers.
Especially those who lost their jobs after the crash of October last year.
Although one remains quite unsure as to whether Bud's belated reformation
after his manipulations have almost brought about his own father's death
and his betrayal of his former master Gecko are really examples of remorse and not merely of revenge.
Even before last year's October crash,
appalled by the combination of greed and ruthlessness and amorality of the young high fliers of Wall Street,
the retired head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission John Shad
announced that he'd committed ten million dollars of his own money
to endow a chair of business ethics at Harvard's renowned business school.
Some skepticism was expressed at the usefulness of such an enterprise
in view of the fact that there was no longer any generally accepted ethical code to which its academics could appeal.
After all, a community which can't agree on what is to be done about brain transplants
is unlikely to agree on what's to be done about insider trading.
Wall Street, like Oliver Stone's previous films Salvador and Platoon,
ultimately owes its drawing power to considerable dramatic power,
but its handicap like theirs is oversimplification.
For the excesses of exchange speculation are not merely a matter of personal greed.
While greed may be their driving force,
if we really wish to understand the excesses of the purely financial economy,
we must understand the substructures without which the greed couldn't operate,
namely the power of the banks to create money out of nothing
and thus to fuel the financial netherworld of options and futures and the rest,
the relative uselessness of the supervision maintained by securities commissions of various types,
the corporate framework provided by the $2 company which enables the players to cover their play
with more effective camouflage than any which the generals could ever hope to create on the battlefield.
Personal greed is a completely understandable keynote of dramatic conflict,
but for the real and basic causes without which it couldn't even operate as it does,
we must probe more deeply into the fundamentals of society.
We'll keep you tuned until next week.
National Civic Council 254 Queen Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000.