As I'm reading 'Free Market Revolution', I noticed the mention about businessmen often being portrayed as villains in movies. It really opened my eyes about something that I'd been aware of but didn't pay attention to. Now that I'm looking, it is amazing to see.

I started watching the movie 'Upside Down' (Jim Sturgess, Kirsten Dunst), and in the introduction, the protagonist speaks of a greedy company that takes the oil from their neighborhood "then sells electricity back to us at prices we can't afford". (Which means no one can buy it, so why haven't they lowered the prices if no one is buying?) Then, he describes a massive accident that blows up a huge section of the population. Because apparently, good business means charging what your customers cannot afford, and then blowing them up because you're too incompetent to care about safety. Yeah, that's good business.

I was watching 'G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra' over the weekend, and the villain, a businessman in possession of a deadly weapon, says about his evil plan, "I'm a businessman," as if that explains everything about his motives. At least in his case, using a deadly weapon would certainly invite a lot of potential customers, except for the fact that he'd be a terrorist and they'd just end up 'nationalizing' his company after they arrested/droned/killed him. It was just funny to hear that line, as if a businessman is just evil by default and requires no further motivation to destroy the world...

I was thinking of the Star Wars prequels as another example of the businessman as the villain. Episode I begins with the 'greedy Trade Federation' blockading a planet because of high taxes. So rather than just increasing their prices, they decide to blockade the planet?? How is that good business? How is that even sane? On the other hand, the clever thing about the Prequels, say what you will about them, is that the villainous businessmen are actually just patsies for the real villain--the government--to hide behind. Use corrupt businesses to create a crisis, then present 'more government' as the solution. So at least this is a clever example that may well be overlooked by those who hate the Prequel Trilogy.

The typical businessman in movies seems to fit the Bond villain stereotype...I'm not even going to go there. I think many of the Bond villains were businessmen.

And then you've got the superhero genre. Of course there are heroes who are businessmen, such as Tony Stark/Iron Man and Bruce Wayne/Batman. But in the Iron Man movies, how much actual work did we see Tony Stark as part of his company? I know, it wouldn't have been that entertaining, but...no board meetings, nothing? And Bruce Wayne--well, after he buys control of his company in 'Batman Begins', we see him sleeping at a board meeting in 'The Dark Knight' and pretty much entirely unconcerned with the business at all in 'The Dark Knight Rises'. At least the 80s/90s films had Bruce Wayne actually showing up at work ('Batman Returns' and 'Batman Forever' in particular had scenes of him doing a job).

I don't use these examples to suggest that these movies are 'bad' by definition. But it does make me see that the media perception of businessmen is that they are not particularly useful or productive. This would seem to fly in the face of reality, as after all, businessmen provided the hundreds of millions of dollars that went into making the movie that may or may not even succeed. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. I've tried my hand at writing fiction myself, and I certainly understand it's not easy to do. But it does seem pathetically easy to cast businessmen in a stereotypical light. The difference between that and say a racial stereotype is that nobody seems to notice or care.

Huh. Go figure.