Fredric Jameson and the Wolf of Wall Street by Burnham Clint; McGowan Todd;

Author:Burnham, Clint; McGowan, Todd;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional
Published: 2019-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

How to Watch The Wolf of Wall Street

Introduction

The Wolf of Wall Street’s ambivalent take on Wall Street is of a piece with Scorsese’s oeuvre (situated by way of comparison with Mean Streets, The King of Comedy [1982], and Goodfellas), but also helps us to think about the vicissitudes of finance capital itself, for the plot of the film can be related dialectically to the Marxist theory of crisis. Following the lead of Jameson’s essay on Dog Day Afternoon, I examine the role of class in the film, finding it figured, first, in the collectivity of Belfort’s sales team, the “crew” he assembles like a robbery gang, but also in the film’s presentation of Stratton Oakmont in opposition to the Wall Street establishment, a presentation that even offers a lesson on the subprime mortgage run that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis. Jameson’s theory of postmodernism then offers a rubric by which to examine especially the media volatilization on offer in the film—its juxtaposition of TV and film is particularly crucial here—as well as more common Scorsese tics and moments of self-reflexivity. A politics of the film, of its unconscious, then can be determined in terms of its non-dit, its unsaid, or at least its propensity for rudely ejecting or killing off characters in a fairly symptomatic fashion. But I finally make an argument for viewing The Wolf of Wall Street as a Utopian film, not only in the ontological sense stressed by Bloch (as a work of art), but also in terms of its most unattractive features, its misogyny and treatment of small people, as well as its more conventional spatialization of the Utopian, via the enclave (although here, again, with the film’s description of the “Guinea Gulch” and the “Guinea gangplank,” we may find something to object to).

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