Alex Tabarrok explains why capitalists are miscast as villains in Hollywood features:
Hollywood’s anti-capitalism is not accidental. It stems from three sources: the rage of directors and screenwriters against their own capitalist backers, the difficulty of using a visual medium to depict the invisible hand, and an ethical framework which Hollywood shares with most of our culture that regards self-interest as inherently immoral or, at best, amoral.
Artists see capitalists as constraining their vision, rather than making it possible:
Capitalists work hard to produce what consumers want. Artists who work too hard to produce what consumers want are often accused of selling out. Thus even the languages of capitalism and art conflict: a firm that has “sold out” has succeeded, but an artist that has “sold out” has failed.
Painters don’t resent the capitalists who sell them paint, because they don’t need their backing. But filmmakers need capitalists for financial support, and so their resentment toward capitalists is especially strong. University of Illinois law professor and movie analyst Larry Ribstein has written a paper arguing that filmmakers enter “a Faustian deal” in order to produce their art. Filmmakers see themselves as selling a part of their artistic soul to make their movies, and naturally they rage against the devil doing the buying. It doesn’t take a Freud to see that some of this rage comes pouring out on the screen.
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Although Hollywood does sometimes produce leftist films like “Reds,” it has no deep love for socialism (check out the Porsches in the Hollywood Hills). Hollywood’s communist and socialist period was based on the promise that in the socialist paradise artists would be liberated from the yoke of capital and freed to fulfill their visions. Even in Hollywood, however, few people take this promise seriously today.
But Hollywood does share Marx’s concept of alienation, the idea that under capitalism workers are separated from the product of their work and made to feel like cogs in a machine rather than independent creators. The lowly screenwriter is a perfect illustration of what Marx had in mind — a screenwriter can pour heart and soul into a screenplay only to see it rewritten, optioned, revised, reworked, rewritten again and hacked, hacked and hacked by a succession of directors, producers and worst of all studio executives. A screenwriter can have a nominally successful career in Hollywood without ever seeing one of his works brought to the screen. Thus, the antipathy of filmmakers to capitalism is less ideological than it is experiential. Screenwriters and directors find themselves in a daily battle between art and commerce, and they come to see their battle against “the suits” as emblematic of a larger war between creative labor and capital.
The invisible hand is hard to capture on film:
It’s hard to present the profoundly nuanced and intricate latticework of capitalism in two hours, which is one reason why one of the few works to attempt this is the five-season television series “The Wire.” As with so many other movies and television shows, the capitalists are vicious murderers. “The Wire” simply makes the stereotype more realistic by making its entrepreneurs drug dealers. But although it uses character, “The Wire” is ultimately about how character is dominated by larger economic forces: drug dealers come and go, but the drug market is forever. “Capitalism is the ultimate god in The Wire. Capitalism is Zeus,” says David Simon, the show’s creator.
Over its five seasons, “The Wire” shows how money and markets connect and intertwine white and black, rich and poor, criminal and police in a grand web that none of them truly comprehends—a product of human action but not of human design. It’s the invisible hand that’s calling the shots, as Mr. Simon subtly reminds us in the conclusion to the third season, when Detective McNulty wondrously pulls a book from the shelf of murdered drug dealer Stringer Bell, and the camera focuses in on the title: “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith.
Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand, like Mr. Simon’s invocation of Zeus, tells us that to understand the world we need to look beyond the actions of individuals to see the larger forces at work. But Zeus is an arbitrary and capricious god whose lightning bolts fall out of the sky without reason or direction. Smith’s “invisible hand,” however, is that of a kinder god, a god that cares not one whit for individuals but nevertheless guides self-interest toward the social good, progress, and economic growth.
Hollywood wants its heroes to be virtuous, Tabarrok says, but it defines virtue to exclude self-interest:
If virtue means putting others ahead of self, then it’s clear that most people, let alone most capitalists, aren’t very virtuous. As a result, the one Hollywood defense of capitalism that everyone knows is Gordon Gekko’s speech from “Wall Street”: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” But even if Gekko’s defense has an element of truth, it’s uninspiring, which is why Gekko remains the villain of “Wall Street,” and not the hero.
