ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how representations of the self-made man have articulated with different stages of and positions toward capitalist development. It analyzes contemporary, mass-mediated reworkings of the narrative tradition and identifies certain narrative patterns that appealed to movie audiences in the late 1980s. The film celebrates a composite class of industrious producers who share a moral orientation toward work, which in principle is available to all occupations, including speculators such as Gekko. Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich connect Hollywood’s rediscovery of the working-class world as a subject for major films in the 1970s to a crisis of masculinity in the professional middle class. Horatio Alger himself would approve of Tess McGill, the spunky, hardworking, congenitally honest secretary played by Melanie Griffith. Tess shares many qualities with Alger’s boy heroes, such as compliance, obedience, submissiveness to bourgeois norms, and willingness to serve powerful men.
