Sudarshan Ramani
For a lot of Indian cinemagoers, The Wolf of Wall Street will be familiar yet strange. It’s based, like most of Martin Scorsese’s films, on a real-life figure, a wealthy stockbroker named Jordan Belfort who has since abandoned his flamboyantly wayward high-lifestyle to re-engineer himself into a much-sought-after motivational speaker. What makes the film exceptional, however, is that it projects the corrupt financier as a different kind of criminal altogether.
Belfort starts out as an “honest” broker, one who hopes to make a living through commissions from every stock his client purchases. The young Jordan, who is cast out of paradise on the Black Monday of 1987 when Wall Street famously crashed, lives in a small apartment with his first wife, scouring classified ads for job listings for unemployed stockbrokers. Now if that picture of a jobless stockbroker looking up jobs in his trade (under classifieds literally listed as “Wanted – Stockbroker”) reminds you of a political cartoon, then you’re watching the right film.
Up to this point, Jordan Belfort is no different from countless eager MBA graduates in India who work in the stock or bond markets for global financial firms. Belfort’s lifestyle, while perhaps more (or less?) excessive than that of India’s super-rich, is still something a lot of us covet. He acquires a harem, a hot blonde wife, a daily dose of recreational drugs, a yacht, a yellow Jaguar and a white Ferrari. These are charismatic brands that several of India’s merchant princes flaunt and made more familiar to us through thousands of Bollywood fantasies.
Most criminals in American and Indian movies are depicted as small-time lowlifes whose rise gives us the vicarious pleasure of an upward social mobility denied to the vast majority of honest citizens in the working, lower-middle classes. However, The Wolf of Wall Street differs by showing us a middle-class man, with loving parents and a supportive wife, discovering within himself a huge appetite for corruption.
What drives this appetite is not explained but the imperatives of class seem to be the safest bet as an answer. Formerly a nobody on Wall Street (“pond scum” is how Belfort is described on his first day), he becomes a real wolf when he descends to a low-end office job, door-to-door selling, a far cry from swanky Manhattan. Surrounded by social inferiors, Belfort decides to wrench himself out of his class by outdoing his peers at their hopeless, unregulated work; in the process, he lowers himself to unfathomed moral depths even as he soars to new heights of success.
Perversely, however, Belfort’s journey to doom involves the creation of opportunities as well. As a job creator, he transforms hopeless, low-end drug dealers into corporate sharks, and even gives a desperate single mother benefits that the US’ social welfare system overlooks. It’s clearly possible to argue that Jordan Belfort is a better job creator than Merrill Lynch; when he, in one of his many crypto-fascist speeches, declares that his firm Stratton Oakmont “is America”, that proclamation carries weight.
The yearning for money as succour drives contemporary capitalism. If every revolution and alternative has failed, why not work to enable the one that actually exists, why not do what your stockbroker tells you, and keep investing to circulate money in the economy? The original Forbes magazine exposé that labelled Belfort “The Wolf of Wall Street” likened him to a “twisted Robin Hood” who takes from the rich and gives to himself and his squad of losers. Is that not what we expect from the market, what keeps housewives glued to the television, watching CNBC for the latest stock information, and what drives many to start demat accounts?
Surely many of us will laud Belfort when he says: “At least as a rich man, when I have to face my problems, I can show up in the back of a stretch limousine, wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and a twenty-thousand-dollar gold watch!”
It is this observation that makes Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street profound, locating and attacking the very appeal of money. Scorsese refuses to dish out false platitudes that “crime doesn’t pay” nor does he echo the sentimentalism of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street movies. Apparently, it’s good to be rich and, for a certain class of people, there’s no real punishment for excess.
The only other film which has made this argument is – surprise of surprises! – an Indian one, Satyajit Ray’sSeemabaddha (Company Limited), which portrayed the life of India’s emerging middle-class in the Calcutta of the 1970s at a time of political turmoil. In that film, the rich are safe and secure, and the hero, a middle-class family man, who would have been an idealistic teacher in the Nehruvian 1950s, is now a corporate honcho who finds great flexibility of conscience in protecting his lifestyle.
Like Company Limited, Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is an exploration of the contemporary world that few would have expected from these two artistes, given their refined sensibilities. The Wolf of Wall Street attacks the lifestyle of the middle-class, the world of advertising and consumerism, the lust for the good life and the protection it offers. The visible surface and texture of contemporary life corrupts us all, making us wolves thronging the pack of the alpha male rather than being benign, though gullible, sheep.
Sudarshan Ramani is the Editor of Projectorhead (projectorhead.in), an online film magazine.
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