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At the end of “Wall Street and Vine,” his essay published in 2005 attempting to explain why he feels Hollywood is critical of business, University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein concludes that “the best way to counteract [Hollywood] films’ misleading message about business is to let business speak for itself.” The Acton Institute, a Michigan-based think tank that attempts to enlist the religious community in support of a free market agenda, has done just that in its 2007 documentary The Call of the Entrepreneur.

In this post, I point out some gaps and contradictions in the Acton Institute’s documentary and also show how Prof. Ribstein’s equally warm embrace of free market principles leads him to a dubious hypothesis about the motivations of the creators of films. Thus, this post will be a critique of two defenders of the free market faith.

The Call of the Entrepreneur is a documentary that blends profiles of three entrepreneurs with pontification by a variety of faith-based free market advocates, including Acton Institute president Rev. Robert Sirico, George Gilder, and Michael Novak. The three entrepreneurs are Brad Morgan, a Michigan dairy farmer who has built a business on high-quality compost; Frank Hanna III CEO of Hanna Capital, a privately-held financial services firm; and Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong-based clothing and media mogul. All three, as far as I can tell from the movie as well as from online searches, have built companies that have prospered. But there are aspects of Hanna’s and Lai’s stories that set off alarms.

Frank Hanna described the essence of his entrepreneurship as the use of financial engineering to pool, minimize, and transfer risk. Even though he didn’t use the term, it is clear from the description that his firm was creating collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) such as mortgage-backed securities (MBS’s). Of course, it was these instruments that blew up during the financial crisis of 2008, when it turned out that the bursting of the housing bubble meant that virtually all the mortgages in a typical MBS tanked at the same time. The film was made in 2007, before the financial crisis. The Hanna Capital website even today tells us only that the value of its portfolio at the end of 2007 exceeded $ 4 billion. The unanswered question is what happened since then. Quite likely $4 billion was Hanna Capital’s high-water mark.

In The Call of the Entrepreneur, Hanna triumphantly proclaims, “but for financial engineering the US would not be what it is today.” Post-financial crisis, we can say exactly the same words but, ironically, with an entirely different meaning.

Jimmy Lai tells us about how he escaped from Guangdong Province in Communist China in 1960 to make his fortune in Hong Kong. At the age of 12, he immediately went to work in a factory from 7 am to 10 pm. The obvious question is whether Hong Kong had any child labor laws at the time. Either it had no such laws or it did and Lai’s employer was violating them. Rev. Sirico interprets Lai’s story with the comment that the wealthiest places on earth have the least regulation and the least taxation. Does the absence of regulation include either openly permitting or failing to detect and prosecute child labor?

Lai moved from clothing to the media out of anger at the brutal Chinese suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1999. While that is an entirely appropriate reaction, and while I admire the determination and imagination that characterize Lai’s story, I would feel a bit more comfortable with his role as press baron if he had some formal education.

The talking heads in the movie go far beyond the three entrepreneurial stories to proselytize for the minimalist state advocated by von Hayek. While city-states with minimalist government have grown rapidly, there have been more than a few economic success stories of nations with more interventionist government (the four Nordic countries, Australia, Canada, and Germany, for example).

Perhaps the most amusing bit of commentary was by Rev. Sirico arguing, with an orchestra playing the Jupiter movement of Holst’s The Planets, that entrepreneurs, like impresarios [sic], coordinate the creativity of others so that they produce pleasing melody rather than cacophony. While the linguistic roots of the term (“carry between”) are consistent with that idea, the true creator in Rev. Sirico’s example is the composer. This leads to the much more complicated issue of the encouragement and protection of intellectual property, something that requires a state that is more than minimalist. Indeed, the minimalist states that Rev. Sirico praises have often permitted the piracy of intellectual property.

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Prof. Ribstein made the unusual argument that Hollywood’s creative class is anti-capitalist because of intrinsic nature of the film enterprise. Film production requires large pools of capital and films are made with an intention of earning a return on that capital. This means catering to audience tastes. Thus constraints are placed on the creatives (screenwriters, producers, directors) and it is these constraints that they face in their working life that have made them resentful of capitalists and capitalism.

An alternative explanation might of course be that capitalism is a flawed economic system and that at least some films give voice to a critique of capitalism. Another alternative explanation is that narrative requires conflict and that one of the dominant fables of conflict in social realism is between heroic individuals and large institutions. In this fable the large institutions could be located in either the public or private sectors.

On reading Ribstein it becomes clear that he idealizes capitalism. Thus he writes “Firms have powerful incentives to build reputations as good corporate citizens in order to encourage people to buy their products” (p. 64, online version), “real firms will not invite, and in fact try to prevent, the unethical or irresponsible corporate behavior films portray,” (p. 65), “the capital markets thrive on truth, and would have no interest in cover-ups,” (p. 66), “Markets penalize the antisocial and the bigoted,” (p. 66), “competitive firms are great social levelers that bypass entrenched classes, castes, and ranks,” (p. 66), “firms create wealth in the long run by inventing and selling better products rather than by chance,” (p. 68), and “the stock markets, far from the perverse gods of film fiction, fairly accurate reflect firms’ value,” (p. 68). In short, if capitalism is the best of all possible economic systems, then the film-makers’ criticism must be a result of their perverse experience with that system, rather than its failings.

Ribstein never seems to imagine a counter-narrative in which people who have done very well in the capitalist system could nonetheless be critical of its failings. The most prominent examples that come to mind are George Soros, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates (the latter in the sense of using his wealth through his foundation to solve social problems the free market has ignored).

The most recent example of Ribstein’s thinking about the capitalist system is a 2009 paper, “How Movies Created the Financial Crisis,” published in the Michigan State Law Review. Ribstein argues that there are a variety of narratives explaining – that is, finding fault for – the financial crisis. These include no one’s fault, government’s fault, speculators’ fault, the banks’ fault, capitalists’ fault, and the fault of financiers who created CDOs and CDSs.

Ribstein speculates about which of these narratives will ultimately be incorporated into films about the financial crisis. Ribstein prefers a film with a heroic narrative about the contrarian investors who had the foresight to anticipate the crisis and made large and winning bets by shorting CDOs and buying CDSs. This would demonstrate that “competitive markets ultimately reward anybody with a good idea, industry incumbents often attempt to ally with government to squelch the innovator, free markets triumph in the end against all odds, and this outcome helps everybody.” However, because “films are less about the actual evils of capitalism than about filmmakers’ resentment of capitalists,” he predicts we are not likely to get such a film.

Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short told the story Ribstein wanted to see in the cinema, but without the free market triumphalism he was hoping for. Ribstein quotes one of the shorts, James Chanos, who urged Oliver Stone in making Wall Street 2 not to focus on the hedge fund managers – advice Stone rejected – and instead focus on the banking system. Chanos had it right, however.

In his documentary Inside Job, producer-director-writer-interviewer Charles Ferguson (whose IT-based fortune enabled him to escape budget constraints on realizing his vision), told a much more complicated and nuanced story about the financial crisis, apportioning blame broadly across the financial sector, its academic apologists, and its public sector regulators. I found Ferguson’s story, while difficult to summarize in a sound-bite or a tweet, much more compelling than Ribstein’s free market fundamentalism.

When the true believers in the idealized free market – Ribstein as critic of Hollywood’s supposed bias and the Acton Institute using the stories of three entrepreneurs as the point of departure for proselytizing – do have their say, I find much to challenge in the stories they tell.

As I work on Enterprising Fables I will be writing posts about the texts I’m watching or reading. My approach is to write about a group of texts in a particular subgenre, and the first subgenre is entrepreneurship. While I posted about The Social Network after it came out (see my posts of Oct. 26, 2010 and March 1, 2011), I’ll now be going back historically, and my first stop is the 2006 movie starring Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness.

Truth be told, I completely missed this movie when it was released. What attracted me was a reference in law professor Larry Ribstein’s article Wall Street and Vine: Holllywood’s View of Business. Ribstein’s main thesis, which I’ll explore in a future post, is that Hollywood has long presented a negative view of business. Ribstein pointed out The Pursuit of Happyness as the exception to his rule, calling it “one of the most pro-business films of modern times,” and an artistic and financial success, and wondering why there are not more films like it.

The Pursuit of Happyness was inspired by the rags-to-riches story of Chris Gardner, an African-American who started life in a broken family, encountered business failures that left him homeless for a year, but ultimately succeeded as a stockbroker, establishing his own brokerage firm. I will focus on the movie’s plot, as opposed to the version presented in Gardener’s 2006 autobiography.

The movie begins in 1981 following Gardner in a downward spiral. Building on a background in medical technology, he has invested all his savings in selling portable bone density scanners, a device that improved slightly on x-ray technology, but at a considerably higher price. His failure in this venture leads his wife to leave him, and he takes custody of their young son. Gardner is evicted from his apartment and he and his son are reduced to homelessness.

In the midst of the downward spiral Gardner has an epiphany. He sees a businessman getting out of a fancy sports car, telling him that he is a stockbroker, which is a good job for someone who is “good with numbers and good with people.” On the spot, Gardner resolves to become a stockbroker. Gardner lurks outside the San Francisco offices of Dean Witter to accost senior executives, and ultimately shares a taxi ride with one, impressing him with his ability to solve Rubik’s cube. Gardner is accepted into Dean Witter’s internship program, aces the securities exam, and becomes the one intern of twenty in the program who is hired full time. He does all this while he and his son are homeless, spending most nights in the shelter of San Francisco’s renowned Glide Memorial Church. The movie ends with the real Chris Gardner having a cameo, and onscreen text informing us of Gardner’s subsequent business success.

Gardner, as portrayed in the movie, is a hero with many virtues. He is innately good with numbers – demonstrated by his facility with Rubik’s cube – and good with people – demonstrated by his ability to impress his colleagues and win clients. More than that, he has tremendous persistence and determination. Even beyond that, he displays almost superhuman unflappability and self-control that enables him to survive in the radically different worlds of a stock brokerage and a homeless shelter.

Ribstein is correct in that the movie depicts business in an extraordinarily positive light. Everyone Gardner encounters at Dean Witter is eager to help him. When he turns up uninvited at the mansion of a wealthy potential client whom he has not met before, the man invites him and his son to share their corporate box at a Forty-Niners game. While the movie is set in liberal San Francisco and almost everyone at Dean Witter is a middle-aged white male, there is no trace of racism or elitism. Even if twenty interns are vying for one full-time position, the competition is clean and without animosity. This depiction of a stockbrokerage – so different from, for example, the brokerage where Bud Fox gets his start in Wall Street – strikes me as much too supportive and cooperative to begin to approach the truth. As the title of this post indicates, ultimately this is one more in a long line of films intended to make whites feel good about their relationship with blacks.

For Gardner to have bounced back from such adversity requires not just his smarts and determination, but a social safety net that provided a meal, a place to sleep, and a place to shower so that he could maintain the workaday charade of stability in his personal life. Glide Memorial Church is one of the most prominent liberal churches in the US, renowned for its numerous social service programs. So while Ribstein sees The Pursuit of Happyness as a narrative glorifying free enterprise, it can also be read as glorifying the voluntary sector. And, my guess is that the depiction of the generosity of strangers at Glide Memorial is more accurate than the depiction of the generosity of colleagues at Dean Witter.

To conclude, I interpret The Pursuit of Happyness as something other than the powerful paean to the glories of capitalism that Professor Ribstein sees in it. Manolha Dargis in her review in the New York Times (Dec. 15, 2006) called it “a fairy tale in realist drag,” and, for the reasons I’ve discussed, I think she had it exactly right.

In writing the literature review for Enterprising Fables, one name that demands serious attention is Stephen Denning, who has written several practitioner-oriented books about how managers can enhance their persuasiveness through the strategic use of simple stories.

Denning’s own story is a compelling one. Initial success as a lawyer – winning a case for an undeserving client – as well as the tragic death of his older brother in a traffic accident led him to reexamine his goals in life. He left his native Australia to make a difference by working in third world development at the World Bank.

After twenty-five years and advancing to senior management, an internal power struggle led to his being sidelined – given the apparently meaningless assignment of “looking into information.” This diversion came in 1996, a propitious time because of the growth of the Internet. Denning redefined himself as the Bank’s knowledge management champion, and his cause quickly was embraced by President (and fellow Aussie) James Wolfensohn.

Denning found that the most effective element of his pitch for KM was an anecdote about a World Bank consultant in remote Zambia accessing the Center for Disease Control’s website to provide his clients with immediate and valuable information about malaria. Denning then played a key role leading a successful (and well-regarded) KM initiative in the World Bank. His use of the Zambia story led him to take the narrative turn, leaving the World Bank in 2001 to become a speaker, writer, and consultant about management narrative.

Since then he has written several books, including The Springboard (2000), an account of his experiences in the World Bank, and two how-to books, The Leader’s Guide to Story-Telling (2005) and The Secret Language of Leadership (2007). I will focus on the latter two, as they were written to stake out his ground as the guru of management narrative.

The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling is organized around eight specific uses of narrative: to ignite action and implement change (what he did at the World Bank), to tell your (personal) story, to build your company’s brand by telling its story, to instill an organization’s values to its employees, to encourage employees to work together as teams, to share knowledge, to respond to gossip and rumors, and to create a shared vision.

The Secret Language of Leadership is somewhat broader in its focus, situating the use of narrative within management communications. It focuses on the use of narrative in driving change (the first of the eight uses of narrative discussed in Leader’s Guide), in particular by showing how stories can be used to getting colleagues’ attention, stimulate their desire for change, and show them the benefits of change.

Denning’s definition of narrative is very loose. He uses narrative and story as synonyms and defines both as “an account of a set of events that are causally related.” So, for him, any time a manager is referring to events, whether personal or organizational, s(he) is storytelling. Denning is more specific about context, envisioning that managers will almost always be telling their stories orally at meetings or in speeches. The most literary form of narrative he imagines is Powerpoint slides. For Denning storytelling is a “performance art.”

The type of story that Denning generally prefers is what he calls minimalist, an unembellished set of events, with one protagonist at most, and a simple plot, usually one that ends with success. Denning isn’t particularly interested in managers developing or using more complicated narratives that would be realized in formats such as film, novels, or traditional oral story-telling. This preference is functional rather than aesthetic, in that Denning believes that minimalist stories enable the managerial storyteller’s target audience to “write” themselves into the story by imagining themselves as the protagonist.

Reading quickly through the text and footnotes of both of Denning’s books, there were several things I liked and things I didn’t. I thought Denning was most authentic when he talked about his lived experience, particularly at the World Bank, and what he learned from his use of narrative as well as from his observations of corporate politics as played there. His recommendations for the use of narrative were based on his own experience and, it would appear, the experience of managers for whom he consulted. He developed comprehensive how-to lists in both books, and the components of the lists seemed plausible. Furthermore, he was humble enough to say that these lists are based on his judgment and are not confirmed by quantitative research.

Denning, like many management gurus, uses the secondary literature – quoting other guurs – rather than undertaking his own original research (which is understandable for someone working on his own and without the benefit of the research grants that support professors). When his case studies are detailed and comprehensive, for example his analysis of ten communication mistakes Al Gore made in the 2000 election campaign (Secret Language of Leadership, pp. 3-20), they were very persuasive.

On more than a few occasions, however, Denning seemed to be taking the business literature and putting little more than a narrative gloss on it. Thus his discussion of storytelling to establish a company’s brand (The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, pp. 102-120) came straight from the marketing literature. That book concludes with an extended contrast (pp. 280-304) between what he calls Napoleonic command-and-control oriented managers and Tolstoyan interactive leaders than sounds to me like the Theory X/Theory Y and manager/leader dichotomies dressed up in new language.

Another example of superficial secondary analysis is his discussion of Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” speech (Leader’s Guide, pp. 231-232), which makes the point – intended to support his notion of minimalist narrative – that, while Churchill used magnificent rhetoric, he was deliberately imprecise about the British government’s strategy for pursuing the Second World War. A deeper investigation of that speech would have told a much more interesting story, focusing attention on both the lengthy recounting of the British Army’s failure in Europe and evacuation from Dunkirk that proceeded the peroration, and the political context, in which a powerful faction in the National Unity Government still embraced the notion of a negotiated settlement with the Nazis. (See chapter 4 of Governing Fables for that story, and several others, all around the theme of appeasement.)

Most recently, Denning has taken a turn away from narrative. His latest book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, advises on how managers can create “people-centred organizations” that “routinely delight and enchant their customers” and “automatically draw on the full talents and creativity” of the people doing the work (quotes from his website stevedenning.com).

In the blog on his website, he traces three stages in leadership storytelling: 1.0 is the simple telling and retelling of stories and 2.0 is the use of storytelling as a management technique, as discussed in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling and The Secret Language of Leadership. Denning feels that as a result of stage 2.0, the use of narrative has become firmly established within the broader field of management communication. In his stage 3.0 storytelling becomes a means to an end, namely an indicator of whether organizations are delighting their customers or drawing on the full talents and creativity of their workers.

I should say that I have not yet read The Leader’s Guide to Radical management, but it seems suspiciously similar to the panaceas that many other business gurus peddle. While the gathering of stories is undoubtedly one way of assessing how well an organization is performing, it is not the only way, and can very easily fall prey to sampling error, in that the stories gathered are not representative of the organization’s overall performance. (As an example of this, I wrote about how in the October 2011 Ontario election, the incumbent Liberal Party argued that they had improved the health system by presenting statistics showing decreased waiting times, while the Opposition New Democrats used horror stories about emergency wards to argue that the health system was declining. Which of the conflicting stories – and storytelling methodologies – do you believe?)

To conclude, I think that Denning has done important work hypothesizing and demonstrating how narrative can effectively be used by managers. He could have carried the work on to do more to demonstrate, and perhaps even begin to test his hypotheses. But a guru has to do what a guru has to do and go to where the market seems to be going, and so Denning is off to promote radical management. Whether he is telling a new story remains to be seen.

I’m now starting to work on a sequel to Governing Fables that will deal with narratives about management in a private sector context. To emphasize its symmetry with Governing Fables, I’m planning to title it Enterprising Fables: Learning from Private Sector Narratives. I will be writing chapters that discuss private sector management in a number of contexts. Three I know will be entrepreneurship, in particular in information technology; the automobile industry; and the financial services sector. I know there is no shortage of stories about each of them.

Before writing these thematic chapters, I need an introductory chapter, and an essential part of the introductory chapter is the review of the literature. I did a preliminary review as part of my successful application to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to fund the project, but now I am returning to the review with a field of focus that is both wider and deeper. When doing the initial review I characterized the scholarly literature on management narrative as consisting of unconnected strands. While it isn’t possible to read everything that might be relevant, I want to read enough that I have a good idea of what is in each of the strands.

One strand that I was vaguely aware of but have learned much more about in the last few days is the literature on the use of film to teach management. In Governing Fables I labeled this “clips for profs,” the apparently widespread practice of taking excerpts from movies and using them to illustrate management principles or ideas. I wrote that this approach “locat[es] highly effective supplementary or illustrative material to be linked to teaching points” but that “the relation of the extracted part to the narrative whole is of no interest here, nor are formal ambiguities, thematic tensions, or alternative readings” (p. 12). The scholar who best illustrates this approach is Joseph Champoux, who has published a number of textbooks that locate excerpts from films (down to the scene, minute, and second) and link them to specific management principles or concepts. But Champoux is not alone. Over the last twenty years the Journal of Management Education has published numerous accounts of other faculty members describing how they use film in teaching. Some just clip, but others take a more holistic and sophisticated narratological approach.

Let me start with the clearest statement of the philosophy of clipping. Jim McCambridge in “Twelve Angry Men: A Study in Dialogue,” (JME 2003, 384-401) uses 12 Angry Men to illustrate the principles of dialogue, which he defines as “a discipline of collective thinking and inquiry.” Much of the article outlines the principles, specifies the clips, and in its appendix outlines how each clip should be linked to the principles. McCambridge is explicit that “rather than using the movie in its entirety, four clips from the movie are used to effectively explicate the principles of dialogue.” (p. 396). He even writes, “Undergraduates consistently become engrossed in the video clips and frequently express the desire to see the entire film. The instructor has an important responsibility to guard the integrity of the theoretical concept by continually linking what is happening in the clips to dialogue.” (p. 392). One could not imagine a clearer statement of the primacy clippers accord concept over narrative. Pesky undergraduates have the audacity to be fascinated by a classic, so the instructor must yank them back before they become engrossed in it.

Here are some other examples of traditional clipping:

• Champoux presenting management lessons from several animated films, including The Lion King (JME Feb. 2001)

• Comer using The Lion King to teach leadership (JME Aug. 2001)

• Serey on life and management lessons from Dead Poet’s Society (JME Aug. 1992)

• Graham, Pena, and Kocher on using Other People’s Money to teach corporate restructuring (JME Feb. 1999)

• Comer and Cooper on using Michael Crichton’s Disclosure (both novel and movie) to discuss gender relations and sexual harassment (JME April 1998)

• Mallinger and Rossy on using Gung Ho to teach about cultural differences (JME Oct. 2003)

• Roth on using Gung Ho, Other People’s Money, and The Efficiency Expert in an introductory management course (JME Feb. 2001)

• Bumpus on using films with actors of color in leading roles to teach concepts other than diversity (JME Dec. 2005)

• Huczynski and Buchanan presenting what they claim is the “deep structure” or dominant thesis of each of a number of films dealing with management (Twelve Angry Men, Dead Poets’ Society, Elizabeth, Thirteen Days among others) but which I take to be only their interpretations (JME Dec. 2004 and Journal of Management Inquiry 2004). I find the second article particularly problematic because the authors accept without question Thirteen Days’ misleading elevation of presidential aide Kenneth O’Donnell to a key role in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• Hunt on organizational behavior lessons from two then-popular television series, Seinfeld and X-files (JME Dec. 2001) and finally,

• Tyler, Anderson, and Tyler who assigned students the task of doing their own clipping from contemporary films or television (JME August 2009).

That said, I did find a number of papers that struck me as going beyond mere clipping to a more holistic and multi-sided approach.

Smith (JME August 2009) described an organizational behavior class that used films as its primary teaching material, had students view one film each week in its entirety, and attributed a variety of concepts to each film discussed.

Van Es (Journal of Business Ethics 2003) applying a variety of ethical models to The Insider, recognizes the polyphonic nature of the narrative (in terms of the often-conflicting perspectives of Jeffrey Wigand, Lowell Bergman, and Mike Wallace) and uses the film to launch a discussion of the ethical dilemmas it raises, rather than to illustrate predetermined concepts.

Taylor and Provitera (JME 2011) reported on using Norma Rae in a labor relations course in an MBA program. They had students watch the film in its entirety to show how and why unions organize and firms resist unionization. They were also clear about the conflict between Director Norman Ritt’s pro-labor perspective and the anti-union views of many MBA students.

Rappaport and Cawelti (JME Feb. 1998) made the overlooked point that feature films dealing with management are much more compelling than case videos produced by business schools because the former employ more resources, far better writers, and much more sophisticated visual production techniques.

Finally, in one of the earliest articles in this genre, Shaw and Locke (JME August 1993) argued that instructors should not be reducing novels or movies to “formulaic expressions of managerial lessons or rules” and that “the experience of literary works in the classroom is meant to be more than an entertaining means of getting at the same chestnuts of organizational behavior” (pp. 356, 354). They advocate reading or viewing the texts in their entirety and encouraging students to relate the texts to their own experience, which will produce a diversity of reactions and interpretations. Discussion in class would then focus on the managerial implications of these diverse reactions. Perhaps because Shaw and Locke wrote their article as a manifesto, with occasional short illustrations and literary references, rather than as a thorough exposition of their method in studying a particular text, the clippers seem to have ignored them.

The approach I will be using in Enterprising Fables, like that of Governing Fables, will be much closer to that of Shaw and Locke than to the clippers, entailing comprehensive, polyphonic, and intertextual readings of a sample of the most thought-provoking management narratives.

In Governing Fables, I outlined three American political fables: the cynical (Primary Colors), the pragmatic (The Candidate, City Hall), and the idealistic (Seven Days in May, The West Wing). The cynical fable – and I take the liberty to quote myself – includes candidates and their handlers who are “cynical power seekers, loyal to no ideology larger than self-interest.” In addition, “marital unfaithfulness/sexual license is a marker of moral failure.” Finally “the political system is a familiar witches brew of influence peddling, hypocrisy, special interest lobbying, self-seeking, and personal betrayal.” (all on page 135).

Through and through, The Ides of March expresses this view of politics. The two main characters, Ohio governor and Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris (George Clooney) and his junior and eventual chief campaign manager Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), epitomize this fable.

Morris is a left-liberal Democrat who spouts the appropriate ideology (for example, with an energy independence speech taken almost verbatim from Tom Friedman’s New York Times columns). But he violates what the movie refers to as the cardinal rule of politics – “don’t fuck an intern” – and then engages in a coverup of the biological consequences. In pursuit of the presidential nomination, he submits to blackmail by reversing himself to agree to a mediocre senator’s demand to be Secretary of State as the price of supporting his candidacy.

Meyers is no better. While working for Morris, whom he describes as “the real deal”, he nonetheless agrees to a meeting with the campaign manager of the other Democratic presidential candidate, in effect opening the door to a bigger, better deal. When fired for his disloyalty, Meyers immediately crosses the street and offers himself to the other candidate. When he’s not accepted, he contacts Morris, using his possession of evidence regarding Morris’s dalliance to blackmail Morris into appointing him as campaign manager.

For both Morris and Meyers idealism or political ideology are nothing more than a patina. Politics is ultimately about personal ambition. Meyers, in particular, sheds his professed idealism so quickly that I see it as only a cover masking ambition, and his essential character as opportunistic.  The Ides of March presents the loss of political innocence much less believably than The Candidate. In the latter,  candidate Jim McKay’s (Robert Redford) loss of innocence is gradual and grudging, the subject of continual struggle between him and his campaign staff.

The dalliance-with-intern lacks plausibility because it results in her pregnancy. Though Morris is a lapsed Catholic and the intern a practicing Catholic, either one of them would have heard of party hats or the morning-after pill. The intern gets an abortion and, then, fearing exposure, commits suicide. This sounds like something out of the Fifties. In addition, it portrays on the intern’s part a mental instability entirely at odds with her behavior to that point. While the cynical fable of American politics is a well-known and legitimate one, I would rather have seen a plot built on more plausible premises.

I’m not happy to see the return of the cynical fable, particularly to narratives about Democrats. The West Wing presented a much more idealistic fable that, at least for a time, was culturally influential. While the Obama Administration’s story to this point has been ambiguous, in particular because of Obama’s difficulties in moving forward an ambitious agenda in the face of determined ideological opposition, it has not been marked by the same sort of lapses of personal morality as the Clinton Administration. So, even if The Ides of March were intended as commentary on the Obama Administration, it misses the mark.

The Ides of March is an adaptation of the 2008 play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, who wrote it after a backroom career in the office of Senator Charles Schumer and the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean. It’s unfortunate that the play was another retelling of an archetypal fable, rather than a reflection of what he observed.