The Wolf of Wall Street

The Wolf of Wall Street is a minor work by a great filmic novelist. It’s a long movie, like one of those tomes by Dickens or Balzac that had never even heard of the jump cut. The direct address to the viewer  and the interior monologues which are novelistic modes of disquisition might also derive from the fact that the movie is based on an autobiographical work by Jordan Belfort (played in the movie by Leonardo DiCaprio). Belfort’s scam was the underwriting and selling of so-called penny stocks. His career begins on Black Monday, October 19, l987, the day the stock market fell 508 points and the old line firm L.F. Rothschild, where he’d been hired for his first legitimate job, tanked. “I want you to deal with your problems by becoming richer,” Belfort tells the employees of Stratton Oakmont, the auspicious sounding firm he later creates. Actually his story is one of addiction to both money and drugs, specifically Quaaludes and cocaine. There’s an image that’s used in the ads for the film, of DiCaprio on his knees licking the high heel of a blond. That blond turns out to be his second wife, Naomi (Margot Robbie), and the scene is one in which she takes her vengeance on his repeated infidelity with prostitutes by both depriving him of sex and threatening to increase the torture by walking around the house without underpants. There are a number of other scenes like this which tell the whole story in microcosm including one where Belfort is so paralyzed by Quaaludes that he can’t warn his cohort Ronnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) that the F.B.I. is bugging their conversations. Here the particular little device has to do with a piece of telephone wire which acts as a noose. So what is Scorsese getting at as he flourishes these metaphors of submission and entrapment? Besides the addiction leitmotif, it’s hard to tell. The canvas is large, but also unutterably small, reducing human existence to the striving for money and power. Scorsese triages his users, but the result is antiseptic and emotionless. There's something missing in this tale of avarice among the cast of outer borough characters. Maybe it’s just the pubic hair on Jordan’s second wife. Along with Black Monday, the advent of Brazilian hot waxing is another of the losses which the film records.

Head Trip

Inception is an old-fashioned head-trip. The Leonardo DiCaprio character is an extractor and implanter of ideas who is haunted by the suicide of his own wife. Parenthetically, one wonders if the story doesn’t owe something to another futuristic work—Tarkovsky’s Solaris (based on the Stanislav Lem novel), in which the central character is also haunted by the death of his wife. In the case of Inception, the wife’s presence is an unholy reminder of the idea of the unreality the De Caprio character had so successfully and tragically implanted in her. But the greatest question about Inception is how and why the film has become such a major hit. Unlike a lot of blockbusters, Inception is not easy to understand, and its varying themes, running the gamut from corporate espionage to questions of solipsism, dream structure and dream life, are not exactly the stuff of commercial film. Hitchcock’s Spellbound has some wonderful dream sequences, which were in fact storyboarded by Salvador Dali, but Inception offers more than just simple fragments and off-the-cuff musings. The understanding and manipulation of dreams is the palette from which the narrative is fashioned, though it might be argued that the attention to dream structure is superficial, owing, in the end, more to video games than to concerns with the relationship between sleeping and waking consciousness. But the film is fundamentally unsettling in the way it paints the mind’s vulnerability to suggestion. The original John Frankenheimer version of The Manchurian Candidate had a similar effect. However, cold war politics and torture effectively grounded it, creating a reassuring feeling of causality. Are audiences relating to Inception director Christopher Nolan’s vision of a purely subjective universe, in which the world outside the self partakes of little, if any, verifiable reality?