The Big Bad Wolf of Wall Street

So I haven’t posted anything in awhile, partly because I’ve been busy with other projects, and partly because I haven’t found a topic that really drove me to write anything, and partly. So I apologize to anyone who has actually been anticipating my follow-up to my only real post. Hopefully I’ll manage to be more consistent in the future but I can’t promise anything. That being said let’s get down to it.

This is going to be about the recent film from Martin Scorsese The Wolf Of Wall Street. As such, this post will contain spoilers for those of you who haven’t seen the film. Now that the obligatory spoiler is out of the way what follows will be my opinion of the movie followed by my response to the sorts of criticisms it has been getting for its portrayals of the hedonistic acts and its female characters.

Just to put it out front, I loved this movie. When I heard that Scorsese would be releasing a new movie during 2013 I was admittedly quite excited. I’ve never been one to binge on his movies or re-watch them as much as I do with the works of some other directors. But I would be lying if I said I hadn’t enjoyed each of his films I had seen. When the first trailer for Wolf was released I was surprised to see that it was accompanied by the driving beat of Kanye West’s Black Skinhead, chiefly because the trailer didn’t seem to have any black characters and the movie seemed to be about stock brokers. But I couldn’t help but become more excited as I saw the sheer debauchery of the trailer. Further, I was incredibly excited to see how Jonah Hill would perform hot on the heels of his last Oscar nomination for Money Ball(At the time of posting this he was just nominated for his second Oscar, so congratulations to him.). I’ll admit I went to see this movie on Christmas morning, continuing my year old tradition of going to see very not Christmas like movies. Last year it was Django Unchained. I’m not sure why I happened to pick two of the most offensive, and polarizing mainstream films in recent memory for Christmas morning. Maybe it comes from some subconscious desire to detox from the forced good-will and togetherness that has always bugged me about the Christmas season. My own subconscious desires aside, Scorsese’s film was unabashedly not about the transformative power of human kindness and good-will during the holiday season. Instead it showcased the ever-present temptations humans are faced with when presented with opportunity and means to do terrible things, to others, and themselves. Will all humans choose this path, absolutely not, but it is undoubtedly a path available. I went into the movie with an expectation that it was at-least good, based on pre-release reviews from the few critics I follow. The overwhelming consensus was that it was going to be a very funny movie. While watching the film in an almost entirely empty theater, (one middle aged woman in the back row and a thirty-something year old man in the isle across from me) I found myself laughing a fair amount in the early sequences of the movie. Partly at the ridiculousness of what was going on, such as Leo and Jonah smoking crack, or Matthew Mcconaughey’s portrayal of a coked out Wall Street mentor to a young Jordan Belfort. My laughter quickly subsided, (with the exception of a few moments that were played explicitly comically such as, the Popeye moment, which I’m sure no one will be forgetting any time soon.) and was replaced by sheer disgust mixed with a sort of sick fascination as I wondered how far Jordan Belfort could possibly go within the bounds of an R-rated movie.

Seeing the movie on Christmas may not have been the best idea because it really messed with my mental state long after I had left the theater. Part moral sickness, part confusion, and part political outrage over the final moments of the movie, something I’m sure Scorsese intended. I was not in a good state to participate in the holiday’s rituals. But I got through the day and let the film sit with me awhile as I watched Facebook and the internet in general erupt into people who loved the movie, and people who were disgusted that such a film could even exist. Reading the arguments of those who hated it I couldn’t help but be a little bit suspicious of the outrage. Mostly because there are plenty of movies that come out every year that go at least as far if not farther when it comes to disturbing and disgusting content and characters, I’m looking at you last scene of Killer Joe. Wolf of Wall Street just had the benefit and curse of being widely released by a major director, staring some of America’s sweethearts. Further, it had the added curse of being politically topical despite being set during the 1980s. In other words, all eyes were on this movie from the moment the first trailer surfaced.

But let’s move onto these criticisms. The two major ones I’ve encountered that, the film is sexist towards women and/or misogynistic due to its portrayals of female characters and the way the film’s male leads treat them; and that it glorifies the deplorable business and life practices of these thuggish stock brokers and ignores the very real ways that these actions in the 80s and in more recent years have torn apart families, and destroyed the lives of innocent bystanders and those involved. So I’ll address them in that order.

Can the film be interpreted as sexist? By this I mean, can the film itself, and by extension, those who made it be called overtly sexist due to their complicity in the creation of the film? Yes, it can and it’s not a very hard jump to make. However, I argue that this claim ignores some very important nuances of the film’s structure and wrongly applies the obvious and undeniable sexism and misogyny of the films main characters onto the film’s creators. Allow me to explain, Jordan Belfort and his inner circle the film focus on are very obviously sexist, and misogynistic there isn’t really a case to be made against that. The constant parades of strippers, prostitutes, and emotionally and eventually physically abusive relationships the main characters have with their wives made that abundantly clear. These men are womanizing and abusive on just about every level to just about every female character they come across. But as is often the case portrayal is not the equivalent of endorsement.

Scorsese is not unaware of this fact and in adapting the memoir of Mr. Belfort he portrayed what this man was really like. He is not a shining bastion of the ideal Self-Made man, he is a deplorable thug and a warning sign for how far people will go to get and live how they want. And in many ways Jordan is on the same moral ground as Scorsese’s leads in his more traditional gangster films. The difference is Belfort’s activities had a certain air of legitimacy since they were conducted in America’s financial sector; and I believe that Scorsese is trying to force the audience to draw these parellels to his famous gangsters.

Now I’m not arguing that Scorsese’s choices in this film weren't dangerous. Every person takes something different out of the media they consume and The Wolf Of Wall Street is no different. Historically, mostly innocuous art has gone on to inspire horrible acts. Think of Helter Skelter, or Catcher in The Rye. Undoubtedly, some men will leave the theater admiring Jordan and his compatriots wishing they could live the life of luxury and excess portrayed in the film. Much in the way many men I’ve spoken to about films like Fight Club seem to miss the fact that it is ultimately a story about love, that shows how misguided and dangerous the narrator’s behavior really is. But that’s a topic for another post. I would be remiss to not concede that this film can have dangerous effects on society, and it fully deserves the rating it received. But I think you would be hard pressed to find many pieces of great art intended for adults that aren’t dangerous in that way. I think with all media consumption, but especially with films like this we need to hold the consumers to a higher level of responsibility when it comes to their reflection on these sorts of works. Instead, it seems, we tend to point blame to those who create art that focus on ‘anti-heroes’ who aren’t really heroic in any way. What we need, are consumers who are willing to engage in the sort of self-reflection that art, and life in general requires. But before I go too far into a rant I’d like to address the other side of a gendered interpretation.

Namely, the film’s portrayal of its female characters as fully-formed characters. It has been argued that these characters are only there to be eye-candy and or serve the sexual interests of the male leads in the film, and really have no defining character of their own. I believe that is a fair argument, but it wouldn’t really make sense for it to be any other way.

First of all I’m willing to afford Scorsese the benefit of the doubt on this one. I don’t believe that he is naïve enough to have done this unconsciously. But I’d like to keep my argument in the bounds of logic of the film itself. Once again I entirely concede that these female characters don’t have all that much character or definition outside of the lives of the male characters. But there is an important part of the film that I believe has been ignored by most of these arguments. It is not as though the camera is dropping into slices of reality as they happened without context. The viewer is not just an omnipotent entity or even a fly on a wall. Instead, the viewer is being guided along a series of narrow corridors led ever further down by the narration of The Wolf of Wall street himself, Jordan Belfort. It is ultimately, his story of how he recalls events and how he feels about them and how he wants to establish them. As such, any portrayal of a character, including himself, is going to be through his lens, affected by his biases, and his pathological conditions.

We have already established that Jordan is a terrible individual, and given that he spends the majority of the film under the influence of one substance or another it’s even more difficult to believe his account as an objective telling of what transpired. The film even takes time to establish that his memory is faulty and he is very much an unreliable narrator. Think of the scene in which he recalls driving home from the country club while on lewds. His image of the world is very warped and as such, it makes sense that female caricatures reflect the reasons he values them in the first place. His account stresses their physical attractiveness and their sexual prowess; the only two things Jordan seems interested in throughout the film besides drugs money and his fraternity like relationship with his inner circle.

In a particularly striking moment that has been rightly called the rape scene, Jordan’s wife refuses his advances. But then Jordan’s account cuts to them having sex that she seemingly agreed to. However as most have argued this really doesn’t count as consent. But notice that Jordan chose to omit what exactly led to coitus. Further he omits almost all financial details of how being stock broker actually works, but give a large monologue about the nature of Quaaludes. Once again Jordan shows that he is willing to omit aspects of reality and chooses instead to focus on things that are of interest to him; mainly drugs, money, and pussy. As a result the totally un-nuanced and frankly disgusting portrayal of women makes sense in the logic of the film. Of course this is a risky move as there are no guarantee young men seeing this movie will understand the logic of the film and it is possible that young men will leave the theater thinking that women have no internal existence or intellectual/emotional life outside of the men in their lives. But all it takes is a willingness to reflect on what you’ve just witnessed and an ability to distance yourself from Jordan’s actions to begin to understand the warped reality he has created for himself.

Let’s move onto the second major criticism: that the lifestyles and business practices of Jordan’s company and friends are portrayed in a way that ignores the very real impact these activities on humans. While the film does not have a monologue about morality delivered by The Peanuts at its completion, it does show that in the end almost all of the characters are met with some form of consequences. I admit that these consequences are not all that terrible given disgusting nature of what they are meant to be punishing. But instead of wishing Scorsese had had characters die and or end up in horrible conditions to gain a self-serving catharsis, understand that Scorsese was portraying the reality of these men’s situations. Upon arriving in jail Leo’s Belfort utters a line along the lines of, “I admit I was terrified when I arrived in prison, but then I remembered…. I was rich.” followed by a scene of him playing tennis on a court that would put some country clubs to shame. Is it ludicrous that he was placed into prison with seemingly fantastic conditions? Absolutely, but we must also remember that these prisons do exist for “white collar” criminals such as Belfort. Our disgust at him getting off easy is really disgust at our own prison and legal system for allowing so many to rot away as career prisoners in far worse conditions for generally far more innocuous crimes.

This is not a new phenomenon either, our very real outrage over the way the legal system has dealt with CEOs of the financial sector who helped bring about the recent economic collapse shows that we can fathom that unbalanced incarceration practices are wrong. But when this reality is portrayed on the big screen we seem to forget that oftentimes these men do get off relatively unscathed legally.

On the familial side, Jordan loses his wife and daughter, and rightfully so, given his abusive actions. It is fair to point out that the film doesn’t linger very much on what happened to all the people that Jordan screwed over during his run as the Wolf including his inner circle; but once again in the context of the storytelling logic of the film it shows that Jordan just truly doesn’t reflect on who he had to climb over to get to where he was. But really I think most of us know someone who was economically ruined by predatory lending and brokerage practices in the recent meltdown so does the film really need to spell that out for us. Instead Scorsese decides to portray Wall Street from the inside and expose the ways in which even if we despise Jordan for his personal life and his business practices will still allow these sorts of people to fill a room and hold our rapt attention. A point driven home by the final moments of the film in which, I believe Scorsese is holding up a mirror to the audience that he believes sat complacent for the previous 3 hours allowing Mr. Belfort a free pass for the sake of entertainment. In closing I believe that Scorsese is challenging the audience to really look at ourselves and our political, legal, and economic systems in such a way that calls for more accountability on all levels of society; and on that level I believe Scorsese and his crew suceeded.

So If you made it this far thanks a lot of reading, and I’d love to hear what you have to say so feel free to leave a comment about what you think of the film, my post, things you’d like to hear me rant about in the future, or whatever you feel like commenting about. Thanks again for sticking through this one; I know it was pretty long.