“Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life; they bring to the surface what, in its newest forms and fashions, is always just below the surface.” – Pauline Kael.
It could be said that the hardest thing about being an artist who creates in a popular form is not the friction between art and commerce. Rather, it’s that once a work is available to the public, the artist loses control over the interpretation. Movies, television shows and music belong to the audience once they become available to it. It’s how a song/album critical of the US’s involvement in Vietnam can become the anthem of a president. And it’s how Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street can be accused of glorifying male bad behavior instead of denouncing it.
The main complaint about The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t that it’s not critical of its cast of characters, the dumbest guys in in the room. Instead detractors appear to focus on the same thing they do whenever a movie really shakes them: That it could inspire the behavior that is so obviously criticizing. It happened to Fight Club. It happened to Scorsese’s Goodfellas, too. Throughout the history of popular entertainment, films that have, as Pauline Kael put it, made entertainment out of American anti-heroism, have faced severe criticism one way or another.
American Anti-Heroism
Take Scarface for example. No, not the 1983 film by Brian De Palma. I’m referring to Howard Hawks’ 1932 masterpiece. Howard Hawks is arguably the greatest popular film director of the 20th century, more so than even Ford, Hitchcock or Spielberg. And his Howard Hughes-produced gangster picture is stirring because of this.
Hawks, the entertainer, made art out of the mob life, and he did it as an outlaw. He worked outside of the studio system and, with the support of Hughes, flaunted the film’s “indecency.” The film, from production and through release, was accused of glorifying gangster life. But that’s not the only thing that troubled critics. Thinly-veiled references to real-life gangster Al Capone only made the film even more controversial.
It’s that connection between what we see in our entertainment and what we see in real-life that makes our greatest art and entertainment have an impact. Again, Ms. Kael pointed this out in her repeated viewing and writings of Bonnie & Clyde. But outside of mobsters and outlaws, it’s the people who work within the system that seem to be the greatest anti-heroes of all.
That’s what makes Jordan Belfort’s story so disturbing to supporters and detractors alike. It’s not that cinematically illiterate meatheads will walk out of the film wanting to live the lifestyle of this rich and famous man. And sophisticated audiences who still make that connection aren’t stupid themselves. No, the film simply affects them, strongly and negatively, because it’s an alarming reflection of life, not just American life as we come to learn at the end of the film, but global capitalist life as we experience it today.
Audience Misinterpretation
The Wolf of Wall Street with that in mind is an easy film to misinterpret. No one ever said great art wouldn’t result in great misunderstandings. In fact, just the opposite is often the case.
Take this scene from The Boiler Room for example. We watch a bunch of meathead investors quote Wall Street as if the lives we see in it are something to model ourselves after:
We all know Olive Stone doesn’t intend for Gordon Gekko, another American anti-hero, and his protege played by Charlie Sheen to be role models. Yet, here we are, watching young men who want to live their lives misinterpret the film.
Likewise, there’s this scene from the movie Jarhead, where soldiers watch Apocalypse Now in order to get pumped up for fighting in Iraq:
We know that Coppola wasn’t making a pro-war film, but does that audience realize it? If they do, the certainly don’t care.
It’s not hard for a film to be misinterpreted by a general audience. De Palma’s Scarface certainly has been. Goodfellas has been, too. And in the world of television, most recently, Mad Men, a show terribly critical of white male privilege and the era in which it takes place, became a lifestyle program, inspiring clothing and home decor lines that stand in contrast to the actual message. We aren’t supposed to want to live in this world of bad boy anti-heroes, but as many people I’ve talked to who love the show put it, we begin to feel like “we were born in the wrong time,” meaning it was better, not worse as the show so plainly puts it, back then.
After watching Scorsese’s Raging Bull again one evening, I was struck by how similar the themes in that film where to what we saw in Mad Men nearly 30 years later. Masculinity certainly isn’t being championed in either. And that’s why it’s disappointing that audiences are critical of The Wolf of Wall Street. Because we already know Scorsese’s history of putting white male privilege and masculinity on trial.
The Greatest Gatsbys
Mad Men and The Wolf of Wall Street don’t just share the same critical view of American life. They, along with works like Citizen Kane, also have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in common.
Gatsby is, was and likely forever will be the American story. Rags to riches, rise and fall. That’s the nature of capitalism. In an era where the entire world experienced the worst financial crisis since the great depression, revisiting Gatsby just made sense.
But actually making The Great Gatsby into a film didn’t work. Baz Luhrmann’s flashy, colorful romp through 1920s New York City/Long Island isn’t a bad movie. It’s a fine motion picture, with moments of greatness. The problem with Luhrmann’s film, released in the same year as Wolf and starring the same actor, is that he set out to make a modern Gatsby visually, but didn’t make a modern Gatsby spiritually.
The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort is a better Gatsby than Luhrmann’s Gatsby. And the truth is, every era has its very own Gatsby that captures the same ideas. In the 1940s, it was Kane. In the 1970s, it was The Godfather, Parts I & II. The common thread for all of these movies is our relationship to wealth, what it does to us and how it affects our relationship with others.
Most Americans have an uneasy relationship with wealth, and seeing a film that features, at least by today’s standards, the most raunchy, ridiculous excess that money can buy is uncomfortable. For some people, it was uneasy laughter in a brilliant comedy, but for many others, it was simply offensive.
The truth is The Wolf of Wall Street should be offensive. That’s our relationship with wealth today. And for the Gatsby of our age, The Wolf of Wall Street must shine a light on the ugliest aspects of the system in place, its tendency to reward bad behavior and allow white collar criminals off with a slap on the wrist. It’s not Jordan Belfort’s fault, though. It’s ours, which the movie makes very clear in the end. And that’s why Wolf bites so hard.