Some of us are old enough to remember Tom Cruise’s first blockbuster movie – Risky Business. It’s a funny, suspenseful, and entertaining story of a naive teenage boy’s rite of passage into adulthood.
One of the memorable life lessons of the movie set in suburban Chicago is delivered by Guido the pimp who puts his arm around Tom Cruise’s neck and offers the timeless advice: “In a sluggish economy, never, ever f&@% with another man’s livelihood.”
(Maybe someone should do that with Lina Kahn!)
The movie has a happy ending.
But now on the 40th anniversary of the movie’s release, the Chicago Tribune couldn’t resist inserting a new more sinister, and woke interpretation of the classic that only a progressive could come conjure up:
“Risky Business,” then and now, is an indictment of privilege, and of somehow keeping the uglier world at bay long enough to buy your way into a kind of imperviousness. Except it’s funny and confident and cool and all of its points about the spoils of capitalism get disguised inside a dream of opulence.
The “spoils of capitalism?” Is that really what this feel-good comedy was about?
