ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century, the sense of social parallelism, of a population moving together in homogeneous time, metamorphosed into another kind of community of feeling. Wall Street reorients the chronotope of emergence to a specific period sense of history, registering the social style of a mid-1980s subculture- the gestures, costumes, language, speed, and exuberance that dominates the film. This chapter describes the formal logic of the Wall Street chronotope, the particular diurnal and nocturnal patterns of the subgenre as well as the distinctive spatial logic of spectacle and concealment that governs the form. The concentrated spatial and temporal patterns of the Wall Street film lend themselves to chronotopic analysis in a way that few other film genres do, and perhaps a more comprehensive description may follow from this initial attempt. The Wall Street film offers an exemplary case study in the way the image of global finance is articulated in contemporary cultural life.
