One of the greatest unforeseen challenges of capitalism has been the concentration of financial power within institutions which manage investments. The share-owning democracy is the openly stated ambition of many a politician. An instrument of investment in which profits are contingent upon volatile share prices, which can fluctuate wildly in response to any number of factors, has created an ancillary industry of stock brokerage. Knowledge of share price behaviour has become a profession of itself, one for which investors are willing to pay a handsome premium in order to try to shield themselves from the volatility of the shares market. The Wolf Of Wall Street is a case study by one of the greatest living film directors, Martin Scorsese, of one such real life stock broker, named Jordan Belfort. It is based on a book of the same name, written by Belfort (played by a superb Leonardo DiCaprio) as a memoir of his “professional” life.
It begins with a 22 year old Belfort arriving on Wall Street to begin a career in a stock brokerage firm. Married, seemingly honest and decent, his sole determination appears to be to improve his prospects for both himself and his wife. A laudable ambition. Upon commencing his job, however, he is inculcated into a world which seems utterly insane. His immediate senior within his job is a wealthy but morally bankrupt drug addict and alcoholic share dealer, who sees his function as one of organised theft of the investors whose interests he is theoretically supposed to serve. Although initially reticent to replicate the behaviour observed in his superiors, Belfort quickly succumbs to temptation. We see him embark upon a hedonistic orgy of class A drugs, alcoholism and sexual promiscuity barely imaginable. Fuelled by the high earning lifestyle of his role in the brokerage firm, Belfort’s activities are brought to a sudden halt by ‘Black Monday’ as his firm is forced to close.
Scratching around for a new job, Belfort begins working for a small, run-down brokerage firm which tries to push “penny-stocks” (i.e. worthless investments) upon the unsuspecting poor. Realising that the commission rates on worthless stock run to 50% of the value of the investment, rather than the 1% he was used to in his previous work, Belfort sets up his own firm with the sole objective being to foist such worthless shares upon as many unsuspecting investors as possible. By recruiting a plethora of salesmen, with no moral inhibitions, he becomes a personal financial success, and before long is earning north of $40m per annum.
Belfort is a fascinating character. Much like Shakespeare’s Richard III, he wins our affections as an audience, not because we ethically endorse his behaviour, but because he has a charm and wit which is appealing. He is highly intelligent, driven, and conducts his life without any moral restraint whatever. Yet his transformation on screen is from an ambitious but naïve family man to a morally vacuous individual. The brokerage firm he establishes is a ruthless environment, where non-conformity to the accepted professional norms of the exploitation of naïve investors is met with dismissal, violence and social exclusion. The almost exclusively male environment painted on screen by Scorsese is one in which cocaine, prostitutes, alcoholism and theft become ends in themselves. Their indifference to those they steal from is only exceeded by their indifference to any notion of fidelity or emotional loyalty they might be expected to exhibit toward their wives and families.
A moral treatise this film is not. The objective is to set out on screen what happened in Belfort’s life, and how. There is no focus on the consequences of his behaviour for anybody except himself and his immediate friends and relatives. Despite given numerous attempts to escape from his degrading and self-destructive environment, Belfort refuses to surrender his delinquency. Manipulative, myopic and aggressive, he is the very definition of a psychopath. Scorsese offers us no solution to such behaviour, or cure for its consequences. As a study of the human nature of financial elites who have made the world what it is today, The Wolf of Wall Street is a reiteration that man, placed in an environment with no ethical, financial or legal checks on his behaviour, is unlikely to conduct himself with the best interests of others in mind. DiCaprio’s on screen performance is one of unconstrained, unabashed self-interest, the very behavioural norm that market liberal economists tell us is good for all. Whether audiences are inclined to agree is another matter, but the closing scene – in which many hundreds of members of the public seek to learn the secrets of Belfort’s wisdom in order to replicate his ‘success’ – might tell us all we need to know about the future of capitalism.
