by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Wolf of Wall Street, a title ironically used for a Paramount film made
in 1929 starring George Bancroft as a ruthless stockbroker and Olga Baclanova
(in her first talkie) as the female lead. The imdb.com plot synopsis of the
1929 Wolf of Wall Street (which
by the way was issued in February of that year, eight months before the Crash) says, “A ruthless stockbroker sells short
in the copper business and ruins the life of his friends by ruining their
finances.” The 2013 Wolf of Wall Street, the one we watched last night, also deals with a ruthless stockbroker who ruins
the lives of his friends, but he doesn’t involve himself in any business as
socially useful as copper; he’s Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), who really
existed — the film is based on his memoir — who worked his way into a job at a
Wall Street firm owned by a branch of the Rothschild family and got mentored by
a fellow named Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), a name that looms large in the
history of America’s last
predatory age where corporations ran everything and bribed their way into total
control of the political system, the 1890’s, since Mark Hanna was the
unscrupulous political operative who masterminded William McKinley’s election
as president over William Jennings Bryan and was often cited by Karl Rove as
his role model. Hanna’s advice to Jordan is that the whole point of being a
broker is to “move the client’s money from his pocket to yours,” and he also
tells him to masturbate at least twice a day — the first of innumerable bits of
dialogue in this film linking moneymaking to sex and drugs. Alas, Jordan
Belfort’s first day on the job as a fully licensed broker (following a
six-month apprenticeship as a “connector,” which basically means someone who
takes phone calls and connects the brokers to the clients) coincides with the
October 1987 stock-market crash, in which one-fourth of Wall Street’s paper
value disappeared overnight (itself a commentary on how unstable and
unsustainable an economy based on financial speculation really is) and the
venerable Rothschild’s brokerage Jordan was working for ceased to exist
overnight.
With his wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) pushing him to find any kind of work to support them, Jordan signs on to a
sleazy brokerage called Investico operating out of a space in a shopping mall,
and realizes that they’re dealing in so-called “penny stocks,” companies way too shaky to earn a place on the New York stock
exchange, the NASDAQ or any other even remotely credible exchange. Jordan
becomes a superstar at this firm when he talks up a Midwestern startup that’s
doing radar research in a garage and makes it sound like the next big high-tech
buy, and quickly he leaves the shopping mall to start a brokerage of its own,
calling it “Stratton Oakmont” because he realizes two big heavy-duty
Anglo-sounding names will give his motley crew of white ethnics (plus one token
Asian) credibility with potential customers. He assembles his friends Donnie
Azoff (Jonah Hill), Manny Riskin (Jon Favreau), Nicky Koskoff (P. J. Byrne) —
whom he contemptuously nicknames “Rugrat” for his ill-fitting toupee — and the
token Asian, Chester Ming (Kenneth Choi), as his brokerage crew, and they build
Stratton Oakmont into a huge brokerage that graduates from penny stocks to blue
chips (Jordan’s strategy is to sell potential clients the blue-chip issues and then graduate them to the far more speculative piles of
shit in his inventory) and then to the crème de la crème of the financial sector, Initial Public Offerings
(IPO’s). An IPO is supposedly the first time a stock in a particular company is
made available to the general public, though given the legerdemain of the financial world companies like Firestone that
have existed (and been publicly traded) for decades can buy back all their own
stock, then resell it and that is
also called an IPO. The IPO that puts Jordan on the map in the brokerage world
is for the Steve Madden company, which makes high-end women’s shoes and whose
founder, Steve Madden (Jake Hoffman), is a wimp barely more functional than the
supposed art “genius” Monroe in Untitled. Jordan keeps 85 percent of the stock in Madden’s company for himself,
though he lists it in Madden’s name, which starts a bidding war on Wall Street
that ultimately earns him a cover story in Forbes and the title, “The Wolf of Wall Street.” He’s
furious at the way the article portrays him but his wife assures him that all publicity is good publicity, and so it proves; the Forbes portrayal of Jordan as an unscrupulous market
buccaneer attracts dozens of aspiring brokers to want to work for him and
enables him to expand his operation even further.
When he’s not playing Master
of the Universe with other people’s money Jordan’s principal diversions are sex
and drugs — particularly prostitutes (in one of the in-character narrations
DiCaprio delivers as Jordan throughout the film, he rates them as high-,
middle- and low-end, saying that the low-end “skank” ones require either a
condom or a shot of penicillin immediately after you fuck them, though of
course Jordan and his partners plow on regardless, in more ways than one) and
Quaaludes, which were so totally outlawed in 1982 (the government not only put
Quaaludes themselves on Schedule 1 but the precursor chemicals out of which
they were made as well; later the DEA tried to do the same thing with
methamphetamines but were unable to because the big drug companies that made
cold medicines were able to lobby and get the bans on ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine blocked) that their scarcity value shot up and they became the
drug of choice (along with cocaine, which Jordan and company used as much as an
antidote for the tranquilizing effects of the Quaaludes as for its own
pleasures) for Jordan and his entourage. One wouldn’t think that people
involved in a high-stakes business that operates 24/7 worldwide and in which
fortunes can be made or lost in a matter of milliseconds would use a drug that
would render them almost totally nonfunctional once the big effects kick in,
but apparently they did.
The Wolf of Wall Street is unsparing in its depiction of Jordan and his
colleagues as totally unconcerned with the welfare of any other people — Jordan even dumps Teresa and
remarries to a hot blonde trophy wife named Naomi (Margot Robbie) as casually
as you’d throw out one facial tissue and replace it with a fresh one, and of
course he isn’t any more sexually exclusive to Naomi than he was to Teresa.
There’s a chilling scene, shown in highlight at the opening of the film and
then in greater depth later on, in which they hire a little person to be thrown
through a target of money and casually debate whether or not it will hurt him
(they decide it won’t because little people’s heads are supposedly bigger and
thicker than other people’s), and the film’s sexism is so relentless that one
woman on the Stratton Oakmont staff gets paid $10,000 to have her long hair
crudely shaved off like an admittee to a concentration camp, and even a woman
who was involved in the early days of Stratton Oakmont gets sexually humiliated
in the guise of being recognized for her achievements. Its homophobia is
equally relentless; the worst way Jordan and his male entourage can insult each
other is to call each other “fags,” and the one actual Gay person in the movie
(Jordan’s butler) is dangled off a balcony and then beaten to a pulp, first by
Jordan’s bodyguards and then by the police Jordan bribes to do so, because when
Jordan was supposed to be away the butler staged a Gay orgy in his home and
$50,000 (small change compared to Jordan’s worth) was stolen from a dresser
drawer.
The director is Martin Scorsese — who seems to have the attitude
towards Jordan and his gang he did towards the Mafiosi of his earlier films; he’s so fascinated by them
he’s totally uninterested in even acknowledging, let alone depicting, the social harm they cause —
and the credited screenwriter is Terence Winter, though the film is peppered
with so many uses of “fuck” and “shit” I found myself wondering if “Terence
Winter” was a pseudonym for David Mamet. (I remember reading for years that
Mamet was considered a master at “well-turned dialogue,” and when I finally saw
something he wrote I thought, “Is that all I have to do to be credited with writing ‘well-turned dialogue’ —
make every other word an obscene one?”) Together they managed to make a film
about a highly politically charged issue — the overwhelming importance of the
financial sector in the modern U.S. economy and the total lack of scruples or
conscience among the people who run it — with virtually no expressed point of
view about it at all. Oh, there are a few veiled bits of social commentary at
the beginning that hint at an Occupy-like critique of Wall Street, and a few
bits at the end (especially as Jordan’s scams start to unravel and the
government gets serious about prosecuting him) that feint at making him an Ayn
Rand hero, an individualist heroically standing up against the forces of collectivism,
Big Government and anything that might get in the way of the free spirit of
capitalism. But even Rand would have been hard put to make a hero out of
someone who was basically a swindler, and as in so many movies today the hints
of anti-corporate commentary are just leftover tics from an earlier age of
filmmaking (and an earlier Zeitgeist)
reflecting a more populist America that was suspicious of the rich instead of
virtually worshiping them.
It’s ironic that Leonardo DiCaprio made this movie
the same year as he starred in the latest version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby — also a story about a poor
man who became super-rich through dubious deals and machinations — and that this, not Gatsby (in which he portrayed a much more complex character who reflected his
creator’s decidedly mixed view of the rich), was the film that won him his
Academy Award. DiCaprio manages to nail Jordan Belfort’s energy, salesmanship
and drive — though we still
wonder how Jordan was able to keep his enterprise afloat for so long when he
spent so much of his time pursuing drugs and pussy (I hate using that last word
but it’s an all too obvious reflection of the way Jordan, at least as presented
here, thought about women; apparently the real Jordan Belfort had no objection
to the way his business career was portrayed in the film but was really upset
at the portrayal of his relationship to Naomi, and especially about how it
ended), and rather than making a huge fortune one would expect someone as out
of control of his appetites as Jordan is shown here to lose one and end up on the street, not on Wall Street. The
Wolf of Wall Street is also a typical
modern movie in that we don’t really get to meet anyone who’s actually likable; the characters are all so unattractive — relentlessly
ambitious, money-grubbing, cheerily unconcerned for anyone else’s welfare (in
an early scene with Mark Hanna, Jordan asks isn’t it good if he can make money
for both himself and his client,
and Hanna chews him out as being hopelessly naïve) and interested in women only
as play-toys and possessions. Though it’s clearly a superior movie to American
Hustle (mainly because Scorsese is a much
more exciting director than David O. Russell, and also because Jordan Belfort’s
sex and drug obsessions enable Scorsese to get us out of all those dull offices
and hotel rooms and actually show us things with movie cred!), it’s equally
matter-of-fact in its portrayal of the American ruling class as hopelessly
corrupt and of that corruption as
a fact of life we can’t do anything about except live with and suffer through.
In their combination of vivid depictions of inequality and the futility of
attempting to reverse it, these movies are essentially propaganda aimed at
getting the masses to accept the current social order as the so-called “new
normal,” a phrase a writer in the current Monthly Review has said is itself reactionary.
