The Wolf of Wank Street

Jamie wrote:

THE WOLF OF WANK STREET


The Wolf of Wall Street is an incoherent mess of ostentatious set-pieces, one-dimensional characters and at just under three hours, a tiresome anti-climax. So why has it become so damn popular?

The Wolf of Wall Street is the latest offering by the collaborative dream-team of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, which has so far brought us such timeless classics as Shutter Island and The Aviator (okay, I won’t be mean, they’ve also done The Departed and Gangs of New York together). Their latest collaborative offering is a movie adaptation of the fuck-and-tell story of beady-eyed, steroid-sweating wankstain and sociopath Jordan Belfort; a real-life, smooth-talking stockbroker simulator that escaped from a Soviet laboratory hell-bent on producing the most single-handedly selfish and morally stunted confidence criminal in an attempt to overthrow and expose the inherent contradictions of capitalism in the most cataclysmic, vacuous and one-note manner that could be potentially conceived.

The film is a three-hour conveyor belt of women-as-objects for sex, women-as-objects for drugs, and the unseen, unwashed masses of working class people actually creating wealth who are perceived as savings-as-objects to be manipulated, ruined and exploited so that the balls-to-the-wall frenzy of empty hedonism may continue without so much as a recess for snacks and a shower. The film is perfect viewing for adolescent teenagers afraid of being caught looking at pornography on the family computer, as they can claim that this is art, or homework, or an essential consumptive fragment of the cultural zeitgeist. Nevertheless, let’s look at the positives;

Leonardo DiCaprio displays a varied, high-octane, yet nuanced performance of Machiavellian intent. However, I have a worry here; Jordan Belfort is pondscum, whereas DiCaprio is a likeable, charismatic environmentalist and Hollywood heartthrob. Much like the Gordon Gekko effect of ‘Wall Street’ becoming the pro-capitalist film that Oliver Stone did not want to make, our central performer almost gives too much of himself to the role. Despite all the trials, tribulations, betrayals and backstabs, DiCaprio’s Belfort is still an anti-hero, a man against the world, a Robin Hood of the 1%; in many ways, a dark truth about unfettered capitalism, in the sense that whilst society and morality tells you that acting in this way is reprehensible, the very nature of neoliberal economics necessitates that victors of this brutal competition for wealth are as amoral, self-interested and existentially detached as Belfort claimed he was. A cautionary tale, this is not.

Jonah Hill’s performance is similarly incredible, and his mixture of comic turn and drug-fuelled cynicism is going to do wonders for his career as a serious actor, growing up from Superbad and improving on his subtle, supporting role in Moneyball alongside Brad Pitt. However, if Scorsese was trying to turn these loveable stars into despicable wretches to show what the system does to ordinary folk, it has catastrophically backfired. Already the internet is exploding with admiration for these ambitious, driven businessmen, the movie being quoted out of context left, right and centre to condone the individualism augmented by the status quo, the cruelty of contemporary austerity politics, and reinforcing the ‘greed is good’ mentality that has gripped the west since the 1980′s.

The biggest problem I have with the film is that it believes it cannot have an ideological stance on the issues, which is inherent impossible. Without getting my philosophy schlong out onto the desk and smacking the reader round the face with it like an angry Jesus with his last fish, I invite the reader to consider the approach of cultural theorist, Marxist-Hegelian-Lacanian academic and general good egg Slavoj Zizek: it is when you are trying your hardest not to be ideological, that you are at your most ideological- and this is where Scorsese’s critique falls flat, as it is essentially the following: oh, if only we had caught this fucker sooner. That’s it; not, oh shit, people like this actually exist, and not only get out of prison within 22 months, but they get to be creative consultants for Hollywood movies about their own misdeeds, but basically, oh, if only we had stopped him from being silly, none of this would have happened. As if Belfort is the only fruitcunt that could be plucked from the Wall Street tree.

The irony is that the best scenes are the ones where Belfort is in cagey exchanges with the FBI who are gradually following the evidence, but even then, the opportunity is used to basically play it as anti-establishment fare. Yeah, fuck the FBI, we are unstoppable, the government can’t stop us etc. and to an extent, this plays into the whole Robin Hood for the rich angle that Scorsese definitely didn’t want to occur intentionally. The guy in real life, rather than rotting in gaol (yeah, that’s right, I’m spelling it that way, I’m bringing it back) for the rest of his years as he without doubt should, he cut a deal…by betraying his so-called friends, working-class guys who had been seduced by his promise of wealth through obedience. Not only is this guy a sociopath, he’s also a coward.

In terms of originality, the film is also lacking. 2000′s Boiler Room was literally about Jordan Belfort’s stock fraud, and whilst it wasn’t Oscar-worthy, it was witty and decent enough. The only difference between Boiler Room and The Wolf of Wall Street is that the darlings of the Hollywood inner circle didn’t produce, market and throw money at Boiler Room. I would also be the first person to acknowledge that fact that the WOWS is also a better made movie than Boiler Room, but the point remains.

Perhaps the more interesting thing about a popular movie is not so much its content, but its reception. Moviegoers seem to be reveling in this Hollywood financial world, as if it were a caricature, a harmless cipher that couldn’t possibly happen in the cotton-wool world of iPhones, housing bubbles and taking back our taxes from the lumpen-proletariat. Toby Young, who when he’s not dismantling curricula or impersonating a thumb, is apparently a film critic, goes as far as to deny that this sort of world ever existed, seeing it as a left-wing attack on his banking buddies. This view, of course, is completely null and void considering that the movie is essentially a scene-by-scene reconstruction of Jordan Belfort’s actual memoirs; yes, Toby, he’s real, not a manifestation of the liberal agenda.

Belfort was once a professional confidence trickster, before being publicly imprisoned for fraud and spending years behind bars, admittedly playing tennis and catching up on his light reading in ‘rich prison’- so what does he do now? He tours the world, giving vague and obvious business tips to the gullible and desperately entrepreneurial, in the hope that they will forget that he is essentially one of the world’s experts at selling fuck-all, by paying money to hear him sell them the mystical secret of being able to sell fuck-all. It’s like being witness to an astrology convention, or better yet, seeing the man behind the curtain, but remaining fearful and reverential in the presence of the big green head in The Wizard of Oz. His advice essentially boils down to ‘don’t have goals, have a vision’, which is basically the equivalent of saying ‘don’t mindless do things, have a general plan’, which anyone with a functioning capacity for self-critical cognition would be able to do by themselves without a secular preacher insisting upon it. He maintains that the key to business is ‘reassuring people that you’re trustworthy’, as opposed to those of us who aren’t damaged by sociopathic inclinations, who would say something like, ‘keep your promises; be a trustworthy person’. For Belfort, it’s impossible to conceive of actually being more than an illusion, it is beyond his understanding to actually ‘be’ what you are displaying to the world- and this is where the biggest problem for the film lies.

Jordan Belfort is already riding the media train to success, appearing on Piers Morgan in order to look less of a twat in comparison.

Can you make something entertaining where all the main characters are grossly dislikeable? Whilst Archer and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia show that this brazen self-interest can work in concert with the banter of other similarly damaged characters, they are limited by the fictional world they inhabit; they do reckless things, but they are amusing because they don’t correspond to real pain being caused by real people. When Archer kills a roomful of assassins, or the Always Sunny gang turn a priest into a homeless person over several seasons of black comedy, it is amusing because the wit is without victims, the hi-jinks is limited to the scope of the narrative. Even in Scorsese movies with dislikeable protagonists like Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, we can grow to sympathise with them by understanding their motivations. Yet with the WOWS, we don’t understand Jordan Belfort. At the beginning, we could guess that he wanted to help his family, or his young wife, but once he’s ditched her for a peroxide-blonde supermodel, there’s nobody we can even begin to care about. It’s certainly not funny when Belfort is destroying other people’s lives, nor is it particularly funny when he’s abusing women. Given that there are no redeemable qualities about any of his crew other than the fact they can occasionally be relied upon to beat the shit out of each other, once the first hour and a half has lagged by, I found it very difficult to care about anybody in the film. I wanted to care about the FBI guy, but he was merely a one-dimensional ‘boy scout’ and wasn’t developed anywhere near enough.

To conclude, The Wolf of Wall Street is lucky that it is in the same year as American Hustle, so it doesn’t win the fluffiest, most empty and vacuous over-rated film in Oscar contention, but the fact that people are talking about it in the same vein as 12 Years a Slave and the Dallas Buyers Club is dubious at best. I also rejected Mark Kermode’s point, in that he argues that the film doesn’t glamorize the lifestyle because Jordan Belfort is such an unlikeable lead character. I disagree, because by not making an ideological point about this lifestyle, you are enabling the lifestyle portrayed. By giving Belfort a cameo and allowing him to contribute to casting and creative decisions about how the story should be told, you are giving him an interpretive platform to sell himself; it reminds me of the old saying that you never remember the cops that catch the bad guys, only the bad guys. There is no question that Jordan Belfort will benefit financially from this film- you can imagine the tickets for his Wembley arena talk- ‘the Wolf of Wall Street- Live in London’, wearing a black turtleneck and one of those insufferable hands-free microphones snaking around the back of his head, talking about ‘the vision’, the ‘American dream’ and how awesome it is being filthy rich, even if it means abandoning your loved ones and any semblance of what makes you a three-dimensional human being.

I cannot accept the argument that this sort of behaviour should be left up to the viewer’s interpretation- imagine if 12 Years a Slave gave a ‘neutral account’ of the slave trade, or if Dallas Buyers Club left it ‘up to the audience’ to decide whether or not the decimation of life caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a good or bad thing. In this case, by attempting to make no ideological statement, Scorsese has accidentally made the most ideological statement he could have made. The Wolf of Wall Street is an entrepreneur’s wet-dream; all the money, minimum effort; all the suffering, none of the evidence that the suffering was directly caused by its perpetrators. The film, for all its flaws, is undoubtedly iconic, and will continue to be a reference point for a generation of young people who are disenfranchised by politics, indoctrinated by consumerism and overimpressed by infantile displays of self-destructive machismo and feminine subordination. The problem is that it is most likely to be embraced by the sort of people that are producing the problems that Leonardo DiCaprio himself is directly trying to fix through his philanthropy.