How The Wolf of Wall Street became a blueprint for the people it set out to parody

It's time to get your head out of the sand/bag of cocaine and acknowledge that this wasn't meant to be something to aspire to.

If the rest of the world was anything like the small town that I grew up in, Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street seemed to be all that anyone could talk about in the pub for about six months. I could see why it would have an appeal to people whose idea of adventure involved doing the big shop at a different supermarket than usual, but I didn’t understand the obsession. Yachts, cocaine, Margot Robbie: all things that took the people to another world, a world far more exciting than their own, and they loved everything about it.

There is a reason that the big-budget, blockbuster depiction of the finance world has an appeal to that crowd. Friday nights spent in the local Wetherspoons, sniffing every last flake of the crust bag of MCat, leave a lot to be desired. Scorsese’s film is a clear form of escapism - it certainly felt more otherworldly than, say, the cantina in Star Wars. However, beneath the flashy glitz of what Variety described as “three hours of cash, drugs, hookers, repeat”, there was an element of criticism levelled at this lifestyle that, for the most part, was missed by the people recommending it to everyone they met. For three months, the film itself became almost cocaine-like in how it dominated these people’s nights out; even talking about the film became addictive. Lost in the hype of it all, many people couldn’t look past the film at a surface level; every recommendation to watch the film came with a rather mundane explanation that the film was “fun”.

I know that personally, on first viewing, I failed to see past the coke-fuelled editing style and hideous amounts of money on display, and to me, that made it an unbearable film. The first four attempts to watch the film were cut short by falling asleep, to the point where I was convinced that in order to enjoy the film you probably had to be off your rocker on cocaine yourself. The only reason I knew that not to be true was that for many of the people recommending the film to me, cocaine was not part of their life, or at least not yet.

Cut to 10 years later, and I can still see the same faces if I walk into those pubs on a Friday night. Very little has changed: their jeans are slightly tighter, their teeth slightly whiter, but their nose still hoovers up white powders. In fact, the only major difference is that in place of the void that existed where their personality was meant to be 10 years ago, they now have a crypto account and a cocaine addiction, essentially making it brat. for straight white blokes.

Much was argued at the time about whether the film was glamorising the lifestyle that Belfort displayed, with people generally split down the middle. The quick cuts, warm lighting and high production values certainly led to an aesthetically pleasing film, but narratively, some elements should have made the viewer question whether this is a desirable lifestyle. Maybe it is easy to struggle to read between the lines when you’re watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s character shovel coke into his hooter and sexually assault his wife, but I don’t think it should be.

Perhaps, despite their intentions to question the capitalist system, Scorsese and DiCaprio didn’t go far enough. At a whopping three hours long, there is a definite need to try and craft the film in a hypnotising style that sweeps people up and keeps them away from checking their watches to see how long is left; however, in their quest to create a film that was both inherently watchable as a blockbuster while still packing in a critique of a capitalistic system, the wires got a little crossed. In fact, there is something rather ironic about defending a picture that cost $100 million to make and grossed over $400 million as having set out to critique capitalism in the first place. In the process of spending all of this money on the film, they forgot to make the critique plain enough to see for the many people who bought tickets to see it, and rather than critiquing this lifestyle, they crafted a blueprint for them to follow to chase the lifestyle they were sucked into for three hours.

Reflecting upon this, I can’t help but feel a little bit sad about where it all went wrong for this supposed mission, not because I think that a blockbuster of this size could ever truly cause a systemic change away from disgusting levels of consumerism, but rather for the people who followed the roadmap to success that Belfort’s story gave to them. They bought the quarter zip, put on the company-branded gilet, and got themselves hooked on coke; the world of The Wolf of Wall Street couldn’t be further from their reality, as they continue to buy into the propaganda of the capitalist system all from the comfort of their local pub on a device that fits into their pocket, not knowing that the closest they will every get to achieving this is a night out with bottle service at some intolerable club in Clapham.