Seth With Money And Business example essay topic

Boiler Room takes place in modern day New York. The main character Seth Davis is running a successful underground casino from his apartment for friends and local students after dropping out of college himself. He is very ambitious and street smart but has a low self-esteem from being belittled by his father his entire life. One night he is visited by an old friend Adam (class clown of the group "big bird mode") who introduces Seth to Greg, a conservative rich stockbroker who intimidates Seth with money and business smarts. As the night goes on over a couple games of poker Gregg identifies Seth's streetwise business skills and recruits him for the hottest new stock broking firm in the city. As Seth begins his new job he is the new kid on the block in the middle of the school year finding his way around.

He is offered instant riches and plenty of face lane pleasure in his first interview (described as a "Hitler youth rally in retrospect") as long as he can keep his head down and work hard, naturally he couldn't refuse the offer of actually being able to prove his father (a local judge) he could be as successful he. To give you an idea of the people he would be working with, Jim Young the motivational interview speaker says a couple interesting statements to set the tone in the first meeting. He states "people that say money cant buy happiness, look at fucking smile on my face", he is greed driven and sucks Seth in without ever really explaining how all of the extra money is made leaving him to find out on his own. As time goes on Seth decides to go through with it and become an understudy of Gregg.

He is not taught all the ropes as the offices main secretary starts moving toward the more heart felt Seth and stops seeing Gregg, this forms a jealous hatred towards Seth from Gregg as his understudy is learning the ropes quick, ahead of the class and forming bonds with the other top sellers quickly. Chris, another head executive on his way to the top is soon teaching Seth, the two notice similarities in heart and spirit and soon Seth is hanging out with the main "crew" of the firm consisting of more money than sense friends with exotic sport cars without any credit to their name. Soon Seth is taking advantage of a cautious buyer Harry who has been married for ten years with two kids, he takes the ropes to him for his fifty thousand dollars in savings piece by piece. The main drive of getting the people over the phone is sell them lies until they buy. All of the lies and knowing something isn't right with being able to bend the laws of wall street, and with morals and curiosity begin to take their toll on Seth's conscious he begins to investigate around the office and starts to realize they are selling fake stock and stock piling the money, when they are caught onto they will relocate across the street under a new name and continue the operation. As Seth begins dating Abby (office secretary) he begins to talk to her about it and she comments that he needs to realize he is not doing the community good and to either deal with that and experience the riches or get out, leaving Seth torn between his morals and riches but most of all his new found respect from his father.

Eventually Seth is competing with Gregg's attitude, earning more and more of the "crews" respect and the jealousy continues to fume as the parties, bar fights, and racing to the top goes on. Eventually the FBI is onto Abby with dirt and collateral to force her to give in to them as much as she tries not to. Seth gets sloppy and desperate bringing his father into a deal after his father knows about the heartless foundation and the phone conversation is recorder by the FBI forcing Seth to keep his father's name clean and bring down Michael Brantley and his "Business". The one thing done before Seth goes out before the bust is he fills Chris in on the bust and get him to sign a trade getting Harry back his money, giving Seth and Chris a piece of mind that at least they did one thing half decent before it was all over.

Over all I can not blame Seth for making the decisions he made and ignoring the things that did not add up. He was caught up in the game of riches along with living with a newfound respect from his father; I feel his fragile self-esteem is more at blame than himself. I think that the main mistake of Seth was exactly what Abby told him, that he needed to decide if he was going to go through with it or not a lot earlier rather than being sketchy the entire duration of the movie. The one decision I would of followed up with that Seth didn't is the thought of the income not being legit to both the law and what I would call common morals.