> I think it’s a basic fact that people look toward fictional characters as role models

I think it's closer to "monkey see, monkey do".

After the Fast and The Furious movies, young men would street race home from the movie.

After watching the movie The Program, young men laid down in the street at night hoping not to get hit by traffic (copying the risky stunt the characters in the movie did).

The art simply shows what is, not what should be.

The Sopranos was interesting because it showed a mob boss doing the typical mob boss things (dodging FBI surveillance, dealing with rival crime families and street thugs, organizing new business ventures, burying evidence deep in the woods / dumping in the river). But it also showed a man with momma issues, with panic attacks, processing (well mostly rejecting) therapy, a wife who spends too much, a son as dumb as a box of rocks, etc. It wasn't the broad morality of western societies, but it was approachable because the character was eminently human.

Similarly, Dexter was a serial murderer, but he had "a code" (to only murder other serial murderers). His code doesn't necessarily match up with the morals of you or I, but like any fiction, it allows you to suspect your disbelief and inhabit the moral choices / predicaments of the character for a few minutes / hours.

> The directors always try to avoid this criticism by saying, "Well he goes to jail in the end," but I think it's a bit of a cop out

I don’t know which directors you’re referring to, but I doubt you receieved such a simplistic response from Scorcese. Worth reading him in his own words on this, below is what he said regarding Jordan Belfort’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street,

“That's something that I've always been attracted to and is interesting to me. Someone like Jordan or Jake Lamotta or Tommy, Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas, and people say well that type of person that sort but… I guess what that means is that they try to distance themselves from them. It's someone else it's not me but in actuality I feel it's not someone else, it's us. It's you and me and maybe if we'd been born under different circumstances, maybe we would have wound up making the same, exactly the same mistakes and choices and doing exactly the same things. I really think … when people say “that kind,” it’s not a matter of equalizing everyone and saying we're all responsible, I think it's a matter of facing and recognizing and acknowledging that part of us which is a part of our common humanity. And we have to deal with it.”

“He [Jordan Belfort] thought that he could bypass morality or surpass morality with a combination of money and drugs. I don't know maybe he still does, I really don't know. There's another way of answering the question; he was different from Madoff and Skilling in that they weren't crashing helicopters or throwing little people (or maybe they were but if they did they kept it pretty quiet) but in that sense Jordan's experiences are more entertaining and that brings you closer to him because you look at these guys and think this seems to be a lot of fun. Well, it doesn't just look that way they really did have a lot of fun. In fact that's really all they could do is have fun and more fun and more on top of that, until it wasn't so much fun anymore. But what they couldn't do was just be. They just couldn't face that. So the challenge is to show that honestly without tipping the scales into judgment and taking you outside of the world these characters and the particular ways that they live their lives which was to obliterate all obstacles, all troubles, all difficulties, by taking more drugs, more money.”

https://youtu.be/kTCyZoaORao

I don't think it's exactly "bad guy looks cool and popular." Some people simply identify with villains in fiction. They see nothing wrong with what normal people see as villainous behavior. Without society's law and order, and/or with wealth/power of their own, they would themselves behave just as villainous.

I'm convinced that a lot of people--probably even some of my own neighbors--wear a mask of civility only because we live in a society and have rules that are enforced. If the opportunity ever arrived and we entered some kind of Mad Max lawlessness, they would instantly start to murder and plunder just like barbarians out of fiction.

Where are we placing the responsibility?

It's okay for art to explore immoral topics, but it's generally not okay for creators and commentators to go, "Come to your own conclusions, wink wink." Have the respect for your viewers, and for your society, to be upfront about how your art is fraught; to say that you don't like the message or implications even if you felt compelled to explore some dark aspect of reality or society or psychology. Or, have the courage to say that you don't think it is fraught. But it's definitely irresponsible to unleash something transgressive on society and then try to wash your hands of it.

Over the last 10 minutes of Wall Street, the main character gets arrested, breaks down crying, gets punched in the face, and then goes to jail. The last scene has his father (driving the MC to jail) turn almost literally to the camera and tell the viewer which precise moral value he's being punished for not upholding. I don't know how much more embodied in the art the values could be.

The problem is that you have to include people's self-justifications to tell a meaningful story. If Gordon Gekko were an uncharismatic sleazeball who tells everyone "I'm greedy because the misery of others pleases me, haha!", the film wouldn't work as a criticism of Wall Street, because real Wall Street tycoons are usually charismatic and don't say such things in public.

was going to say, Hollywood knows exactly what it's doing with these "bad guys"

He's still the villain. He sounds perfectly reasonable. His criticisms of Teldar paper are plausible. He makes a compelling case for greed, but by definition, greed is excessive, it cannot be good.

His apparent reasonableness obscures the fact that he's appealing to the rapacious or covetous nature of the shareholders. He wants to override any moral objection to the fact that he's buying the company, in part, to strip the overfunded employee pensions, and by accepting his offer, shareholders get a cut. (IIRC, it's been decades since I saw the movie.)

And yet, those useless execs are better for the company and for employees then him. Much better.

Villans usually see themselves as heroes and everyone else as either stupid or sucker. That does not mean I have to adopt villans framing just because he looks charizmatic.

Prison sentences were so short back then, plus parole, that it was arguably worth it. it worked for Boeseky, Milikin and others.