Narrative in Wall Street: Money

¶ … Narrative in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Oliver Stone's 2010 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a film that follows the standard Three Act Narrative formula. This paper will show how the film's plot trajectory takes shape according to the plot point structure stipulated by the Three Act Narrative formula. While the film uses several conflicts to propel the storyline, the major conflict of the film that serves as the inciting incident is introduced in Act 1 at 16:00 as main character Jacob "Jake" Moore watches Keller Zabel's stock crash.

This incident causes Jake's mentor Louis Zabel to kill himself in despair. Before throwing himself in front of a subway train, however, Zabel advises Jake to have children and to love them, advice which serves as the film's ultimate message and becomes the ultimate goal for Jake as his character and the storyline progress. Most of the characters are engaged in both an internal and an external struggle.

Louis Zabel is contemplating throwing in the towel and retiring from a business he no longer understands when his very enterprise collapses from underneath him and leaves him with nothing to stand on. He resolves his internal and external struggle through suicide. Louis' death creates an internal struggle in the main character Jake. Jake wants to avenge his mentor's death, resurrect his own career, and patch things up with his fiance Winnie and her father Gordon Gekko.

To do so, he believes he must practice deception: he deceives his new employer Bretton James, who is the man responsible for bringing down Keller Zabel; he deceives Winnie by meeting with her father and hiding the fact from her; he deceives himself by thinking he is wily enough to hold everything together. While he struggles externally to stay afloat in the world of Wall Street, he struggles internally to balance his desire for power and riches with his desire to be decent and honest with Winnie.

There is also the internal and external struggle of Gordon Gekko, who upon his release from prison finds that no one is there to pick him up. He has been forgotten and abandoned by friends and family. He sincerely longs to be reunited with his daughter. However, at the same time he sees that he can manipulate Jake into retrieving his daughter's trust fund and using it to start-up his own business. His internal/external struggle mirrors Jake's.

Gordon's daughter Winnie, on the other hand, struggles internally with her conflicting feelings for her father. At the same time that she wants to hate him for his past actions, she also wants to forgive him. However, she does not want to be betrayed again. Externally she struggles to promote her news website, which will be used later to help bring down Bretton James. A false solution to Jake's problems is introduced 1/4th of the way through the film at the 29:00 to 35:00 when Jake meets Gordon.

Jake sees Gordon as a sort of replacement mentor. He admires Gordon's finesse and hopes that by making a deal with Gordon, he can learn how to avenge Louis and happily reunite Winnie with her father. The consequences of this false solution appear as the main aspect of Act 2. Jake realizes that he has been duped by Gordon, Winnie's trust fund is never transferred to the charity that is supposed to receive it (1:40:00 mark), and Jake's stint with Bretton comes to an early demise.

Winnie breaks up with Jake as a consequence of his having hidden his meetings with Gordon from her. No one is happy, except for, apparently, Gordon and Bretton, both of whom are at large and in charge. Secondary characters do work actively both for and against the protagonist's goal. Gordon, for example, reads Jake like an open book and sees immediately that he can benefit himself by manipulating and riding on Jake's desire to bring down Bretton James.

Winnie exerts an opposite influence by recalling to Jake the necessity of being a good, moral person if he wishes to keep her in his life. Even the baby that Winnie is carrying plays a part in Jake's need: he uses the baby as leverage to win back the money that Gordon has pilfered from him and Winnie. The baby is "time," and "time" is what Gordon really values.

Jake offers Gordon the opportunity to make right with Winnie by donating the $100 million from the trust fund to the charity that Jake and Winnie support. By helping Gordon make right, Jake buys himself an "in" with Winnie, and Gordon is there to insist that the two give their relationship another try. Prior to this happy reunion, however, Jake suffers his lowest moment in the film.

That moment comes as a consequence of the false solution provided at the end of Act 1 and has already been described as the moment at the end of Act 2, approximately 3/4ths of the way through the film, when Jake loses his job with Bretton and his relationship with Winnie fails and Winnie's money is stolen. However, new information is also introduced to Jake at the end of Act 2 that forms the basis for a true resolution: this information is two-fold.

The first part of this information comes from Gordon and concerns Bretton's role in the destruction of Keller Zabel's stock. Jake is able to use this information to write an article for Winnie's website that exposes Bretton James to the public and allows him to be brought to justice. The second part of this information concerns Winnie: she tells Jake that she is pregnant.

The fact that Gordon is going to have a grandchild is important because it serves as a bargaining chip for Jake: he tells Gordon that he can have a part in his grandchild's life if he just returns the money that he stole from Winnie. This good deed on Gordon's part reflects favorably on Jake and helps Winnie forgive both of them for their deceit. The third act does connect insight to success.

Jake learns a lesson in the value of honesty and morality, Gordon learns a lesson in the value of family and life, and.