“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.
Genre and Ideology
Robin Wood starts his essay “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” by defining the
American capitalist ideology, or the values and assumptions embodied and
reinforced by classical Hollywood cinema. From the celebration of success and
wealth to what Wood calls “the Rosebud syndrome,” the idea that money isn’t
everything and that money corrupts, to the ideal of marriage and family contrasted
to the image of the perfect man as unencumbered adventurer or the white picket
fence small-town life in opposition to the sophisticated city career, the
concepts Wood provides boil down to a list of contradictions. The ideology
presented, “far from being monolithic, is inherently
riddled with… unresolvable tensions” (719, emphasis in original). The
argument Wood puts forth is that the development of genres is rooted in just
this type of ideological contradictions, with each genre navigating a different
set of characteristics, a different facet, of the ideology. In this way,
Hollywood films work to reproduce and negotiate, challenge or support the
dominant ideas of society, a thought echoed by Frederic Jameson in “Reification and Utopia” when he writes, “All contemporary works of art—whether those of
high culture and modernism or mass culture and commercial culture—have as their
underlying impulse—albeit in what is often distorted and repressed, unconscious
form—our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it
now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived” (147).
According to Jameson, “even the most degraded type of mass culture”
aims not only for empty distraction, entertainment or the creation of false
consciousness, but in fact accomplishes transformative work on social and
political anxieties and fantasies (141). As Robert Warshaw explains in his
seminal essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” “even within the area of mass
culture there always exists a current of opposition seeking to express by
whatever means are available to it that sense of desperation and inevitable
failure which optimism itself helps to create” (129). Thus the twin drives of
Hollywood cinema are, on the one hand, the potential for wish-fulfilment
through an explicit or implied critique of the social order from which it
springs and, on the other hand, the necessity to control such negative or
critical, potentially damaging impulses. Although these goals at first seem
inconsistent, or even incompatible, Jameson explains that “anxiety and hope are
two faces of the same collective consciousness” (144). In this way, works of mass
entertainment revive and give expression to anxieties regarding the dominant
ideology, or feature behavior and ideas that directly challenge it, only to
manage and repress the anxieties and criticism.
Similarly, Robert Ray, in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, sees the resolution of
incompatible values as the main function of popular American film, situating
his study at the intersection of different theories of overdetermination and
transformation in order to explain the evolution of Hollywood cinema. The three
schools of thought that converge in his study are Marxism (especially
Althusser’s work on ideology), myth study (following Levi-Strauss), and
psychoanalysis (Freud’s dream work and its notions of condensation and
displacement). Significant to my discussion of genre and ideology in The Wolf of Wall Street is Ray’s
engagement with Levi-Strauss’ idea that myths, as “transformations of basic
dilemmas and contradictions that in reality cannot be resolved,” enable “a
single cultural anxiety to assume different shapes in response to an audience’s
changing needs” (11-12). Starting from the premise that the myths—in the sense
of Roland Barthes’ “mythologies”—and artistic conventions employed by Hollywood
cinema do not exist in some politically neutral realm of archetypes or
aesthetics but instead are always socially produced and consumed, Ray argues
that genre films are always implicated in ideology (14-17).
“Genres are cultural metaphors and psychic mirrors,” Jack Shadoyan
writes in Dreams and Dead Ends: American
Gangster/Crime Films (x-xii). The steady flow of repetition and variation
within the genre system provides the myth with a “fixed dramatic pattern” which
can be recreated indefinitely by Hollywood cinema (Warshaw 129). American sound
cinema’s mythology occurs, according to Ray, only as a part of a regressing
chain of texts that stretch back from films to W.S. Hart westerns, Horatio Alger stories, classic nineteen-century authors like Twain, Cooper, and
Melville, to frontier tales, Pilgrim narratives, to myths of the New World, to
Eden itself (56).
In a familiar reconciliatory pattern, American movies raise and then
appear to solve problems associated with the troubling incompatibility of
American myths, such as the opposition inherent in the myth of family, which
encourages contentment and permanence, and the myth of success, which
encourages ambition and mobility (Ray 56-57). The quintessential dichotomy in
American culture—and hence American cinema—is, for Ray, the opposition of individual
and community, and, implicitly, the outlaw hero and the official hero:
“Embodied in the
adventurer, explorer, gunfighter, wanderer, and loner, the outlaw hero stood
for that part of the American imagination valuing self-determination and
freedom from entanglements. By contrast, the official hero, normally portrayed
as a teacher, lawyer, politician, farmer, or family man, represented the
American belief in collective action, and the objective legal process that
superseded private notions of right and wrong” (59).
The value conflicts between these two types of protagonists permeate
our culture: tensions between selfishness and commitment to others, violation
and obedience, freedom and responsibility, promiscuity and fidelity, force and
persuasion (Rafter 200-01). The outlaw mythology manifests itself in a general
ambivalence about the law, the sum of society’s standards, as a collective,
impersonal ideology imposed from without. Out of this sense of the law’s
inadequacy bloomed a rich tradition of legends celebrating legal defiance, a
mythology which “transformed all outlaws into Robin Hoods, who ‘correct’
socially unjust laws (Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, John Wesley Hardin)” (Ray
61-62).
The Wolf of Wall Street embodies
this contradiction as fully as any gangster picture. A big, unruly bacchanal
with a sizeable, sinister smile on its lips, the film is both abashed and
unashamed, spectacle and cautionary tale, ode to and indictment
of dollars, depravity, and conspicuous consumption. As Nicole Rafter points out in Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society,
the gangster genre has traditionally tried to make two arguments at once. On
one hand, it criticizes some aspect of society, often encouraging the audience
to “identify with a ‘good’ bad guy that challenges the system”; on the other
hand, it enables our identification with a figure who restores order at the
end, even if that means punishment or death of the bad guy. Thus, crime films
offer “contradictory sorts of satisfaction: pride in our ability to think
critically and root for the character who challenges authority [and] champions
the underdog; and pride in our maturity for backing the restoration of the
moral order…, enabling us to dwell, of only for an hour or two, in a state of
happy hypocrisy” (3).
The Gangster Genre and the
American Dream
Crime films reflect fundamentally American contradictions about social,
economic, and political issues at the same time they shape the ways we think
about these issues. The durability of the gangster genre attests to its
cultural importance; it has survived because the issues it addresses have
always been central to the American experience, because its formal properties
have given them a clarity of outline and lucidity of exposition, and because it
has been infinitely flexible in adapting to shifting social and cultural
conditions. “Thus the importance of the gangster film, and the nature and
intensity of its emotional and aesthetic impact, cannot be measured in terms of
the place of the gangster himself or the importance of the problem of crime in
American life…. What matters is that the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to
Americans” (Warshaw130, emphasis in original). Dealing with the underside of American
exceptionalism and individualism, the genre chronicles the dark underbelly of
the myth of success as ambition spills over into greed, and progress is defined
solely by capital accumulation. Of course the obsession with material
possession and physical comfort or the pursuit of individual improvement are
not solely American preoccupations. “After all,” Ellis Cashmore writes in Martin Scorsese’s America, this country
“didn’t invent materialism, any more than it created the individual and vested
in him… a sense of purpose and desire for self-improvement. Yet, it was in
America that these were changed into unquestioned values, principles to guide a
population’s conduct and to reward as beneficial…. It’s almost as if Americans
are under obligation not just to be successful, but to exhibit that success”
(5-8). In one film after another, Scorsese has captured the “swarming egotism
of America and the rewards and punishments offered by attempts to either escape
or embrace it,” and no other genre has fit his vision of America better than
the gangster film (Cashmore 3).
The gangster is a paradigm of the American dream, the “archetypal
American dreamer whose actions and behavior involve a living off of the dream
common to most everyone who exists in the particular configurations and
contradictions of American society, a dream in conflict [with] the society”
(Shadoian 2). The typical gangster plot lets viewers off the hook at the exact
moment of the criminal hero’s demise—we can savor the dangers of the streets and the safety of home, the excitement
of violence and the pleasures of peace. This resolution of value conflicts is
what Warshaw discusses when he writes that “the final bullet thrusts [the
gangster] back, makes him, after all, a failure…. At bottom, the gangster is
doomed because he is under pressure to succeed, not because the means he
employs are unlawful” (Warshaw 133). Like the gangster, we are all under
pressure to succeed. Everyone wants to be a winner of some kind. The gangster
must ultimately be a failure, not only to absolve viewers who have identified
with his unlawful success, but, more importantly, because we must repress what
he represents, that pessimistic note of the celebration of success, the dark
figure hovering at the edge of our consciousness. The gangster’s death is a
rude awakening from our American dream, the character expressing “that part of
the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life,
which rejects ‘Americanism’ itself” (Warshaw 130).
The main ideological function of the gangster film is to situate this
dilemma in the context of crime rather than business, to ensure us—albeit not
always convincingly—that “the deterioration of daily life in the United States
today is an ethical rather than an economic matter, connected, not with profit,
but rather ‘merely’ with dishonesty and with some omnipresent moral corruption
whose ultimate mythic source lies in the pure Evil of the Mafiosi themselves”
(Jameson 146). Classic mob narratives thus project a simple solution to
complicated social contradictions: corruption, dishonesty, and crime can be
dealt with swiftly and surely by the official organs of law-and-order. Of
course this message is not as easily conveyed as Hollywood at first hoped, and
something of the reverse happened—audiences saw the critique of society
inherent in these films and began identifying with and rooting for the
criminals.
The three most vivid and influential gangster films of the 1930s, Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932), set the pattern for the
genre: an ambitious, ruthless—but not entirely unsympathetic—criminal rises to
the top only to die violently. He and his cronies sport double-breasted suits,
fedoras, and Tommy guns; they talk tough, scorn dames, and are infinitely more
interesting than the bland G-men who gun them down. Despite the studio-imposed
anti-crime message of these films, and no matter how unlawful and violent they
are, the gangsters are seen as tragic heroes, “desperate men in a desperate
hour, victims of a society that stresses wealth and status while failing to
provide working-class men the means to achieve these ends” (Todd 27). Identification
with the criminals was made easy in the context of Depression-era America,
where many of the movie-going public shared the economic disadvantages and
dreams of wealth of the protagonists. “Walking a populist tightrope, these
films spoke to Americans struggling to make ends meet while simultaneously
attacking crime and the government’s ability to control it” (Todd 27). Influencing the genre thereafter, these early
iterations of it ensured that audiences would associate criminality with
economic hardship and portray the gangsters as underdogs.
This, of course, is the Utopian function of the gangster genre, a result
in direct contrast to the intended ideological effect. The mob had come to
represent hope—the hope of existing outside the confining rules of society. This
effect of gangster films on audiences has remained almost unchanged throughout
its evolution, prompting Roger Ebert to write, in the opening of his review of
Scorsese’s Casino (1995), “If the
Mafia didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
The same is true of
Las Vegas. There is a universal need to believe in an outfit that exists
outside the rules and can get things done. There’s a related need for a place
where the rules are suspended, where there’s no day or night, where everything
has a price, where if you’re lucky, you go home a millionaire. Of course,
people who go to Vegas lose money, and people who deal with the mob, regret it.
But hope is what we’re talking about. Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if
most people weren’t optimists.”
As the genre evolved over the second half of the twentieth century, its
form and conventions became increasingly refined as it adapted to changing
social and cultural factors. During the Hollywood Renaissance and due in large
part to the waning of the studio system and the Production Code, crime films once
again flooded the silver screen, with American youth readier than ever before
to idealize heroic rebels. If Arthur Penn’s Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) revived and re-envisioned the gangster genre, Francis Ford
Coppola’s The Godfather (1972)
restored it to a position of primacy not only in Hollywood but also in
America’s mythic imagination. The story follows the changing of the guard in
the Corleone family from a more orderly and traditional rule, which abided by a
strict set of codes, to one less chivalrous, more violent and embittered. The
protagonists were, of course, outlaws, but the movie encouraged viewers to
identify with them, to regard their refusal to pursue ordinary careers as the
metaphorical equivalent of the counterculture’s rejection of the establishment
(Ray 328-31). By using subjective point of view and isolating the heroes in a
moral vacuum in which they could appear as forces of justice, Coppola insured
the audience’s sympathy.
To the image of outlaw independence and uncompromising individualism,
the director added the motif of the family, which, “within the movie’s closed
world… resembled a romanticized, self-supporting commune” (Ray 333). In the
first film, the family represents a fantasy message, a collective unit that
becomes “an object of Utopian longing, if not Utopian envy” (Jameson 146). Like
a surrogate state, the family is the source of the Corleone’s morality,
security, stability, and sense of purpose. As Coppola advances through his
trilogy, however, the family fails morally, degenerating until it serves only
one purpose: ensuring its own survival. As the Utopian appeal of the family
decreases, the social critique is heightened. At first Coppola confined his
ideological criticism to tacit thematic analogies between the Corleones and
capitalist America, but the business metaphor that is the basis of the first Part I ceases to be a disguised in The Godfather: Part II (1974), instead
becoming foregrounded in itself. “Thus
the Mafia material, which in the first film served as a substitute for
business, now slowly transforms itself into the overt thematics of business
itself, just as ‘in reality’ the need for the cover of legitimate investments
ends up turning the Mafiosi into real businessmen” (Jameson 147).
The lines between mob crime and
American capitalism were thus increasingly blurred, and since the 1970s
an alternative tradition developed in Hollywood that refused the easy solutions
of the past, a tradition that Scorsese has embodied and shaped as much as any
other New Hollywood filmmaker. Even in gangster films suffused with high
spirits and good humor such as Scorsese’s Goodfellas
(1990) and Casino there is a nagging
recognition of the inevitability of confusion, crime, and suffering. A brief
comparison of the two versions of Scarface
(1932 and 1983) highlights the shift in attitude. Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte in
Hawks’ film remains attractive despite his primitivism and violence. He is
bigger than life, awesome in his greed and boldness. Al Pacino’s Tony Montana
in Brian De Palma’s remake is more difficult to admire. A drug lord who begins
as a petty criminal shipped out of Cuba in 1980, he seems smaller than life,
dwarfed by the crowded first scenes and the huge detention center to which he
is initially assigned. Both Tonys are risk-takers, both make a fortune off
contraband, and both marry a blond trophy wife. The differences between the two
characters (and the two movies) are, however, more noticeable than the
similarities. The incest theme, suppressed in Hawks’ film, in the newer version
emerges full-blown, and the second Tony’s wife (played by Michelle Pfeiffer),
anorexic and addicted to cocaine, is self-destructive and frightening, even
more so than Sharon Stone’s Ginger in Scorsese’s Casino. Where the first movie begins like a thriller, cool, slick,
and mysterious, the second starts with a sweaty, shifty-eyed Tony lying to
immigration officers. Reviewing De Palma’s Scarface
when it was released, Vincent Canby notes yet another point of divergence from
the original—Pacino’s Tony ignores a crucial rule of the underworld: Don’t get
high on your own supply. “This,” he argues, “is a major switch on the work of
[Ben] Hecht [the screenwriter of the original film], who might have guffawed at
the suggestion that Al Capone, Chicago’s most powerful Prohibition gangster,
might have been done in by alcoholism.” By the end of De Palma’s film, Montana,
incapacitated by and smeared in his own drugs, is “close to the brink of
parody,” Canby continues. It’s like watching a Macbeth who is unaware that his
pants have split.”
Contemporary, post-New-Hollywood gangster movies, then, make a powerful
statement not only concerning their heroes, but also the nature of heroism in
the modern world. While early twentieth-century immigrants could use crime as a
shortcut to the American Dream, today the dream itself has become empty, and
crime has lost its appeal. This is the environment in which Goodfellas is released in 1990. A
comparison to De Palma’s Scarface makes
Scorsese seem almost nostalgic, if not for an older, gentler time (that never
was), than at least for an older, gentler kind of gangster movie, one in which
there was still a place—albeit increasingly rare—for tradition and honor. But
even wiseguys Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), Jimmy “the Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro)
and especially Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) are a far cry from the heroism and tragedy
of Tony Camonte or Little Caesar. Scorsese even mires us in the quotidian as
Hill spends the entire third act of the film cooking spaghetti sauce with one
hand and trying to move a cocaine shipment with the other.
Scorsese and other filmmakers working within the gangster genre in the
1990s were accused of glamorizing the mob by devoting much of the films’ narratives
to decadent, hedonistic lifestyles filled with drugs, booze, money, and fame,
but many of these films turned traditional by the end, when the consequences of
living too fast or too hard led to the same tragic place: the morgue or, if one
was lucky, prison—or, if one was luckier still, the witness protection program.
The critique of American capitalism and consumerism is even more apparent in Goodfellas than in the Godfather series. Scorsese’s gangsters don’t
live the ethnic holism of the Corleones, with their sturdy links to Sicilian
traditions. Instead, “these hoods reflect the breakdown of the family order and
the infiltration of yuppie nihilism” (Yaquinto 169). At the time of its
release, the movie was already being recognized as less of a gangster melodrama
than, as David Ehrenstein wrote in his book about Scorsese, “an indictment of
Reagan-Bush America, where brute force and conspicuous consumption have
completely subsumed identity and ethics.” David Ansen of Newsweek agreed, writing that Scorsese’s “wiseguys and their wives
and mistresses are an upside-down parody of untrammeled consumerism” (cited in
Yaquinto 172).
The director takes it a step further for his next gangster story, Casino, by tracking Las Vegas’ sad
demise from mob-controlled funhouse to corporate sandlot, turning the city into
a metaphor for a crass, decaying America besieged by corporate takeovers and a
loss of honor—even among mobsters. “The big corporations took over,” Ace
Rothstein (Robert De Niro) observes in the closing moments of the movie.
“Today, it works like Disneyland.” This change mirrors the loss of the Utopian
potential that draws people to the genre in the first place. As Ebert writes in
his review, “in a sense, people need to believe a town like Vegas is run by
guys like Ace and Nicky.
In a place that
breaks the rules, maybe you can break some, too. For those with the gambler
mentality, it’s actually less reassuring to know that giant corporations,
financed by bonds and run by accountants, operate the Vegas machine. They know
all the odds, and the house always wins. With Ace in charge, who knows what
might happen?”
The Wolf of Wall Street as Ideological Criticism
The Wolf of Wall Street thus
can be seen as a logical next step in the evolution of the gangster genre; the
links between the mob and American capitalism made explicit in Scorsese’s
earlier films can now be developed into a narrative that actually takes place
in the business environment. As Ellis Cashmore writes, “crime, for Scorsese, is
a caricature of power, an exaggerated version of what law-abiding people do en
route to becoming powerful. Actions and omissions that constitute offenses and
are punishable by law are little different from the everyday behavior of
powerholders” (Cashmore 9). So it would make perfect sense for the director to
move from chronicling the offenses of the mob to looking directly at the corporate
powerholders.
Taking its cue from (chiefly Scorsese’s own) gangster pictures, the movie shows how the
working-class, Queens-raised Belfort made his way from humble origins to wealth
and notoriety. The opening montage presents all of the character’s possessions
in quick succession, as he enthusiastically catalogues them in voiceover: in
addition to a blonde, buxom trophy wife (Margot Robbie) and “two perfect kids,”
Belfort owns a 170-foot yacht, helicopter, private jet, six cars, three horses,
two vacation homes, and a mansion another DiCaprio character, Jay Gatsby, might
find gaudy. Greed is not only good, as it was to Wall Street’s (1987) Gordon
Gekko, but, for Belfort, greed is also fun as hell. “Enough of this shit will
make you invincible,” he tells us, “able to conquer the world, and eviscerate
your enemies.” He continues, “Money doesn’t just buy you a better life, better
food, better cars, better pussy. It also makes you a better person.” As Belfort
endeavors to explain what he means, Scorsese cuts to an image that perhaps
describes the character better than all that have come before: a woman’s
backside fills the screen’s foreground; we are to understand, if it wasn’t already
clear, that the stockbroker is a giant ass. Although the narrative places the
character in the sympathetic position of an underdog and an outsider as he
tries and fails to establish himself at a blue-chip brokerage firm, working his
way up the corporate ladder from the level of “pond scum,” as his first boss
calls him, sympathy and identification do not come easily. After he gets laid
off in the market crash, the character reinvents himself on Long Island, taking
over a penny stock boiler room where he sticks out like an Armani three-piece
suit on a Walmart clearance rack. It’s not long before he grows tired of
“selling garbage to garbage men” and starts targeting the deep pockets of the
one percent, slapping the fake blueblood name Stratton Oakmont on his own firm
(started in the back room of a gas station while smoking crack), and raising
its value a few thousandfold,
It’s practically impossible to find a Scorsese film in which the
American Dream doesn’t have a presence—usually a perverse presence—but The Wolf
of Wall Street, more than any other of the director’s works, is about living
the dream. Goodfellas’ famous “Ever
since I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster” here has been replaced
with “I always wanted to get rich.” While Henry Hill saw being a part of the
mob as “even better than being president of the United States,” Belfort has no
ambition beyond material gain. A
sense of belonging was what Hill looked for in his association with the
neighborhood gangsters as a teenager; these men were respected and admired, an
elite class bound by close ties of honor and tradition, a family of sorts. The
would-be goodfella was accepted under the tutelage of Paulie Cicero (Paul
Sorvino), the local mafia boss, a figure that is fatherly, honorable, and even
caring. He was depicted, notes writer Douglas Borde as “one of those
old-fashioned, anachronistic noble elder gangsters… [who] refuses to have
anything to do with drug dealing” (cited in Yaquinto 169). In stark contrast,
Belfort gets the grinning, gleeful, coked-out, humming Mephistopheles played by
Matthew McConaughey.
In Belfort’s first day on the job, the experienced broker explains why
it is not in their interest to ever let the client make money. The
“number one rule on Wall Street” is that “nobody knows if a stock is gonna go
up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles, least of all stockbrokers. It’s all
a fugazi.” Belfort corrects, “Fugayzi. It’s a fake,” he explains. “Fugayzi,
fugazi, it’s a whazy, it’s a woozy, it’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s
never landed. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real.” If the
client asks to cash in on his investments, that would make it real; the broker thus
should only line his own pockets and keep the client churning his portfolio, so
the commissions keep rolling in. After the above speech, McConnaghey’s
character hums Belfort a tune and the latter joins in. Later, there’s a callback
to that tune, hummed by the entire Stratton Oakmont mob. They’ve absorbed Wall
Street’s ethos; like the ever-present whores at company gatherings, clients are
there to be screwed and sent on their way. In fact, the drumming, thumping and
rumble singing becomes the anthem of Belfort’s firm, and why not? The almost
feral, tribal tune suggests the wild war cry of barbarians on constant,
ruthless rampage.
DiCaprio’s Robin Hood-in-reverse assembles a team of merry men that are
as far from established stockbrokers (or other representatives of corporate
America) as humanly possible. Petty thugs, drug dealers, and high-school
dropouts one and all, Belfort’s devoted minions are Robbie “Pinhead” Feinberg
(Brian Sacca), Alden “Sea Otter” Kupferberg (Henry Zebrowski), the
dreadfully toupeed Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff (P.J. Byrne), “The Depraved Chinaman”
Chester Ming (Kenneth Choi), and Brad Bodnick (Shane Bernthal), a neighborhood
hothead known as the Quaalude King of Bayside. “Give them to me young, hungry,
and stupid,” Belfort professes, “and in no time I’ll make them rich.” This crew
might not be as dangerously violent—or concerned with codes of honor and
tradition—as the filmmaker’s former cinematic male camraderies, but the
familiar testosterone brotherhood is pure Scorsese. Stratton Oakmont’s
enforcer is Belfort’s own galvanic, short-fused dad (Rob Reiner), who screams
expletives about expenditures and debauchery even as he debates the appropriate
amount of pubic hair on strippers and prostitutes—all bought and paid for with
company cash.
It is impossible to categorize
Scorsese’s film as a straightforward career movie because we are not given any
information about the actual career of its protagonist. Every time
Belfort, breaking the fourth wall, starts explaining his Darwinian financial
wheeling and dealing, he stops mid-sentence to interject something along the
lines of “but you don’t really want to hear all of this,” and resume the
activities we’re supposedly interested in: the booze, the broads, and all those
pills and powder. This is another
characteristic which brings the film much closer in tone to the gangster genre.
As Warshaw points out, “the gangster’s activity is actually a form of rational
enterprise…. But this rationality is usually no more than a vague background….
So his activity becomes a kind of pure criminality: he hurts people” (131).
Writing about Goodfellas,
Drew Todd explains, “as with the
classical gangster film, which followed the ethnic gangster’s rise to riches
and power but ended in moralizing tragedy, the question lingers: Do these
movies intend to preach at us, or are they simply interested in showing us
hedonistic people at work and play?” (57). The same question applies even more
readily to The Wolf of Wall Street.
Scorsese has made an excessive film about excess, about the compulsive
appetites of loathsome men, and the director’s own appetite for his subjects
and their sleazy pleasures seems bottomless. The film plays out like the
jittery, fever-pitch, paranoid last thirty minutes of Goodfellas
stretched to three hours; The Wolf of
Wall Street is in the thick of things, all the time, and things happen all
the damn time: stock fraud and money laundering, taping wads of cash to women’s
bodies and sending them on trips to and from Switzerland to deposit the
millions (which gives Jean Dujardin a lot to do with his crocodile smile),
nearly crashed helicopters and nearly sunk ships, snorting off prostitutes’
backsides and blow jobs behind the wheel of a Ferrari, slow-motion Quaalude
binges and sped-up coke orgies, drugged-out, frenzied montages to music,
elaborate tracking shots, fast dollies and faster whip-pans.
While I will not engage in an
in-depth discourse analysis, it is difficult not to note the varied and
vociferous reactions to the film. While one Hollywood veteran approached
Scorsese to shout “Shame on you!” after an Academy screening, Christina
McDowell, the daughter of Tom Prousalis, a business associate of Belfort, attacked
Scorsese and DiCaprio in an open letter published by LA Weekly for glamorizing a lifestyle of “fun sexcapades and coke
binges.” She went on to call the movie “a reckless attempt at continuing to
pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining,” The letter emerged as it
was revealed that Belfort is set to benefit from the newfound notoriety heaped
upon him by Scorsese’s film with a new reality-TV show (Cohen). This prompted
McDowell to argue that the director has aligned himself “with an accomplished
criminal, a guy who still hasn’t made full restitution to his victims,
exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed
and psychopathic behavior.” The film’s star was quick to defend the movie,
stating in an interview, “ultimately I think if anyone watches this movie, at
the end of Wolf of Wall Street,
they’re going to see that we’re not at all condoning this behavior” (Tapley).
It is the viewer’s choice whether to read this all as celebration or as
condemnation; my feelings stray towards the latter. The film might be vulgar
and voyeuristic, but it is not—as accused—amoral. Scorsese and his movie make
it pretty clear that they find this behavior disgusting and the characters
grotesque and degenerate. Like well-dressed animals in luxurious, lushly
decorated terrariums, the characters are filmed in distorting angles, through
warping lenses and often from disorienting perspectives. In A Certain Tendency, Ray notes how disruptive
or dissident variations at the level of both content and form have a chance of
subverting a movie’s intended ideological function; excess, whether thematic or
stylistic, will often create a distancing effect that allows for a critical
attitude in viewers (18). Scorsese’s own criticism of his characters lies
chiefly in his style, which often alienates the audience form what is going on
onscreen. Extreme overhead shots, oblique angles, dizzying close-ups,
distorting wide-angle and fishbowl lenses make the characters look grotesque
throughout the film. The distorted, stuttery step-printing in Belfort’s first
helicopter ride (and near-crash) make it difficult for us to imagine he’s
actually having fun, or to want to engage in such behavior ourselves. The
exaggerated slow motion when Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill, the Joe Pesci to
DiCaprio’s De Niro) gets a business idea, played over mock-heroic opera music,
is not dramatic as much as it is farcical; the humor is heightened especially
when he starts slurring “Steve Madden” as he frantically hits a table with his shoe.
A God’s eye view of Belfort’s ravaged hotel suite after his Vegas bachelor
party makes the characters look not only unhinged, but also objectifies them
and draws our attention to how small and utterly unheroic they are.
At the level of content, Scorsese’s implied critique is perhaps more
obvious but occurs more rarely. The high—or low—point of the film is a Quaalude
bender that spirals into comic madness. Experiencing a delayed reaction to
decades-old drugs, Belfort and Azoff skip the tingle, slur, drool, and amnesia
stages and discover a whole new stage: cerebral palsy. A blubbering, freaking
out Azoff stuffs his face and passes out. Belfort, almost fully paralyzed
during a panicked phone call about the federal investigation and his money, pulls
himself to his car one agonizing inch at a time, a painfully slow and hilarious
race against time to stop Azoff from talking shop over a tapped phone. The
childishness of such behavior is made explicit when Belfort, in a bird’s eye
view again, falls backward and starts crawling, “like [his daughter] Skylar,”
only to exclaim, “Fuck! The kid makes it look so easy.” The sequence culminates
in an epic, explosively funny battle over the kitchen telephone between two men
with completely obliterated motor skills.
But there is a sick sense of pleasure to be gleaned from the alpha male
posturing, profit-making, and howling. The film is so acerbic you almost leave
with a sour taste in your mouth, a scathing satire unremittingly cynical and
critical, but it’s also honest. If there was no appeal to this kind of
behavior, no one would ever engage in it; if the “good life” wasn’t alluring
and the system didn’t allow for so many clear getaways, there would be no
Jordan Belforts. The movie fascinates as much as it disgusts; by the end we’re
fascinated by our own disgust and disgusted by our fascination, but there are
grander ideas at stake here than Wall Street corruption. As Shadoian writes,
“the [gangster] genre speaks to not merely our fascination/repulsion with
aspects of our socioeconomic milieu that we prefer to shut our eyes to, but
also to our fascination/repulsion with our most haunting depths of ourselves….
to deal [these films] means facing those contradictions in ourselves that we
evade by our adherence to social norms and to appeasing self- and national
concepts” (2). At its caustic core, The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie
about addiction, not to drugs, power, or money, so much as to a way of life, to
all the empty, glittering promises of the American Dream, false promises we
eagerly, if silently, agree on, a collective handshake on fiction-made-truth.
In a passionate defense of the film, David Cohen of Variety compares Scorsese’s movie to Scarface—Hawks, not De Palma, writing,
“maybe The Wolf of Wall Street would have benefited from some Old
Hollywood-style meddling, because there seems to be some confusion among
viewers and critics about something that seems to me as clear as the titles of Scarface:
Every incident in
this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of
this picture is to demand of the government: ‘What are you going to do about
it?’ The government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?”
Indeed, a number of key scenes suggest Scorsese was trying to sound the
alarm about America’s passivity in the face of Wall Street’s depredations. When
Belfort shows his low-rent hucksters how to hook a rich “whale” for their
pump-and-dump schemes, they snicker and laugh while the mark, Kevin, is on
speaker. Belfort flips Kevin the bird with both fingers while seducing him over
the phone. Scorsese puts his camera right behind the phone. We’re looking at
Belfort and his brokers as if they’re pitching us, laughing at us,
flipping us the bird. And so they are. America is the whale. We are
Wall Street’s marks.
Goodfellas, Scorsese’s finest plunge into the low life, ends on
Henry Hill’s teasingly ambiguous smile. In The Wolf of Wall Street’s
last moments, Scorsese turns his gaze on Belfort’s audience, suggesting it is
our own greed—or at least naiveté—that feeds his. The reason guys like Belfort
exist is because we, their enablers, are as addicted as they are. Like Belfort,
we want more, more, more, never getting enough of anything, We get a contact
high from following the stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, con artists, CEOs’ (or
whatever they might be) exports, we egg them on and rejoice when they skirt the
rules that restrict the rest of us. We turn them into disreputable folk heroes,
reveling in and living vicariously through their success, letting them
represent us even as they’re robbing us blind. The addiction, ours and
theirs, is to the thrill of the theft, of the narrow escapes, the lies they
tell, and the lives they ruin. The problem is not that we might want to be like
Belfort, but that we already are. Horrifying as it is, Scorsese’s moral
message boils down to the implication with which I started this essay. As
Belfort himself says in an impassioned speech to the brokers at his firm, “This
is Ellis Island here, people. I don’t care who you are, where you’re from,
whether your relatives came here on the fucking Mayflower or on an inner tube
from Haiti. This right here is the land of opportunity. Stratton Oakmont is
America!”
Works
Cited
Canby, Vincent. “Al Pacino Stars in Scarface.”
New York Times. 9 Dec. 1983. Web. 21
Apr.
Cashmore, Ellis. Martin
Scorsese’s America. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009.
Print.
Child, Ben. “The Wolf of Wall
Street Criticized for ‘Glorifying Psycopathic Behavior.’” The
Guardian. 30 Dec. 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/30/wolf-of-wall-street-christina-mcdowell-letter-martin-scorsese?CMP=ema_861&commentpage=1
Cohen, David S. “Does Wolf of
Wall Street Glorify Criminals? No.” Variety.
31 Dec. 2013. Web.
24 Apr. 2015.
http://variety.com/2013/film/news/wolf-of-wall-street-is-this-generations-scarface-1201016119/
Drew, Todd. “The History of Crime Films.” Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. 2nd
ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univeristy Press,
2006. Print.
Ebert, Roger. “Casino.” Rogerebert.com. 22 Nov. 1995. Web. 22 Apr. 2015.
Ehrenstein, David. The Scorsese Picture:
The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese. New York: Carol
Publishing Group, 1992.
Jameson, Frederic. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text. 1979: 130-148.
JSTOR Journals. Web. 8 March 2015.
McDowell, Christina. “An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf
Himself.” LA Weekly. 26 Dec. 2013. Web. 24 Apr.
2015. http://www.laweekly.com/news/an-open-letter-to-the-makers-of-the-wolf-of-wall-street-and-the-wolf-himself-4255219
Pond, Steve. “‘Shame on You!’ Says Academy Member to Martin Scorsese at
Wolf of Wall
Street Screening. The Wrap.
22 Dec. 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2015. http://www.thewrap.com/Martin-Scorsese-Wolf-of-Wall-Street-Academy-Screening-Shame-on-You/
Rafter, Nicole. Shots in the
Mirror: Crime Films and Society. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York:
Oxford Univeristy Press, 2006. Print.
Ray, Robert B. A Certain Tendency
of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Pres, 1985. Print.
Shadoyan, Jack. Dreams and Dead
Ends: American Gangster/Crime Films. Cambridge, Mass.
and London: The MIT Press, 1977.
Tapley, Kristopher. “Leonardo DiCaprio Says Wolf of Wall Street Critics ‘Missed the Boat
Entirely.’” Hitfix.com. 30 Dec. 2013. Web. 24 Apr.
2015. http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/leonardo-dicaprio-says-wolf-of-wall-street-critics-missed-the-boat-entirely#fSyh0w3hDgwyC0HA.99
Warshow, Robert. “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” The Immediate Experience. By Warshaw.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974: 127-33. Print.
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Yaquinto, Marilyn. Pump ’Em Full
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ReplyDeleteCould not agree more, when it comes to Scarface
ReplyDelete