Intent vs Impact
- Mustafa Shabbir
- Dec 27, 2020
- 4 min read
Roland Barthes in 1973 as a part of his literary theory proposed the idea of two types of texts. ‘Writerly’ and ‘Readerly’. Readerly refers to those literary works which reduce the role of the reader to a passive one. These texts attempt to hide any elements that would open up the text to multiple meanings. In writerly texts there is a multiplicity of cultural and other ideological indicators for the reader to uncover. The writerly text destabilizes the reader’s expectations. The reader approaches the text from an external position of subjectivity.
Barthes describes the ideal text as one which is writerly in nature. However, a conflict arises when there is a glaring discrepancy between the meaning the writer himself has attached to the work and how the reader perceives it. This brings us to the conversation of ‘intent vs impact’.
We elaborate on this topic using Martin Scorcese’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ as an example. The Wolf Of Wall Street is based on a real life stockbroker Jordan Belfort who perfected the ‘pump and dump’ technique and bankrupted investors. To this day Jordan Belfort still owes investors $97 million. His firm Stratton Oakmont was a circus of sorts. The acts of debauchery had no end at Stratton Oakmont, from tossing dwarves on a dartboard to paying a female employee to shave her head to bringing in a hoard of strippers into the office during the day. Eventually, his crazy life was brought to an end when he was apprehended by the FBI, but the punishment barely met the crime as he spent 22 months at a facility which was less like a prison and more of a country club. Upon its winter, 2013 release it was raked through the mud by critics for glorifying, apologising and endorsing capitalist excess.
It is not that a movie that revels in excess is something foreign to the screens of Hollywood, Scorcese himself has indulged in excess before in Goodfellas. Showing the glorious rise and fall of mobster Henry Hill. However, Goodfellas was not met with nearly the same resistance as Wolf of Wall street. The difference comes in the moralisation in the movie. A critic, Guy Lodge said, "I wasn't left with much when the circus was over: its moral stance, such as it is, is laid out early on, leaving us jogging furiously in place for three hours." Scorcese himself had said that Belfort was a man trying to beat morality with a combination of money and drugs. He knows what he’s doing is wrong but he does it anyway. He believed that the money he was stealing was his right since he knew how to spend it better.
Unlike American Psycho or Goodfellas which have been movies commenting on the capitalist greed motif, the joke in this film is never on Belfort, it is always on those around him.
The void of an introspective moral realisation and a proper fall in Belfort’s life have led to the perception that Scorcese is saying that Belfort’s life is good. The ‘Dudebro’ has looked at this movie as inspiration. They hail Belfort as a legend or a God. Belfort painted an ideal life for them.
Was this however the impact that the filmmaker wished the movie would have?
Another explanation of the ambiguous moralisation in the movie is, honesty. In an interview the filmmaker said, “It looks like they’re having fun-- that’s because they were having fun. That’s all they did. They had fun and more fun and more fun until it wasn’t so much fun anymore. The challenge is to show it honestly without tipping the scales into judgement and removing you outside the world of these characters.”
It is important to note that the story of Belfort is a real story and to give a realistic picture of our surroundings it was important to portray it truthfully. But why was it necessary to make a movie with such a horrible role model? Because it’s entertaining. The three-hour run of the movie is fueled by montages and bizarre sequences and keeps the audience on their toes for the entire duration. The run-time itself fits the excessive tone of the movie.
This is not to say that social responsibility can be sidelined in the name of entertainment, and contrary to popular belief that hasn’t been the case with this movie. The lack of overt moral clarity in the movie is purposeful. It is to allow the movie to function as a tool which gives us a third person perspective on our own society.
According to Leonardo Di Caprio who plays Jordan Belfort in the movie who is also the person who brought the book to Scorcese encouraging him to direct it, “Belfort is something that is a part of American culture. Look at young people and what the American dream means to them. It’s all about accumulating more, and doing what’s best for you, in spite of how it affects someone else.”
The filmmakers are trying to show a horrid and perplexed look at wealth. At the same time they are saying that the disgust we feel for Belfort is a self-righteous delusion. We happen to live in a culture that allowed a person like Belfort to thrive and do whatever it is that he did. After all Belfort’s motto was to steal from the greedy themselves. In a world where we aren’t greedy a person like him would never have reached the heights that he did. Scorcese does not overtly criticise the lifestyle, this, however does not mean that by extension he is endorsing it. His criticism of his lifestyle comes from the unapologetically excessive tone of the film itself.
With a movie like this, there are bound to be subjective experiences. What is important for a movie goer is to consciously analyse how they feel when they watch a movie like this, to open up to others about it and to take in the opinions of others as well to effectively and productively enjoy a film with all considerations in mind.
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