Words by: Ernest Baker
Everyone I know who saw The Wolf of Wall Street thinks that Jordan Belfort is awesome. Yes, people think that scumbag piece of shit who ran a brutal stock fraud scam that conned investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars is awesome. The fucked up part is, I understand where his supporters are coming from, and, to some extent, I agree with them. I don’t necessarily respect what Jordan Belfort did, but the matter of respect is not the most relevant part of my assessment of him as a person. Belfort’s twisted outlook inspires a connection with people who admire not what he did, but how he felt. There’s a difference.
The drive within Belfort represents a tenacity that a lot of us strive to tap into on a daily basis. Belfort tried to do things the right way, as a legitimate stockbroker, and he got laid off when the stock market crashed in October 1987. So, in the aftermath, here’s a guy who still kept his sights on a goal, and reached it by any means necessary. Though he did it in the slimiest way possible, that's kind of the point. Sometimes we get it however we can. That's why we empathize with rappers when they talk about selling crack to their own impoverished communities. It's what Pusha T is expressing when he raps, "They said be all you can be/I just wanna buy another Rollie/I just wanna pop another band/I just wanna sell dope forever/I just wanna be who I am." Of course, there's guilt involved when you fuck people over on your way to the top, but the complicity in knowing that you did whatever you had to do overrides it. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg spends a second of his time thinking about Eduardo Saverin? We know that Jay Z isn't thinking about Dame Dash. It’s unfortunate, but it makes sense.
It’s admirable when someone throws caution to the wind and conquers their opponents and leaves victims in their trail with no compassion for them. Whether those victims are anyone in the NBA who isn't Lebron James, anyone who was living in North America when Europeans arrived, or the senior citizens who lost their life savings buying bogus stocks from Belfort, we still revert to thinking about the winners in those situations and wonder how they tapped into that perverted ruthlessness that humans are capable of at times. Jordan Belfort worked directly and almost exclusively from the id. Consider the id, in Freud’s exact words:
"It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it...most of that is of a negative character...we approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle."
Is that not the sharpest description of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street that you’ve ever heard? His blatant disregard for the law, tact, humility, and ethics signals a straightforwardness that we all wish we had more of. It’s so rare to go about life in that manner that we can’t help but appreciate those who are intense enough to do so.
Martin Scorsese has been under fire for projecting Belfort’s excessive, indulgent persona onto the big screen without providing a moral compass, but that ambiguity allows for a harsher judgment of the corporate goons at Belfort's "firm" Stratton Oakmont. American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman appears sexy to so many because the film (and book) is critical of his lifestyle. By shunning Bateman, the art provokes a contrarian, cult appreciation. Belfort’s behavior is, in some aspects, celebrated in Wolf, and with such a gross amount of greed and sex and drug consumption on full display, in a potentially positive light, it makes for a hard watch that, in turn, criticizes the lifestyle being promoted more effectively. But, like Belfort, we can't help but remember Gordon Gekko's "greed is good” speech—that speech about how “greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” The statement feels wrong, but we know that so much of it is right, and it allows us to take on a cold-blooded approach to our own personal ascent, and, in the same breath, forgive and even embrace the faults of others who did extremely fucked up things on their way to prosperity.
Once you get to that point, all of the hard to watch stuff I was talking about earlier becomes a thing of the past. That’s a first stage, amateur reaction to The Wolf of Wall Street. Sure, most people, including myself, walked out of the theater thinking, “Wow, those dudes are terrible.” There’s no question that the initial moments after watching the movie are like some PTSD, Vietnam, shellshock shit, but after a while, those feelings subside. What remains is a perverse respect for Belfort’s vicious pursuit of the American Dream. You remember his tribal, chest-beating war hymn. You remember Belfort telling his team, “At least as a rich man, when I have to face my problems, I show up in the back of a limo wearing a $2,000 suit and $40,000 gold watch.” You remember Belfort telling an FBI agent “Look what I found in my pocket, your year’s salary.” And you also remember Belfort holding up a $100 bill, after using it to snort a line of cocaine, and telling the viewer directly, "Enough of this shit’ll make you invincible,” knowing that so much of the movie is true, and that money actually did make Jordan Belfort invincible for a good amount of time.
The means by which Belfort stepped over and crushed practically everyone he knew to achieve success will never be justifiable, but success is such a fucked up concept that anything you do to reach it is probably fucked up by proxy. It’s difficult to feel empathy for Stratton Oakmont’s victims. As the brokers say in the film, “Fuck the clients.” We’ve been trained to view the world in these cynical, dog-eat-dog terms, and in so many ways, it’s the right way to look at things. Belfort used that perspective to his advantage to capitalize on the weak, and it worked. There are winners and there are losers. Someone has to get fucked over, and it may as well not be you. We saw that happen with Zuckerberg’s rise in The Social Network, and that’s why that film is also widely regarded as a motivational mantra for this generation.
People have such a moral objection to The Wolf of Wall Street because they can't handle how the elements of a character that are supposed to breed contempt actually inspire attraction. When you get one over on this cruel world, when you, for once, for any amount of time, beat the system, are you supposed to make a futile attempt to rectify the ills of the world, or give into them? It's easier to give in, and it’s more fun. It's why Eve bit the apple. Part of it was her being an insatiable, self-absorbed person, but she knew that, and revolution isn’t possible without making your own desires the priority. Of course an authority figure won't be pleased when you subvert them, but people step out of bounds to get to where they want, not need, to go. It comes back to the id. It’s a natural aspect of the human personality, and even though it lives inside all of us, many are afraid of it, and it’s difficult for a good sect of the population to come to terms with their darkest instincts in any capacity. That’s why Jordan Belfort is such a brilliant antihero. Who is the SEC or the FBI or society to tell him what to do? Sometimes there's a noble motive behind beating the system, like civil rights, but sometimes it's more superficial than that, and there's nothing wrong with that. The people in power enjoy the more malignant aspects of life. So when you come into power and thus acquire the ability to be greedy and have any sexual partner you want and consume enough drugs to numb yourself from the madness of it all, there’s an appeal to indulging just like those in power already do.
Belfort’s highest points represent that moment at which you can buy your way out of reality, and that’s why a generation of sick fucks have a twisted admiration of his moves. Anyone with a brain knows that a ride on top is temporary, but so is life in general, and if you can reach a peak at all, at any time, in any way, it’s commendable. YOLO, for fuck’s sake. Jordan Belfort may have lost his wife, but he got a hotter one. He may have overdosed on Quaaludes and temporarily lost his motor skills, but had a Lamborghini to drive home in. He may have lost his second wife, but had a bunch of cocaine to do to cope with it. He may have gotten busted and gone to jail but Scorsese directed a film about his life and Leonardo DiCaprio starred in it and now it’s nominated for Oscars. It’s a fucked up cycle of positive reinforcement that comes with money and elite status. It’s not about morals. It’s not about mistakenly thinking that any of what Belfort did was excusable. It’s about understanding why he did what he did. For a brief moment, he achieved the type of freedom that we work for everyday, and still will most likely never see. If he was able to cheat his way into getting there, then more power to him.
We admire Al Pacino’s Scarface for the same reasons. Charles Manson has devoted followers, to this day, for the same reasons. Jay Z’s on his way to billionaire status and still can’t stop rapping about his days as a crack dealer, because those are the true moments of glory. They’re not admirable by traditional standards, but for the common man, who’s so constricted by the boundaries of society, we’re very attracted to the idea of a huge fuck you to the establishment and ostentatious gloating in the wake of if. At the end of The Wolf of Wall Street, even the FBI agent who took down Belfort is still riding on the subway, knowing that hasn’t and won’t reach his potential. As Belfort put it in the film, “There's no nobility in poverty. I've been a poor man, and I've been a rich man. And I choose rich every fucking time.”
Last weekend, I texted a friend, “My head is fucked up from Wolf of Wall Street.” He responded, “Get money and then you die, ain’t really much to it.” That’s how we’ve been taught and trained to move, and no amount of morality can change that because, so often, the good guys still come out at the bottom. We aim to, like Belfort, revel in those fleeting moments of excess, when we can, for as long as we can. That’s why The Wolf of Wall Street resonates with my generation. Too many people are reluctant to recognize those traits in themselves and thus a performance like Leonardo DiCaprio’s goes underappreciated, and that’s why it won’t be a surprise if he doesn’t win Best Actor on Sunday, but whether he wins or not, the performance and the movie and what it means is bigger than an Academy Award. Those of us who know, know, and if you can realize the value of your worst qualities, then good for you. It might feel like you’re alone, but you’re not. Some of us understand how you feel. Jordan Belfort felt the same way.
