Kip Robisch looks at The Wolf of Wall Street and The Hunger Games through a wide lens of popular culture and social narratives.
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A good friend loved The Wolf of Wall Street and gave reasons why—reasons that I thought were very reasonable and in line with what I’m sure Martin Scorsese was hoping would happen to a viewer in the theater. I won’t say I hated the film, but I’ve been thinking about why I think it fails, both as a movie and as a social document, which, at three hours long, a movie pretty transparently reveals as an aspiration. In the bigger-than-three-hour picture, I want to use the film as a vehicle to write about a particular element of black comedy that eats at me now and then. The local bar chat level of reader/viewership is a great thing. I love that we still talk (or try to talk) about art (or what tries to be art).
What I sometimes wonder is why we bother to teach it in some formal way, and why certain movements in criticism that have driven what is supposed to be a clinical, informed discussion of art toward the polarity of two schools–the one nothing more than a taste-driven, ideological conversation for which no college student should have to pay; the other a jargon saturated orgy of self-indulgent poststructuralist nonsense relying on no one with a commitment to sound argumentation to suss it out. In short, The Wolf of Wall Street, along with several other pieces of work that puzzle me in terms of how an analysis works nowadays, has got me thinking about why I want to go back to teaching in a college classroom.
The film could be seen as a post-apocalyptic picture like The Matrix, in which almost no one in the general population knows that the machines have taken over and are making them into slaves. Scorsese’s attempt at black comedy seems to me to be part of the machine’s own apparatus to keep us duped more than something to enlighten us about how to fight and fix the machine. This makes the movie feel like a sell out even when one understands that the central conceit is to reveal Jordan Belfort as the narcissistic, dehumanizing, destructive force—the Matrix Agent—that he is.
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Next door to the theater in which I saw The Wolf of Wall Street, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was playing. Ostensibly a more transparently Orwellian project, Suzanne Collins’s work is some of the worst trash to be produced in many decades. The writing is bad, and the unintentional glorification is of pedophilic sex and violence that, if written by a man, would more likely have resulted in his being hoisted on a cross for his retrograde sensibilities and “obvious issues” about pimping out young girls and then making them fight in a pit. Utterly derivative of better stories that preceded it (most of which were of dubious quality as literature or film–from “The Lottery” to “The Most Dangerous Game” to Logan’s Run), The Hunger Games is part of the YA craze that has gotten adults often only reading material at least six grades below where they should be operating intellectually. That bothers me about half as much as the brand of scholarly elevation it’s been given. Collins’s work has been unjustifiably credited for a sophistication and nuance, both about “being a teenager,” and about and Orwellian craft that matches its Orwellian morality, that the books and films simply do not reveal. The author is not up to that level of subtlety, and has been forced by popularity to claim it as a conscious effort, despite the writing proving otherwise. When the high school where I taught made a big deal out of The Hunger Games, I read it, and recognized a long list—a very old, Aristotelian and proven list, I thought—of why the book should be ignored if possible and only taught as a litmus of mass culture’s tendency to drop its collective IQ when its prurience is being massaged, and by an average masseuse. But that didn’t happen. And, to my surprise, the man who would have been pilloried for writing The Hunger Games might just be the man who will win Oscars in his Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jordan Belfort personae
The Wolf of Wall Street also fits into the hit man movie or slasher genres. It gives you a weapon, a crazy asshole wielding it, hot fake women getting all cut up by the weapon with no real say in their dismemberment, and anonymous victims populating the world around the psycho. Its most interesting feature as a cultural product is that it exhibits all characteristics of the 1980s death throes of the modern era’s brazenly corporatized brand of chauvinism. It poses as something running deeper, and employs black comedy as the central literary device to try and dig to that ambitious depth. It is also fiction posing as nonfiction, and occasionally tips its hand to that effect through the meta-narrative, as in a fourth-wall breaking moment when Belfort changes his Ferrari from red to white to get the facts straight—an indication that his megalomaniacal dishonesty is the only fact on which we can count.
Scorsese’s film is derivative of Casino/Goodfellas with some of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sprinkled throughout (including a mention of the name “Gordon Gekko” to let us all know that Scorsese gets it), but Wall Street was a better movie. Made on the front end of the postmodern era, Stone’s movie employed certain classic elements of rhetoric and narrative that have in the rear end of the postmodern era come to be unfairly devalued. Because we have been trained to degrade elements of structure and moral centering over popularity and cleverness—especially the kind of cleverness that demands too many people shouting, “But that’s the point”—I wonder a couple of things about this film. The first is, “Am I cynical in thinking that a greater number of 20-somethings will want to become Jordan Belfort than the number of 40-somethings who want to bust the Jordan Belforts that dealt themselves raises with American bailout money?” The second is, “What about a class on film or literary analysis distinguishes it anymore from a bar discussion of people very bright and uneducated?”
The latter wonder has been the central concern, I realize, of the justification of the humanities for centuries. Why bother to teach fiction (or fiction posing as nonfiction)? Experts in colleges, for instance, have the charge of explaining to novices not that art matters, but how. Okay, so maybe that’s one difference between the tavern and the classroom. The function of art in the world is nearly impossible to gauge, to quantify, and it doesn’t always work to say, “But that’s the point and what makes great art so beautiful,” because you’ve got the wrong audience for that message. First, they’re getting grades—quantified system. Second, what many of them want out of college is a job with a monetized ethical system—quantified. Third, unless you’re preaching to the choir, they’re in science and finance and coding fields—quantified systems. When teaching a person of an age likely to fall in love with Jordan Belfort, you can’t lead with the value of art. You have to find a way to broach the subject.
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When I worked as a professor, I would sometimes ask my business and science majors, “Do you ever wonder why we bother to teach fiction and poetry? Don’t they seem to run on taste, and ultimately what difference does it make what I like or don’t like?” Almost always nods around the room. “Don’t finance, chemistry, and physics seem more necessary in the world? Computer science—you need that, right? You don’t need art. You can’t measure art or really grade it. So how, honestly, can you teach people what it is?” Nods, a vague sense of being baited, but some suckered right in. “So that’s why businesses never spend any money on advertising.”
Most of them get that. But even my own analogy creeps me out a little, the way a sports analogy tends to creep out someone in gender studies. Postmodernism has failed as a critical apparatus, almost completely, because it has so favored relativism and subject positioning over elements of craft that exhibit expertise and skill that, through an abandonment of standards, it has abandoned as well, ironically, a sense of audience.
And that is, for me, what The Wolf of Wall Street seems inadvertently to be about. Here’s a matter of taste: I do not like most of either Martin Scorsese’s or Leonardo DiCaprio’s work. Here’s a matter of argument: Because I see evidence of their egos trumping their talent. Martin Scorsese made the mafia into Disneyland for America, and I don’t see that as an accomplishment. When he’s good, he’s excellent, and there are always brilliant moments in his films. But what his corpus of work has done violates a basic principle of rhetoric in art that produces what Aristotle (though perhaps not Plato) would consider bad form: it makes us laugh at moments when laughter is not a virtuous response. Our laughing at the ugly, stupid, and cruel makes us feel superior, but our laughing with them indicates a flaw in the art.
That’s pornography. Pornography, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell (another outstanding scholar of art who has been rejected by the postmodern cult of personality), promises us a context we cannot have. It gives us the sex, which we can call realism—there, indeed, wow, are people fucking—but with no real context for the act. It sells us the idea that we get to have the sexual act with no moral connection, consequence, or value beyond the orgasm. And it can collectively protest that sex is a beautiful thing, or that its art is “mere entertainment,” or that the sophistication of porn is in its reflexive strength to reach human emotion. But, in the end, it’s prurience. And analysis with some sophistication might just trump the tavern conversation there. Scorsese’s mafia is just porn, and when a group of guys drinking and watching the game can talk about it in those terms, then the public critic to academic analysis gap is one I love to see closing.
I don’t write that The Wolf of Wall Street is porn from a prude’s hard church pew. To the contrary, the movie made me want to get rich and coked up and have a nearly fictionally beautiful woman’s naked hips in my hands. But that’s one of Scorsese’s problems. That aesthetic of titillation, of pouring the Dionysian so thick over the Apollonian, crafted Martin Scorsese into Martin Scorsese more—sadly more—than the technique of the brilliant filmmaker who took Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and made it work as a film because his ego took a back seat to Wharton’s ego, and because he cast people capable of the humility required. Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer are two of the best actors in film history.
Leonardo DiCaprio is not. He is, like Jonathan Franzen, good at his craft and then rammed down our throats by an industry that keeps stomping its foot and telling us that he is the most brilliant thing ever, a claim born of the values of that industry, the main one of which is making money, not raising the bar on what Aristotle would have called virtue.
When someone gives DiCaprio’s ego its daily pill, he’s outstanding. Blood Diamond is a great piece of acting, as is Catch Me if You Can. And yes, Gilbert Grape, the moral center of which was strong, sound, and again maintaining those elements of modern craft that postmodern craft phobia had just begun stomping out. But watch this: Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Belfort. See a pattern? These are DiCaprio’s choices, and the acting gets more transparently legacy driven, and is often overdone as a result, as we go. This is what happened to Sting, whose brilliant genre hybridization became easy listening music because he started working as Sting more often than as a songwriter. You see it when two of the cuts on a record/cd/album (whatever we call that thing now) are crafted to near perfection by any criteria of musicianship, and the rest are just like the other eight off the last album. It’s what happened to Peter Jackson, who needed someone to tell him and his average writers, who are Not Tolkien and think they are, to shut up and cut 45 minutes out of every Hobbit film. Or just cut two Hobbit films.
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And this is what’s happened in the academic humanities, in the scholastic approach to art criticism that too often abandons the teaching of story and craft for classes in English departments that are not about English—classes called “AIDS” or “Gender Studies” or “Cultural Studies.” Classes that should be taught, but not by sacrificing what has come to seem retrograde about criticism—actually reading a book or viewing a film and applying something more than one lens to that work. Scholars have become monofocal and clubbish (“I’m a Lacanian,” “I’m a Deleuzianal”). Professors are sick of teaching grammar and mechanics, the craft of writing, so they just don’t. They’re sick of having to back up an argument with evidence, because it takes work and has to be trained to happen on the fly in a class environment, so they just say, “trust me” to the students and shout the assertions of racial or gender (hardly ever of class) politics that ensure their acceptance in the context of academia. And so the critique of art becomes a matter of power and taste—the most powerful drive taste—rather than as a matter of careful consideration before adoption or rejection.
I get the sense, and maybe I’m wrong, that English has lost its way. We need to get back to looking at art with a hard eye for what the piece in front of us is doing, including context (so, not quite the New Critical mode), but not lionizing context (so, not quite the poststructuralist mode). To have something beyond a gut-level response to a piece of work—many of which I had during The Wolf of Wall Street, and no, that does not mean it’s done a good job—we need to steer back to certain things, like the laws of thermodynamics or the Socratic syllogism, that just work. There are arguments that work, and narrative devices that have rules by definition. Subject positioning does not negate these rules. Black comedy, for instance, does not function without a high risk of backfiring
What I like about The Wolf of Wall Street is that, like The Hunger Games, it stands as an example of how messed up American culture is—not as a brilliant critique of that culture, but as a child of it. We have to hope for an audience to decide too arbitrarily that “the point” of the work is to examine and critique its society. This is, in my view, evidence of artistic failure, however ball-tickling or cleverly metafictional a work might be. You don’t have to hope for that audience awareness with a great work—with a Lord of the Flies (YA) or a This Side of Brightness (literary fiction). And you don’t need the didacticism of a Pilgrim’s Progress or even “Young Goodman Brown” to get that point across. All of these works, incidentally, have The Devil in them. And so does The Wolf of Wall Street. This raises the stakes on the character to whom an impressionable audience gives its allegiance.
There’s at least one reason it’s even possible for state governments to cut music and art programs from their schools. That reason is the failure of teachers to instruct people in how to judge a book or film through its craft, and find the necessity of art to cultural progress—to human survival—through practice and respect rather than through strident ideological programming. The popularity contest, the cult of personality, might be destroying our taste buds rather than getting us in touch with such lofty ideals as logocentrism or the pleasure of the text. The Wolf of Wall Street could as easily inspire a coke fiend as inspire a better Occupy Wall Street movement.