Every dream has its price: Personal failure and the American dream in wall street and the firm

This essay utilizes Wall Street and The Firm to further Fishers (1973) rhetorical work on the American Dream by explicating how the Dream communicates and rationalizes an inegalitarian class system. The rhetoric of these films urges people to accept and valorize working‐class morality, but in concentrating on greed the movies ignore the inegalitarian social structures that make social mobility an impossibility for most Americans. The films communicate an understanding of social order that rationalizes the social limits placed on the working class while simultaneously supporting the myth of abounding success opportunities for all Americans.