Yeah the Wolf Of Wall Street is such a weird work of art in that it is structured to display Wall Street as full of pathetic, power hungry losers but then the movie basically totally undercuts its political message by spending every scene trying to make Wall Street people as sexy and “virile” as they possibly can.
It ends up just making the people the movie is supposedly exposing as “villains” look super cool and enviable (that guy drove home fucked up and totally destroyed his lambo, damn that guy partied hard and is rich as fuck I want to be him!) to exactly the wrong kinds of people and I think because of that it is a really problematic work of art.
I distinctly remember the scene with the government official, who is trying to do right and stop the main character, riding on the subway and the subtext might as well be conveyed over a loudspeaker that this guy is the biggest loser in the whole movie.
Couple this fact with the movies general conclusion that “this is just how people are, we can’t stop it” and yeah I think you have a movie that can actually meaningfully further poison the brains of the kinds of people who are likely to go into finance anyways.
Yeah Marty really did us a disservice with making Belfort look so “good”, I mean at least in Goodfellas at least Marty makes Henry Hill look like the coke addicted scumbag he was, Wolf of Wall Street was more like the My Blue Heaven version of Henry Hill’s life.
Now we get every idiot who becomes a stock broker or on r/wallstreetbets or r/superstonk thinking they’re going to he the next Jordan Belfort thanks to The Wolf of Wall Street, and they might not actually be wrong since the SEC and FEC both seem feckless and toothless.
Yeah the Wolf Of Wall Street is such a weird work of art in that it is structured to display Wall Street as full of pathetic, power hungry losers but then the movie basically totally undercuts its political message by spending every scene trying to make Wall Street people as sexy and “virile” as they possibly can.
It ends up just making the people the movie is supposedly exposing as “villains” look super cool and enviable (that guy drove home fucked up and totally destroyed his lambo, damn that guy partied hard and is rich as fuck I want to be him!) to exactly the wrong kinds of people and I think because of that it is a really problematic work of art.
I distinctly remember the scene with the government official, who is trying to do right and stop the main character, riding on the subway and the subtext might as well be conveyed over a loudspeaker that this guy is the biggest loser in the whole movie.
Couple this fact with the movies general conclusion that “this is just how people are, we can’t stop it” and yeah I think you have a movie that can actually meaningfully further poison the brains of the kinds of people who are likely to go into finance anyways.
Yeah Marty really did us a disservice with making Belfort look so “good”, I mean at least in Goodfellas at least Marty makes Henry Hill look like the coke addicted scumbag he was, Wolf of Wall Street was more like the My Blue Heaven version of Henry Hill’s life.
Now we get every idiot who becomes a stock broker or on r/wallstreetbets or r/superstonk thinking they’re going to he the next Jordan Belfort thanks to The Wolf of Wall Street, and they might not actually be wrong since the SEC and FEC both seem feckless and toothless.