Martin
Scorsese's latest film, though based on the eponymous memoir of stock
market fraudster Jordan Belfort, is not about the financial crisis.
Belfort had been indicted a full decade before that. But it's like
watching 'M*A*S*H' without thinking of the Vietnam
war. We cannot help but see it through that prism.
As
such, inevitably, many have tried to read a political commentary into
it. Given Scorsese's history in gangster flicks, some have suggested
we're being invited to compare Belfort and his huckster cohorts to
those criminals of yore. Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review starts “imagine the
honey-gravel of Ray Liotta's voice in 'Goodfellas' saying: ‘As far
back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a stockbroker’.”
The film is mostly played as a black comedy. Perhaps it could be seen
as a modern version of Hogarth's 'Rake's Progress',
a salutary tale of the road to ruin.
Yet
others have seen in it a celebration of the Wall Street 'greed is
good' ethos - a hagiography, a bigging up of those big characters, a
revelling in excess. After all, the film is bookended by a corporate
video for Belfort's company and one of his motivational sessions, as
if the whole thing is one big PR statement. Producers Riza Aziz and
Joey McFarlane were themselves former investment bankers. Who had to
win a bidding war to get the rights to his memoirs. (While, needless
to say, he has only repaid a fraction of the money he stole, when
compelled by court orders.)
And
it's a perfect fit, isn't it? One big business which trades in
glamour and appearance sidling up to another. As if to complete the
circle, Belfort himself has said he was 'inspired' by Gordon Gekko
from the 1987 film 'Wall Street'. (Who of course
coined that “greed is good” quote.) Seen that way the film
indulges Belfort's claims for his company Stratton Oakmont - “this
right here is the land of opportunity. This is
America.”
Yet
when asked these questions, Margot Robbie (who plays Naomi, the main female lead) replied:
“Gosh,
I don't know. People keep asking that. I'm still obliged to think I
hope they see a greedy lifestyle and in the end living in excess
won't make you happy. But I don't think we made this movie to tell a
moral story about what's right and wrong.”
And
she's right. The point about the question is that it's the wrong one.
It's like someone who only knows of religious art suddenly coming
across a collection of porn prints, and trying to fit the new wine
inside the old bottles. You can of course criticise the film for
having no political agenda or moral standpoint. But there's no point
in pretending it has one. Not even the wrong one.
Based
on Belfort's memoir, it makes no pretence to objectivity. Almost the
first shot is his sports car changing colour as he shifts the
narrative. It's a distorting mirror. To be precise it's a convex one,
exploding his salesman's grin over the screen. To quote Peter Bradshaw again: “his character gets to the
end of this long movie having learned nothing, conceded nothing and
even physically changed in no obvious way.”
And
apart from him and his cohorts, who gets their face in edgeways? The
schmucks they hoodwink go unseen, out of sight and mind, just the
occasional duped voice over the phone. The FBI, while the
antagonists, are essentially mirror images of the crooked traders.
They're equally swaggering and macho, telling Belfort he's their
“Greneda”. One side has their targets set in sales, the other in
prosecutions – same deal.
The
nearest to a moral voice is Belfort's first wife, Teresa, who
innocently asks why he can't defraud rich investors who can stand to
lose the money. And she's soon swapped for a trophy wife. (Robbie's
Naomi, as mentioned earlier.) In fact it's hard to talk about the
role of women in the film without sounding like some sort of tub
thumper. It's like they took the most virulent feminist critique they
could find and used it as a shooting script. It's like an MTV video
with an R rating and a three hour duration.
Naomi
must be the female character with the longest screen time, but she
never builds into any kind of character. As with everything else,
she's only seen through Belfort's eyes – a hot babe when she's
giving sex, an uptight bitch when she's withholding it. She's not
really any different from the general parade of strippers and hookers
that line up through the film.
Needless
to say, these are as much accoutrements as the sports cars and
designer watches, flesh and blood versions of pointy signs which say
'RICH' and 'FLASH'. In a crass plot to smuggle out money, they
absurdly tape cumbersome wads of notes all over a stripper. That
image feels pretty much like a microcosm.
But
there's more than that. Not only is there no disguising they're
getting the girls purely through money, this is even flagged up. The
cash (dubbed “fun coupons”) is as foregrounded as the girl flesh.
The cash and the girl become equivalent, both seen as emblems of a
winning personality. Notably, the desired location to screw a hooker
is in the office. Very often at your work-desk, in front of your
cheering co-workers. They're part of the same loop as closing the
sale and hitting the targets, public demonstrations of virulence.
Ultimately, sexual desire isn't really the thing. Even when they're
interested in the girls, they're only really interested in
themselves.
The
film becomes a classic example of the sink hole of apoliticism. The
genuine belief that you're not out to make any kind of political
point, that's what makes its politics so virulent. There's no space
for anything else here, beyond these get-rich scams, because what
else is there? But that just raises the question –
what kind of political point ends up being made?
Despite all appearances, 'greed is good' doesn't really cover it.
Watching
the film I was reminded of two quotes I'd read. Pete Townsend often
commented all that interested most people about The Who was Keith
Moon's antics. The band, the recording and the touring, just existed
as a mechanism to keep him in crashable cars and tabloid headlines.
And NME journalist Charles Shaar Murray once said that in the late
eighties he went on a night out with city traders, and was amazed how
their excess and debauchery dwarfed anything in the music world.
Now
put those two things together...
Reviewing the Facebook-startup film 'The Social Network' (2010) I
commented “this film’s tagline should really be 'dotcom startups
are the new rock’n’roll.'” I was pleased with that at the time.
As it turns out, I was wrong. Dotcom startups are like
bluegrass or skiffle. They were just preparatory. Financial
investments, they’re the real rock‘n’roll.
Notably,
Scorsese has never made a rock biopic. (Perhaps just as well, most of
them are terrible.) But he’s quite definitely a rock’n’ roll
film-maker, in the way Altman is a jazz film-maker. Not just in the
way music is so central to them. His films are kinetic,
a seeming tautology transformed into a style. They leap and bound,
rush from one grand set-piece to another. They act brash, they're
big, broad statements. Even when you're not always sure what that
statement is.
(I'm
half-wondering if that's the reason why there's such an
uncharacteristic shortage of rock music on the soundtrack here,
because it would become a kind of double-booking. Mostly there's
blues. Which works quite well. Despite the stereotypes many white
folks like to stick on blues, it's not all etherial 'spiritual' stuff
akin to gospel. There's a swagger to blues, which
gets put to serious use here.)
Because,
seriously, when was the last time rock star antics hit the headlines?
And the very few that remain, can you see them mythologised by movies
in the same way Jim Morrison or Sid Vicious were? People queuing
round the block for 'Pete Docherty The Movie'?
Rich lists have replaced chart placements in our mind maps of
influence.
Of
course, it may be I’m betraying my age with the rock stars
comparison. Rock stars have not so much become a spent cultural
currency as collapsed into that bigger, more insidious category of
‘celebrity’. (Take Ozzy. Who exactly could define what makes Ozzy
famous nowadays?) And the film works as an exploded version of the
‘kiss and tell’ features celebrities are always selling to the
tabloids. But either way, we're in the same sphere.
The
film follows almost the same trajectory (you can’t really call it
plot development) of a rock biopic, just updated and transferred.
First the band get together, play some small gigs, start hitting the
big time (defined as girls, drugs and money) ...then their
camaraderie ruptures as everything crashes and burns. There's the
same conflation of livelihood and lifestyle, as if what we have here
is a lifestyle that pays. Hence the notion that drugs aren’t just a
reward for hard work or something supplemental to what you do, but an
essential component to it. It’s just that instead of taking acid in
the desert and recording an album, you snort coke then seal a deal.
And
just like rock biopics are interested in every aspect of a band's
career apart from their actual music, so these
sexy-new-world-of-business films shy away from the nitty-gritty of
trading. As I said of 'Social Network', “the algorithm that underpins
Facebook… can be paraded precisely because we don’t
get it, it’s importance rising in proportion to its
incomprehensibility.”
All
of which is made explicit here. There's several scenes where Belfort
starts to explain market workings to us, then cuts off as if able to
see our uncomprehending faces. Don’t worry, folks out there, we
know that stuff isn’t for you. More strippers soon, promise. In
fact, things are even taken up a notch. We’re told definitively,
and very near the start of the film, that no-one
understands the markets. It’s like establishing a basic premise.
You'd call it a game-rule, except it’s there to tell us this game
has no rules.
Money
used to be simple. You learnt the basic maths of it at school, and
moved on. Now money has become a form of magic, like the shift in
science from solid Newtonian particles to shifty quantum mechanics.
Labour and materials don't make money any more, now money itself
makes more money. Corporations can make it disappear from one
jurisdiction and make it reappear in another. In fact, so magic has
it become that even money-men don't understand money any more. They
get where they are not by know-how but by strength of personality, by
being able to ride it's chaos better than the rest of us. (Here the point of comparison would be Cronenberg's flawed-but-interesting'Cosmopolis', (2012) with it's portrayal of money as
fascinating and inscrutable as religion, analysts studying currencies
like ancient texts.)
And
if this theory is correct, it could explain something which might
otherwise seem beyond explanation. When
Lord Jones complains of a culture of kicking "wealth creators", when Barclays CEO Bob Diamond insists the time of remorse for bankers should now be over (before most of us were even aware it had begun), when venture capitalist Tom Perkins compares criticism of the profligate rich to (yes really) Nazi persecution of the Jews, what is actually
happening? Given that the world as we know it was almost brought to
ruin by their reckless stupidity, given that the rest of us are now
paying through the nose for mistakes not of our making…. seriously,
what ‘kicking’ has there been?
As
much as any criticism has occurred, it’s been kept out of
mainstream political discourse. What may initially seem merely an
absurd over-reaction, a crass case of chutzpah, is more accurately
described as literally hysterical. We are only getting the reaction.
What’s being criticised is the idea that finance capital can
be criticised. It’s like Lord Jones and Tom Perkins have become the
Royalty of the modern world. Even when they get it all wrong you’re
not supposed to say so, in case that upsets the natural order.
Perhaps
what this 'apolitical' film really does is explain this lack of
‘banker bashing’. Back when we had rock stars, what did we need
them for? To quote the old Flux Of Pink Indians song, “vicarious
living, ritual boredom”. Mostly, we use our cars to drive to work.
The idea that someone else, in another reality, crashes his into a
swimming pool – that titivates our lives of plodding mediocrity.
But those same images give us a good reason to stay sitting in our
crash-free cars. They live that way so we don't have to. They get the
highs and lows so we can stay with the evens.
And
just as rock stars are supposed to crash their cars, so must the
stock of stockbrokers plummet. When Belfort's yacht gets scuppered,
its neither moral lesson nor cheap figleaf. It’s as much a part of
his role as when he was partying on its deck. The job of bankers and
brokers is no longer to soberly invest our money, reassuringly
dull-suited. Their job is now to drink, snort and screw it. They’re
there so we can live our lives vicariously through them. Someone
should make a movie about them.
Oh
hang on, wait...
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