It is has been a long-standing complaint from pro-market folk – like yours truly – that business and capitalism tends to get a pretty crummy deal in Hollywood and its equivalents around the world. Even one of my favourite movies, Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas as the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, is normally taken to be an anti-capitalist film, even though there is nothing in the magnificent “greed is good” speech with which I fundamentally disagree (it is like Ayn Rand on acid). In the main, businessmen are treated as shysters, or cold, or boring, and business is regarded as either vaguely venal or not very dramatic. The trouble is, I suppose, that the creative process of forming a business, running it and exploring a new market is not always full of obvious drama the same way that a crime story is, or at least not obvious to people who tend to view business in a hostile light. Some processes of bringing a new product to market might actually be very dramatic, and it is surprising that the arts world has not picked up on this more.
People have of course speculated why business tends to get treated like this. In part, artistic people, including extremely intelligent and creative ones, will regard the process of raising funds for a film or play as a chore, and often resent the process of getting money and having to suck up to people to get it. Also, creative people often do not get close to the grubby necessity of having to pay bills, meet salary payrolls and so on. As a result, a lot of people in the arts world do not really understand business all that well. The results tend to bear this out. Take UK soap operas on television, like the terrible Eastenders, Coronation Street or the US shows Dallas and Dynasty. (The latter two cases were admittedly self-parodies to a degree). In almost every case, the businessman – it is usually a man – is presented as a crook, or brutal, shallow, uninteresting and generally unpleasant. And even in so-called “reality” business tv shows like The Apprentice, starring the Amstrad computer firm boss Alan Sugar, the impression is that being a great businessman means being a total wanker, which alas is the impression that Sir Alan conveys, although for all I know he is a much nicer man in real life and is just hamming it up for the cameras.
So is there any hope? Well, this interesting blog item suggests that things might be brightening up. Why does it matter? It matters, I am afraid, because people these days seldom form their views by reading long books like Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt or Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. For better or worse – and it is usually the worse – we get our opinions, our prejudices and our ideas from watching visual media.
On a qualifying note, I should add that I do not, of course, want television dramas or films to become propoganda for the views that I like, as a reaction to propoganda for views that I detest. Rather, it is just that it would be nice to see entrepreneuriship given a bit of a fairer shake from the luvvies, once in a while.
I can unreservedly plug this film, however, I can also repeat my admiration for this film as well. This old movie, Cash McCall, is worth a look although it might be hard to get hold of easily.
A real piece of Samizdat was the film which came out last year(in America and Canada but not apparently here), called “Thank You For Smoking”.
It really is a superb piece of entertaining intelligence.
There was a good article the other day about the long standing romance between Hollywood and various socialist/progressive/marxist viewpoints. I linked through The Corner, I think.
At any rate, the corresponding negativity towards business and businesspeople is the flip side of that coin, and it’s been that way for a good, long time.
At the dawn of the movie age, of course, socialism was all the rage among the intelligentsia and artistic types, who were thus able to express their disgust with the grubby necessities of commerce, and their idealistic optimism about the coming socialist nirvana, by teaching, writing, and filming stories about the nastiness of capitalists and capitalism.
The much beloved “Mr Smith Goes to Washington”, or the Xmas classic about the heroic George Bailey and his contempt for Mr. Potter, the evil businessman, are just two of many examples.
The recent book, “Red Star Over Hollywood”, documents the many inroads that committed communists and sympathizers made in the movie business, both promoting socialist ideas, and preventing capitalist ones from appearing, whether as active party members or dupes.
The incongruity of these “struggling” artists, making astronomical amounts of money to turn out some of the most cliche’ ridden, schlock filled pieces of cinematic horse hockey ever created, turning around and whining about the evils of capitalism and business is striking, but, of course, as in academia, talent and intelligience is often a secondary consideration after political correctness and faithfulness to the ruling dogma.
Johnathan,
In Hollywood, at least, the production of a movie itself is predatory capitalism at its best.
Financing must be arranged for the whole thing. Hiring of performing talent and technical personnel must be arranged. Actual production must occur on schedule and, hopefully, within budget.
All of that is done – by many people – without the interference – or cooperation, in most instances – of government, except for the rating assigned on the finished product.
The people who manufacture the anti-business movies in Hollywood don’t want the movie-going public to realize all of the above.
I would also recommend “Other People’s Money” with Danny Divito and Gregory Peck. Danny plays Larry the Liquidator who takes over companies that have become vulnerable through bad management. He is obviously the heavy with Gregory Peck as the good guy who owns a small company in New England. The speeches they both make to a stockholder’s meeting on the question of a takeover of the company are wonderfully descriptive of the essence of free market capitalism.
Kinky Boots would be an example of a recent British pro-business film.
I think the problem with business in film is not so much that business is unexciting, but that it’s visually unexciting. Courtroom dramas work because courtrooms are in their nature theatrical places. Boardrooms are lethally dull. Even the board meetings where some people start arguing and getting emotional are dull.
Also, most people will want a good guy to go free and a villian to be locked up. But they aren’t too worried about a good marketing director having a really successful product launch. I mean, he might be a nice guy, and we might be relieved it all went well for him, but it’s a bit underwhelming, no?
And, finally, a lot of people like me sort of, you know, work full time. I get enough of the thrills and spills of capitalism between 9 and 5. Why the hell would I leave the office to watch a film about an office?
I must watch Wall Street again.
I don’t think I’ve seen it since its theatrical release in 1987, when I was myself working in a stock broking company and we hired the cinema for a screening.
I wonder if I’d think the same of it now. I was only 24 then, two years out of university, had just learned to fly, and had only just bought my first BMW motorcycle (I’m on my 3rd now).
J—Police work and fire fighting are mostly dull also in real life. So would a show about life in a hospital be dull, if all the nasty, boring tasks that make up 90% of a doctor’s or nurse’s day were shown in real time.
No, the question isn’t whether or not some activities are exciting or not, but which theatrical cliches and cultural stereotypes are being repeated and reinforced in movie after movie and television show after sitcom after soap opera?
And the answer to that question is, overwhelmingly, that the bad guy is an unfeeling, corrupt businessman, usually with a gun in his desk, and a couple of henchmen in his outer office, who thinks nothing of despoiling whole countries, murdering anyone who stands in the way, cheating and lying about anything and everything, and gleefully plotting the literal destruction of any opposition, not just in an “out-compete” sense, but in a physical, violent sense as well.
Are there people like this in real life? Yes, I suppose there are, certainly in parts of the above description, if not all. But, really, does every movie, from the muppets to Tron to The Fugitive to The Godfather to whatever came out yesterday absolutely HAVE to have this tattered, worn out, pathetically overused cliche as an integral part of its plot line?
The failing here is not just that the political slant is relentlessly leftist and anti-capitalist, but that the “art” allegedly being produced is so numbingly predictable and ludicrisly contrived.
Watch “Meet John Doe” from back in the 1930’s, and tell me that the evil, scheming media mogul bad guy isn’t the crystalization of every leftist fantasy about the latent fascist dictator lurking behind every big cigar and every boardroom door.
But who were the true fascists? Who were the totalitarians? Was there even one true business person among them?
What store did Adolph ever manage? What car company did Stalin build into an industrial giant with competative effort, and not a gun? Did Mussolini ever actually operate the railroad he was so famous for making run on time? How many steel mills did Mao build through creative effort, before he debauched his countrys’ economy with back yard pig iron schemes, famine, and “great leaps forward” that fell right on their collective faces, or maybe the other end.
Let me ask you a simple, easily answered question about this entire matter—if you truly wanted to see the latest example of creative, inventive, ingenious, innovative human activity, where would you go?
A movie theater? An art museum? A medical laboratory? An electronics expo?
Where is the true artistry in our culture? Spiderman 3? Or a cigarette pack sized appliance that can hold your entire music collection?
My complaint isn’t just that movies are slanted left, but that, regardless of slant, they are trite, boring, and lack any semblence of artistic courage or innovation.
They can only remake the same four stories so many times. Eventually, even we “fly-over” country bumpkins can figure out how the story is going to end—if we don’t fall asleep first.
Couple of comments on veryretired’s excellent comment.
The first, almost throwaway one, is this: how many plots would Hollywood have left if it was widely believed that a resonable adult might have a long term, serious, romantic relationship with more than one person at a time, and be capable of in turn dealing rationally with partners who also had multiple attachments?
I’m not offering any opinion or claim on whether that is in fact the case or not, but only suggesting that it would devastate Hollywood movies if it was.
The second comment is that I am getting quite concerned that many of the current generation of police and military have grown up so exposed to Hollywood versions of how police and military act that they are confusing fiction with reality, and (perhaps unconsciously) imitating movie depictions of no-knock raids and torturing suspects in real life.
Not here, they aren’t. We screen for that in our hiring process. People who think that the job is anything like NYPD Blue or CSI have poor odds of being hired, and even worse of staying around if they don’t sort it out quickly.
Frankly, torture is usually a myth spread by people who will believe anything about police. These are frequently people who see a vast communist conspiracy in the volume of speeding tickets they get. In the rare exceptions, the involved officers tend to get stripped and jailed.
As for CSI…I don’t know where to begin.
The closest thing in pop culture to the reality of the job are a few items in Joseph Wambaugh’s writing, and I’m not going to go there tonight.
I don’t know what the military does or doesn’t do. I imagine they’re not talking.
I mentioned this before and I’ll say it again- I think hollywood is to blame for the dumbing down of America. When Americans see educated people, who are usually foreigners, portrayed as crooks, and see them getting beaten and out-smarted by the uneducated but lovable American cop, what message is being conveyed and reinforced all the time? There might be a few pro-enterprise films being made, but the majority will still have the same formula- educated evil-doers cannot conquer Honest home-grown hicks!
After all, if the crooks were portrayed as dumb, and the police as smart, that might seem unfair- with all their equipment, the police might have an unfair advantage if they also had brains!
Hey Bruce, I learned to fly in 83; I was earning next to nothing as a research engineer at Cranfield, but the flying was heavily subsidised, compulsory even.
I had a Kwakker at the time, haven’t had a bike for years but a couple of months since my workmate lent me his Fireblade.
(Yahoo!)
The Aviator§ and another film, Tucker, are movies showing how hard it is for good ideas to get born.
In “Its a Wonderful Life” I see that more of Monopolist/Oligarch vs Libertarian – Bailey was about self-help by privately-arranged, pluralist organisations of consent, not at all Socialist in my view. I am quite sure Potter, the evil capitalist, had the local Government in his pocket. Potter would be winning PFI deals so beloved by Statists and Sociofascists – spending other peoples’ money to keep big business on a leash.
§ blueprints…blueprints
“My complaint isn’t just that movies are slanted left, but that, regardless of slant, they are trite, boring, and lack any semblence of artistic courage or innovation.”
Yes, I sort of agree, but there is only the free market to blame. 99% of people like and want to buy what Hollywood produces. Even if the 1% who want intelligent films could all agree _which_ intelligent film, they still couldn’t afford to have it made.
And while much of Hollywood output is rubbish, much is very good. Mystic River, Lost in Translation, Usual Suspects, The Man who Wasn’t There – all very good high quality movies from Hollywood.
And remember, the Hollywood machine allows people like Lynch to ply their trade without (AFAIK) government subsidy. Of course among people who want ‘intelligent’ films, 50% think Lynch is garbage.
But perhaps the biggest issue is with why Hollywood should portray businessmen as good. I don’t think they should protray their heroes and heroines as moderately ugly, just because that is realistic. I agree that archetypes can be very dull and tiresome, but they can also be very good and effective.
In Pursuit of Happyness was one of the better films of the year (along with The Lives of Others). Eye-rollingly predictably, the left’s criticism of it can be summed up by the headline to one review I saw which read, “In Pursuit of Money”.
I have seen “Cash McCall” and the “Aviator” and I agree that they are both good films and films that are pro free enterprise (such films are indeed very rare from Hollywood).
I have not seen the Will Smith film but I have heard good things about it. I watched a film critic snear at it – and that is normally a good sign.
Film critics are normally leftists (just as television critics and book critics are) even on supposedly conservative stations – as for film critics who appear on broadcasting stations they are even more likely to be leftists.
What is the Marxists say about the “capitalist hegemony” in the “cultural superstructure”?
Still objective truth is just an example of “bourgeois ideology” so the “liberals” can claim anything they like.