The new film The Social Network has earned all manner of praise for its depiction of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg as a socially disengaged, comeuppance-minded savant. While maybe the valences to contemporary culture that we’d been promised aren’t there or are too heavy-handed for comprehensibility, everyone likes it! The film’s Zuckerberg isn’t hero or villain – he’s as much a cipher as the real Facebook creator, whose image we’ve lived with since the site reached saturation point.

Zuckerberg, though, isn’t the point, really. The release, a week before The Social Network, of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps, indicates the rise of a new sort of cinematic – if not hero, or even protagonist, then central point around which a maelstrom of power, influence, and narrative swirls.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

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Let’s begin with the wholly fictional character, on whom far less intellectual energy has been expended. Shia LaBeouf plays Jake Moore, an Wall Street wheeler-dealer-whatever-name-these-people-have (not consultant, right?) we know to be incredibly promising because he looks 17 (LaBeouf is 24, but not, evidently, a hard 24) but is the most vocal participant at a boardroom meeting where vast sums of money are being discussed. Before that, even, we see Jake on a motorcycle, discussing via earpiece vast infusions of money to be pumped into an energy concern whose turbines are shown in split-screen. Got it, Stone – Moore is young! And has power not perhaps equivalent to his youth! And he’s nicely amoral, a product of his times; he tells his sweetly naggy “liberal blogger” fiancée, regarding his investments in green energy, “the only green is money, honey.”

Moore, like the unformed and undeniably lucky Zuckerberg in a situation beyond his pay grade, is vulnerable to the influence of a guru – and here is the point at which Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and The Social Network grow intriguingly congruent. In Stone’s film, that guru is Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, a character who in the years since Wall Street’s 1987 release has grown into legend, a human Darth Vader whose Death Star is the stock market. The Social Network’s character along these lines is Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker, who has no similar cinematic baggage but is introduced with a heavy load of exposition indicating that he’s a brilliant, amoral computer pioneer (he’s told as much, in flattering tones, by a Stanford girl he’s just bedded).

The Social Network

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Both Gekko and Parker come into contact with their targets after initial exposition has been disposed of – Moore’s firm, and mentor, have vanished into the ether; Zuckerberg’s site has exploded but he doesn’t know how to maintain it. And they both deliver lengthy diatribes that cut to the respective hearts of Oliver Stone and Aaron Sorkin’s (The Social Network was directed by David Fincher, but for better or worse, it’s Sorkin’s movie) visions of America. Douglas, in an interminable talk designed in the narrative to sell his book and in the film’s structure to sell Jake an ideology, declares, “You’re all pretty much fucked.” It seems that it is up to Jake – soon, with Gordon’s help – to build a new economic order, one where an exceptional youth can rise to the top despite the missteps of Gekko’s generation.

This is Gordon Gekko, though, and Stone is high on the fumes of his character’s notoriety, so of course a betrayal is in the offing – Gekko uses Jake’s intrapersonal skills, and Jake’s engagement to Gekko’s own daughter, to embezzle money out of a trust he’d set up and to restart his own career. Parker, in more subtly drawn ways, edges out Zuckerberg’s closest collaborator in order to gain a stake in the meteoric company and restore his reputation – and to use Zuckerberg’s stature to humiliate old enemies. In a turn of phrase that could have come from either movie, Gekko tells Jake, of investing, “It’s not about the money. It’s about the game. The game between people. That’s all it is.” Jake seems to agree, and so would Mark, surely, because both think they’ve won, though they’ve yet to really play on their own.

Both Gekko and Parker are burdened with memories of lost money and reputation, and with living humbly in a world they used to run. There is no easier way for them than to exploit those who will happily be exploited – young men, in finance and technology, who have yet to be presented any compelling reason beside money or adulation to continue their work. Jake and Mark are unfulfilled – and they leave the viewer unfulfilled. Their costars steal the show. At the end of The Social Network, Mark has cut ties with Parker – among many others – and sits alone, looking at the system he has created for quantifying and measuring friendships. His is an extraordinary case, but his personality type – grasping for connection and, even more unsteadily, towards financial and socially measurable reward – is a common one. Spurred on by Gekko, Jake betrays his fiancée, inadvertently jeopardizes the energy projects he doesn’t really care about, and would be left alone but for a bizarre, unexpected happy ending. Genius or simply callously immune to the rules that constrain members of society, these young men are – still! – stuck in older men’s games.

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Chilly Gonzales takes the stage at the Pigalle Club, a Forties-style dinner and cabaret spot in London’s West End (circular tables, low ceilings, regular intervals of green velvet), and assumes his place at the piano. He is wearing a brown knee-length silk robe with matching trousers and a pair of generously cushioned slippers. His hands are encased in pristine white gloves. With shadowy deep-set eyes and slicked back hair, he is the very image of the brooding piano maestro.

He eases into a medley of slow, spare classical pieces. The music starts off somber and restrained, but his fingers move with such fluidity that they can’t resist adding little flourishes here and there. The embellishments begin to mount up. What opened with an air of great solemnity is now becoming increasingly comical. Now he’s playing a blues standard with one hand, a blur of white hammering away at the lower octaves.

He wraps it up and turns to confront his audience. “Hi, I’m Chilly Gonzales. If you don’t know me, I’m a Grammy-nominated producer.” This is true. He continues: “I hold the Guinness world record for longest continuous piano concert at 27 hours.” This is also true. “I’ve got a lot of famous friends.” He pauses for effect, then performs a modest raise of the shoulders. “In France, where I live, they call me un génie musicale.”

In 2004, Gonzales, who is neither French nor Hispanic but Canadian and whose real name is Jason Beck, released Solo Piano, an album of concise minimalist classical numbers in the vein of Erik Satie which gave substance to the génie musicale claim. Those who came to know Gonzales through that album – his best-selling by some margin – would have been shocked to learn that the author of those beautiful, delicate pieces had previously made, among other things, a gleefully profane lo-fi rap record called The Entertainist.

It’s not entirely surprising that a musician who rolls out his “unfuckwithable resume” at the beginning of a show, and makes unabashed reference to his musical genius at every opportunity, should dabble with rap. Rapping is, after all, the art of the inflated brag. The Sugarhill Gang were extolling their globally-endorsed sexual prowess and enviable motoring options as hip-hop drew its first breath, and given the amount of hot air that’s been blown over 4/4 beats since then, it’s no wonder the ice caps are melting.

Gonzales embraces the spirit of boastfulness on The Entertainist and its more lavishly produced follow-up, Presidential Suite, although in Gonzoworld the line between brag and self-skewering gag is always porous. Yes, he may be “the greatest entertainer of the year”, but he is also “the worst MC” who gets “more pussy than a priest”. He is “the prankster Frank Sinatra”, a “combination of Joe Stalin and Woody Allen”, whom you may address as “Fuckeye” or “the one-eyed Jew”. Or “Chilly Chaplin”. Or “Santa Klaus Kinski”, because he spent a few years living in Berlin.

“I am the worst MC” is at once a villainous sneer and an admission that Gonzales’ rapping abilities circa 2000 left something to be desired. In fact, as he demonstrates during tonight’s show, Gonzales is a pretty good rapper – stylistically derivative perhaps, but deft, playful and always entertaining. He spouts vast jets of nonsense in his rhymes but somehow manages to be more upfront than any other rapper you’d care to name.

Musicians rarely speak about, let alone lyricize, the shallow calculations that often underscore big career decisions, yet here is Gonzales on why he left Canada for Berlin: “I still remember when it first occurred to me./ Fuck it, I’m gonna move to Germany./ I don’t speak German, screw it/ But hey! I’m Jewish/ And I need a new press angle and that should do it.”

These kinds of outrageous proclamations make listening to Gonzales, or attending one of his shows, enormously fun. His almost pathological frankness presents an interesting challenge, however, when it comes to interviewing the guy. Any criticism you’d level at him has already been anticipated, and slyly underlined, in his music, or on other platforms. When he released Soft Power, his paean to Seventies soft-rock, in 2008, he posted a video online in which a Mercury label honcho begs him to take singing lessons to soften his harsh Montrealer tones. In the clip he circulated to promote his London dates, Gonzales tells a buffoonish interviewer, also played by Jason Beck, that although he “owns” France, he remains an underdog in England, adding: “I’m not a young man anymore. This could be my last chance.”

So why all the second-guessing?