"Scarface for Douchebags," or The Stockbroker as Tragicomic Antihero

“Now you’re not naïve enough to think we’re living in a democracy are you, buddy? It’s a free market and you’re a part of it” –Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987)

“At the end of the game, you count up your money. That’s how you find out who's best. It's the only way.” –Bert Gordon, The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)

 Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) starts with an ad for Stratton Oakmont; the commercial makes us believe the brokerage firm is a golden American institution, a pillar of financial stability, as traditional, trustworthy, and established as if the Mayflower passengers had etched the very name into Plymouth Rock. Cut to the nightmarish circus of a rollicking party on the trading floor of the company—not unlike what we’ve imagined went on in Rome before the fall (all but the roller-skating chimp and snorting coke off hookers, of course)—and then freeze-frame on the billionaire brokers tossing a dwarf at a huge velcro target, literally and figuratively abusing the Little Guy. Stratton Oakmont is America, its founder proudly proclaims in the ad. How horrifying is it to realize that he just might be right?

The tale that follows the fictional commercial amounts to a nonstop barrage of drug-fueled decadence adapted by Terence Winter from real-life stockbroking swindler Jordan Belfort’s memoir. The book is a distant relative of the truth, it’s been said, and the film is a distant relative of the book. The humorous, “honest” movie poster of The Wolf of Wall Street created by Uproxx titles the movie “Scarface for Douchebags.” Although obviously meant as a joke, the film’s framing as a crime movie points to the many parallels between Scorsese’s film and the gangster genre, and raises the question, is Belfort even worse than the cinematic mobsters the director seems to draw inspiration from? The filmmaker might be the best cinematic connoisseur of charismatic sociopaths, and Henry Hill or Nicky Santoro ain’t got nothing on Leonardo DiCaprio’s titular wolf. The film’s brokers are avatars of an age of heedless self-indulgence and greed, gangsters with fountain pens instead of guns, slicing and dicing your bank account and putting your savings in a vise rather than your head.

It has long been accepted that the mob has always been a cinematic stand-in for the underside of American capitalism. As Frederic Jameson eloquently puts it in “Reification and Utopia,”

“When indeed we reflect on an organized conspiracy against the public, one which reaches into every corner of our daily lives and our political structures to exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-makers and in the name of an abstract conception of profit—surely it is not about the Mafia, but rather about American business itself that we are thinking, American capitalism at its most systemized and computerized, dehumanized, ‘multinational’ and corporate form” (145).

Parts of this essay have appeared previously in my review of The Wolf of Wall Street.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

The Wolf of Wall Street starts with an ad for Stratton Oakmont; the commercial makes us believe the brokerage firm is a golden American institution, a rock of financial stability, as traditional, trustworthy, and established as if the Mayflower passengers had etched the very name into Plymouth Rock. Cut to the nightmarish circus of a rollicking party on the trading floor of the company—not unlike what we’ve imagined went on in Rome before the fall (all but the roller-skating chimp and snorting coke off hookers, of course)—and then freeze-frame on the billionaire brokers tossing a dwarf at a huge velcro target, literally and figuratively abusing the Little Guy. Stratton Oakmont is America, its founder proudly proclaims in the ad. How horrifying is it to realize that he just might be right?

After going unexpectedly family-friendly with 2011’s Hugo, Martin Scorsese pulls a dramatic 180 with The Wolf of Wall Street, a nonstop barrage of drug-fueled decadence adapted by Terence Winter from real-life stockbroking swindler Jordan Belfort’s memoir. The book is a distant relative of the truth, it’s been said, and the film is a distant relative of the book. A big, unruly bacchanal with a sizeable, sinister smile on its lips, the movie is a bit of a contradiction, both abashed and unashamed, spectacle and cautionary tale, ode to and indictment of dollars, depravity, and conspicuous consumption.

Disturbing and exciting, exhilarating and exhausting, the endlessly entertaining film holds together by sheer virtue of its exuberant, furious filmmaking energy. Scorsese might be the best cinematic connoisseur of charismatic sociopaths, and Henry Hill or Nicky Santoro ain’t got nothing on Belfort. The Wolf of Wall Street’s brokers are avatars of an age of heedless self-indulgence and greed, gangsters with fountain pens instead of guns, slicing and dicing your bank account and putting your savings in a vise rather than your head. And, just like in the much less cynical and coked-up American Hustle, you’ll cheer the con artists on and thank them for swindling you when they’re done.

Small Town America on Film: Pleasantville, Far from Heaven, and Revolutionary Road

The small town is “a deeply rooted symbol in the country’s collective consciousness,” more than a place, it’s “a distinct life-style with its own set of values,” and, implicitly, its own set of drawbacks (Levy 15). The phrase itself has come to carry a double layer of meaning, at once sentimental and condescending. It has been a “permanent staple of the American cinema” since its inception (Levy 16). The image of the small town in film has changed drastically over the past century, influenced by social and historical events and phases of the country, from an idealized and romanticized version in the 1930s, to the idea of small town as prison, a repressive environment of conformity and dull homogeneity in the 1950s, and everything in between. However, from the very beginning, it has been the image of the ideal, rather than its realization, that has ensured the survival of the small town as myth, “at once historical (specific) and universal (atemporal),” providing both “a version of concrete history and a vision of existence” (MacKinnon 3, Levy 20). Gary Ross’ Pleasantville (1998), Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), and Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008) all depict the less-than-sunny side of small towns and suburbia, in a very personal way, and at the same time their characters stand in as representatives for society as a whole, individuals who gave in to the idea of the middle-class American Dream of success in the small town, and found themselves trapped by the environment’s blandness, boredom, and the constant obsession of keeping up with the Joneses

All of these movies take place in the fifties, and it has been that era, more than any other, that seems to epitomize and perpetuate the image of the suburban/small town ideal, chock-full of family values carried “to the heights of saccharine platitudinousness” in shows like Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave it to Beaver, “shows with lots of teeth—teeth that were all evenly spaced, capped, and pearly white. But not teeth that actually bit into anything, [in] a world nicely contained in a box in which there were no problems that couldn’t be solved in twenty-two minutes,” (Simon 67, Wynne-Jones 31). These “kinder, gentler” times we reconstruct from TV reruns and movies of the 1950s bear little resemblance to reality, and in films like Pleasantville, directed by Gary Ross, we begin to see the true colors of this antiseptic view of the past (Sharett 65). Like any fairytale, the movie begins with “Once upon a time,” and transports the viewer into this “mythic utopia” we have made of the fifties (Maio 89).

The Great Gatsby (2013)

“It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…  And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 

Baz Luhrnman’s The Great Gatsby is an audacious, fascinating technological and aesthetic experiment in expressionism, a “kaleidoscopic carnival,” to borrow Fitzgerald’s phrase, as bursting with bejeweled excess as its title character’s boozy parties, the cinematic equivalent of the biggest, craziest, loudest guest at a gathering where the confetti falls and the champagne flows like monsoon rain, and the twenties really roar their golden roar. Everything shines in baroque, brilliant, beautiful fakeness.

A lavish, splashy celebration of the extravagance of the Jazz Age, Gatsby is filled to the brim with the sort of stylistic gambits Luhrman fans have come to expect—epic, classic melodrama that blends old world theatrics with the newest in postmodernist subjective filmmaking, CGI cityscapes, anachronistic soundtrack mashups of period music and modern pop, psychological drama and speedy slapstick. But through the brightly-hued haze of acrobatic camera movements, opulent flowers, flappers, fringes, and frills, Luhrman’s reverence for his source material shines through like the blinking green beacon of light at the end of Daisy’s peer.

Django Unchained (2012)

If it wasn’t over the top, it wouldn’t be Tarantino. Django Unchained, the filmmaker’s nearly three-hour long tale of antebellum empowerment set in the Deep South, reaches the screen in bounds of unbridled joy and leaps of feeling. As desperately entertaining as it is dark, this movie explodes and exhilarates. It’s pulpy, profane, giddily violent and gleefully gory, but some scenes stand at the borderline between farce and tragedy. Although brutally funny, Django Unchained is also an important—if not too serious—movie about slavery and racism in pre-Civil War America.

Steeped in the director’s distinct brand of movie love, which sometimes makes him tread the thin line between homage and plagiarism, the film marks another of Tarantino’s tributes to the more outlaw, outsider, and less well-regarded genres: the spaghetti western and blaxploitation pictures of the seventies. The highly stylized movie, however, is notable as the filmmaker’s first real love story, its comparatively straightforward narrative centering on freed slave Django’s  (Jamie Foxx) journey to reconnect with his wife Hildi (Kerri Washington).