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Abstract
Audiences have praised and criticized Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street since its release. Despite projecting a portrait of Wall Street greed, the film’s cultural reception demonstrates a public ambiguously mesmerized by a wealthy individual and his “get rich quick” philosophy. This article argues that Scorsese’s film and rhetoric from the real Jordan Belfort act as a homology for America’s ambivalent attitude on the hegemonic power of money and celebrity. Connecting rhetorical homologies to Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling, this article illustrates how personal and public attitudes are constituted through a text’s form and content.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Josh Miller, Andrew Cole, Pamela Lannutti and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this manuscript.
Notes
[1] Kim Parker, “Yes, the Rich are Different,” Pew Research Center, August 27, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/27/yes-the-rich-are-different/.
[2] Parker, “Yes, the Rich are Different.”
[3] Michael Erman, “Five Years After Lehman, Americans Still Angry at Wall Street: Reuters/Ipsos Poll,” Reuters, September 15, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/15/us-wallstreet-crisis-idUSBRE98E06Q20130915; Rebecca Riffkin, “In U.S., 67% Dissatisfied With Income, Wealth Distribution,” Gallup, January 20, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/166904/dissatisfied-income-wealth-distribution.aspx.
[4] Sheyna Steiner, “Do You Think You Will Be Rich One Day,” Bankrate.com, March 30, 2017, http://www.bankrate.com/finance/financial-literacy/do-you-think-you-will-be-rich-one-day-1.aspx.
[5] Although defined later in this article, structure of feeling refers to Raymond Williams’s description of the term in The Long Revolution. Williams explains that a structure of feeling is “the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major importance.” See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press Ltd., 1961/2001), 64–65.
[6] Barry Brummett, “What Popular Films Teach Us About Values: Locked Inside with the Rage Virus,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 41, no. 2 (2013), 64.
[7] Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Very Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford, 2013), 49.
[8] Sewell Chan, “Financial Crisis Was Avoidable, Inquiry Finds,” New York Times, January 25, 2011, https://nyti.ms/2kK6rJQ.
[9] Chan, “Financial Crisis Was Avoidable.”
[10] Blyth, Austerity, 49.
[11] Marlia Banning, Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contemporary U.S. Public Life and the Conservative Right (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 37.
[12] Art Swift, “U.S. Views of Gov’t Regulation Still Political Polarized,” Gallup, October 3, 2013, http://www.gallup.com/poll/165236/views-gov-regulation-politically-polarized.aspx.
[13] Erman, “Five Years After Lehman, Americans Still Angry at Wall Street.”
[14] “Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years: Section 5: Values About Business, Wall Street and Labor,” Pew Research Center, June 4, 2012, http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/04/section-5-values-about-business-wall-street-and-labor/.
[15] Swift, “U.S. Views of Gov’t Regulation Still Political Polarized.”
[16] Matthew W. Seeger and Timothy L. Sellnow, Narratives of Crisis: Telling Stories of Ruin and Renewal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 23.
[17] See Kenneth Burke, “Dramatism and Logology,” Communication Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1985), 90; Walter R. Fisher, “Narration As A Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs 51, no. 1 (1984), 16–17; Walter R. Fisher, “The Narrative Paradigm: An Elaboration,” Communication Monographs 52, no. 4 (1985), 351, 357
[18] Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 237, emphasis in original.
[19] Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 50, emphasis in original.
[20] Brummett, “What Popular Films Teach Us About Values,” 64
[21] Barry Brummett, Rhetorical Homologies (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 39.
[22] Brummett, “What Popular Films Teach Us About Values,” 6.
[23] Kathryn M. Olson, “Detecting a Common Interpretive Framework for Impersonal Violence: The Homology in Participants’ Rhetoric on Sport Hunting, ‘Hate Crimes,’ and Stranger Rape,” Southern Journal of Communication 67, no. 3 (2002), 217, emphasis in original.
[24] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 106.
[25] Michael Leff, “Things Made By Words: Reflections on Textual Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78, no. 2 (1992), 226, 229, 230.
[26] Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man,” The Hudson Review 16, no. 4 (1963–1964), 507, 509; Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 366–367.
[27] Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 1, 20, 109.
[28] Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132.
[29] Williams, Marxism and Literature, 129.
[30] Brummett, Rhetorical Homologies, 3.
[31] The Wolf of Wall Street is regarded as one of the most foul-mouthed films of all time. See Forrest Wickman, “Is Wolf of Wall Street Really the Sweariest Movie of All Time? A Slate Investigation,” Slate, January 7, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/01/07/wolf_of_wall_street_sets_f_word_record_we_counted_every_last_f_bomb_in_the.html.
[32] “The Wolf of Wall Street,” BoxOfficeMojo.com, last modified March 27, 2014, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=main&id=wolfofwallstreet.htm.
[33] Richard Brody, “The Wild, Brilliant ‘Wolf of Wall Street,’” New Yorker, December 24, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-wild-brilliant-wolf-of-wall-street.
[34] A. O. Scott, “When Greed Was Good (and Fun): DiCaprio Stars in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street,” New York Times, December 24, 2013, https://nyti.ms/2kDdelD.
[35] David Denby, “Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street,’” New Yorker, December 16, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/martin-scorseses-the-wolf-of-wall-street.
[36] Joe Morgenstern, “’Wolf of Wall Street’ Skims the Surface of Sin,” Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303290904579278012548994926.
[37] Lorraine Devon Wilke, “The Wolf of Wall Street: Cautionary Tale or Excess Porn?” Huffington Post, January 2, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lorraine-devon-wilke/wolf-of-wall-street_b_4529078.html/.
[38] Robert Hariman, “Political Parody and Public Culture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008), 249.
[39] Charlie Rose, A Look at the Film ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, online video, 54:34, Charlie Rose LLC, December 18, 2013, https://charlierose.com/videos/17413.
[40] For a discussion on how films engage a spectator see Murray Smith, “Altered States: Character and Emotional Response in the Cinema,” Cinema Journal 33, no. 4 (Summer, 1994), 41.
[41] For more about Scorsese’s cinematic style, see Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200), 181.
[42] Smith, “Altered States,” 41–42.
[43] All quotations are transcribed directly from the film.
[44] Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937/1959/1984), 53.
[45] Beth E. Bonnstetter, “Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin): Comedy and Burlesque in Satiric Film,” Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1 (2011), 21.
[46] Bonnstetter, “Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin),” 21.
[47] Bonnstetter, “Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin),” 27.
[48] Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 201.
[49] The actor who plays the fictional Auckland Strait Line Host is the real-life Jordan Belfort.
[50] In addition to being a homology, the rhetoric of The Wolf of Wall Street can be said to function through epideictic rhetoric. To understand how a film can work through epideictic rhetoric to constitute a public attitude see Kathryn M. Olson, “An Epideictic Dimension of Symbolic Violence in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Inter-Generational Lessons in Romanticizing and Tolerating Intimate Partner Violence,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 4 (2013): 448–480.
[51] See “About Jordan,” JordanBelfort.com, accessed March 27, 2014, http://jordanbelfort.com/about-jordan/; Jordan Belfort, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street (New York: Bantam, 2009); Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street (New York: Random House, 2007); Geoffrey Gray, “The Wolf of Wall Street Can’t Sleep,” New York Magazine, November 24, 2013, https://shar.es/19JWHz; David Haglund, “How Accurate is The Wolf of Wall Street,” Slate, December 31, 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/12/.
[52] Charles Levinson, “Prosecutors Give Poor Reviews to Restitution From ‘Wolf of Wall Street,’” Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304347904579312560659290676.
[53] Susan Antilla, “The Wolf Is Still Bending the Truth, Prosecutors Say,” New York Times, January 10, 2014, https://nyti.ms/2oPVybj.
[54] “Transcript of Piers Morgan Life: Interview with Jordan Belfort,” CNN, January 24, 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1401/24/pmt.01.html.
[55] “About,” JordanBelfort.com, accessed March 27, 2014, http://jordanbelfort.com/about-jordan/.
[56] Jordan Belfort, “Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort,” Jordan Belfort: Corporate Training, Sales & Wealth Building Strategies, blog, December 30, 2013, http://jordanbelfort.com/wolf-of-wall-street-jordan-belfort/.
[57] Jordan Belfort, “The Real Wolf of Wall Street,” Jordan Belfort: Corporate Training, Sales & Wealth Building Strategies, blog, December 27, 2013, http://jordanbelfort.com/category/the-real-wolf-of-wall-street/.
[58] Belfort’s program is advertised in the film, particularly the final sequence.
[59] Jordan Belfort, “Wolf of Wall Street,” Jordan Belfort: Corporate Training, Sales & Wealth Building Strategies, blog, January 3, 2014, http://jordanbelfort.com/wolf-of-wall-street/.
[60] Jordan Belfort, “Jordan Belfort—The Winding Road,” Jordan Belfort: Corporate Training, Sales & Wealth Building Strategies, blog, January 2, 2014, http://jordanbelfort.com/the-winding-road-of-jordan-belfort/.
[61] “Transcript of Piers Morgan Life.”
[62] Jon Marino, “The US is Still Angry At Wall Street, and it May Be Hurting Recruiting,” CNBC, June 9, 2016, http://cnb.cx/1XIflW3.
[63] Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro, “Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment,” New York Times, November 9, 2016, https://nyti.ms/2k4lSJa.
[64] See “Presidential Executive Order on Core Principles for Regulating the United States Financial System,” The White House, February 3, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/03/presidential-executive-order-core-principles-regulating-united-states.
[65] Ben Protess, “Trump Moves to Roll Back Obama-Era Financial Regulations,” New York Times, February 3, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2k4I1Ht.
[66] Louis Nelson, “Poll: Americans Oppose Trump’s Wall, Easing Regulations,” Politico, February 8, 2017, http://politi.co/2k43kIt.
[67] Barry Brummett, “Rhetorical Theory as Heuristic and Moral: A Pedagogical Justification,” Communication Education 33, no. 2 (1984), 103, emphasis in original.
[68] Douglas Ehninger, et al., “Report of the Committee on the Scope of Rhetoric and the Place of Rhetorical Studies in Higher Education,” in The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, eds. Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), 210.
[69] In addition to these texts, The Big Short (2015) and TV series Billions (2016-) contain a similar homology and ambivalent attitude about financial excess and Wall Street regulation.
[70] See “Voters Want More Regulation of Financial System,” Rasmussen Reports, February 15, 2017, https://shar.es/19Jo7T; “50% Say There Are Too Many Government Regulations on Business,” Rasmussen Reports, January 26, 2017, https://shar.es/19Jo6y.