ABSTRACT
Protestant cultures have a long legacy of investing business enterprise with moral value. ‘If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.’2 Thus wrote Richard Baxter in 1678; he spoke a language many would understand perfectly in the 1980s. Yet the values of capitalism and the qualities of ‘respect, loyalty and affection’ do not always sit well together, and if the late 1980s has been a period characterized by business and ‘enterprise’ culture, it has also been characterized by a profound sense of moral unease, one which has found no focus or lead from a Left engaged in ‘winning back’ individualism from the Tories. As so often happens, advertising has been the quickest part of our culture to pick up on this moral anxiety and among the images of go-getting yuppiedom, banking ads in which young men in red braces terrorise fuddy-duddies, glamorized cut-throat competition in series like Capital City, we already see ads for the ‘Amicable Man’ who makes time to be nice to the tea lady and plays with his children, and are offered cars for the 1990s which appear to embody spiritual values rather than those of the boardroom. But the great achievement of Hollywood cinema in this period has been to dramatize both business achievement and the social indignation it engenders, within the same moral framework, a single
narrative. The most satisfying (and popular) films are those where success and righteousness dovetail as neatly as in the Home Secretary’s wishful words above.
