[clojurestan]

These films are meant to depict a certain type of person, one who is drawn to the appeal of wealth and particularly the excess and display present in certain communities. I can imagine how someone who had this type of predisposition would feel inspired if they were exposed to that lifestyle by one of these movies and develop an aspiration for the specific position where previously it was a more amorphous longing for wealth and privilege.

[psyc]

This is the only comment in the whole thread that comes anywhere near the way I think about this subject. Everyone is presuming that people have their value systems formed by watching movies. I think that's as false as it is dismal. The way we form our value systems is highly complex. We get a lot from parents and real life role models, our own thinking about things, real life events, the systems we're part of, chance circumstances, and much more. A film or book may very well hint at the writers' value systems, but that is not simply transfered to the viewer. The viewer brought their own value system in with them, and at most had it very slightly modified, or more probably enhanced by whatever they identified with in the story, regardless of the presumed moral.