Boiler Room Boilerplate

Reason, May, 2000 by Nick Gillespie

Does it matter that Hollywood always vilifies businessmen?

Boiler Room, the recent and highly entertaining film about rogue stockbrokers who foist junk investments on unwitting and malleable investors, strives mightily to be more than a mere diversion. It aspires to social commentary, to make us face uncomfortable truths about our oh-so-depraved world. "I wanted this movie to be an expose," the film's 27-year-old writer-director Ben Younger told the Chicago Tribune. "Here's what's going on, people, wake up!" The movie's protagonist, a novice seduced by the affluence and power that accrues to his successful colleagues, calls selling stocks "the white-boy way of slinging crack rock." Another character, a brokerage-house recruiter played by Ben Affleck, smugly proclaims, "Anyone who tells you that money is the root of evil doesn't fucking have any."

Much of the press surrounding Boiler Room stresses the film's verisimilitude, its willingness to represent the sleazy details of, as a New York Times critic put it, "the hard-sell ethos of buying and selling, lying and cheating." Many of the movie's reviews note that Younger himself was once recruited by a "boiler room" stock-selling operation and that he spent a long time interviewing brokers at those disreputable firms that hawk shares in unlisted or phony companies (such outfits are estimated to make up about 1 percent of all brokerage firms).

Commenting on the feedback he's gotten since the movie's release, Younger told The New York Post, "I thought I was just depicting [shady brokerage houses], not all of Wall Street. But now I know that there's 50,000 people out there who think this movie is all about them, and the reason is all these firms are completely the same. The March issue of Details, the trendy men's magazine, features an article titled "Inside the Boiler Room" that asks the question, "Is Hollywood's shocking new Wall Street expose on the mark?" The answer: "We got some inside information that says, 'Be afraid.'"

But Boiler Room raises other questions, as well, ones that are more difficult to answer in any sort of pat or moralistic way Does it matter that most depictions of capitalism and business in popular culture are relentlessly negative? Should we be concerned that, as the Times review quoted above suggests, "buying and selling" and "lying and cheating" are often seen as kissing cousins, if not actually married?

Ironically, the pretext for such a discussion is the enormous wealth thrown off by capitalism; movies such as Boiler Room are, after all, essentially luxury items. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter noted more than 50 years ago, capitalism--defined by him simply as a system in which people are relatively free to own and trade property--results in a generally wide distribution of more and cheaper goods throughout society. "Queen Elizabeth [I] owned silk stockings," he wrote in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). "The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."

In contemporary America, Schumpeter's insight is verified by any number of contemporary indicators: home, car, and stock ownership rates, income mobility, the percentage of high school students who go on to college, the number of household appliances, and retirement incomes. All of these had been increasing steadily before Schumpeter wrote Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and all have continued to grow since.

To the list of indicators we might add products such as Boiler Room. It's worth underscoring that the movie breaks no ground in fingering capitalism as both corrupt and corrupting. It's simply the latest example of what might be called the "salesman as scumbag" genre. The movie openly references two relatively recent, highly acclaimed works that trod similar ground in similarly heavy boots: David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (which won a Pulitzer Prize for drama during the greed-is-good '80s and was made into a movie in 1992) and Oliver Stone's film Wall Street (1987). Mamet and Stone themselves drew on a tradition perhaps best represented in the post-war era by Arthur Miller's heavy-handed and dramatically incoherent Death of a Salesman (1949), which unmasks its title character as a "phony little fake" even as it seeks to elevate him to tragic stature.

In Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture (1994), Robert S. Lichter, Linda Lichter, and Stanley Rothman comprehensively surveyed TV shows from the '50s through the early '90s and document what anyone who has ever sat through Act V of a Quinn-Martin production already knows: "Business characters were twice as likely to be bad guys and three times as likely to commit crimes as were characters in other occupations.[ldots][They] were also at their worst when they were shown actually engaging in business, rather than purely personal pursuits.[ldots]Most of their criminal conduct was directly related to their business activities." (That showbiz--an industry hardly renowned for its humane treatment of people--sees fit to time and again castigate the business world for callous heartlessness is itself an irony worth savoring.)