Lies, Damned Lies, and Hollywood

Hollywood, to state the matter nicely, fabricates. Ask a Martian who knows about college fraternities only what she knows from mass-market films, and she will reply that they regularly hold destructive, lubricious parties, and that most fraternity brothers would happily have served in the Hitler Youth had they been born several decades earlier. I attended college; not so. Fraternities were not to my taste--they don't much appeal to literature students--but they weren't much like those in the movies, either.

So, too, with Wall Street. I can't speak to whether Hollywood overstates the excess of Wall Street's parties (probably, but regretfully I cannot speak from experience), but I can address the portrayals of its venality, even criminality. They are overstated, sometimes greatly. Villainizing Wall and victimizing Main make for fine cinema, but as history goes, it lacks.