The Feature Film Is Dead, and “The Wolf of Wall Street” Is Its Tombstone

There are lots of bad Hollywood films pitchforked at us every year, of course. But not many from the director of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas.

The Wolf of Wall Street is both a Martin Scorsese movie and a crime against cinema. It’s a soulless, brainless, lazy, relentlessly ugly calamity it’s hard not to read as hostile to its audience—an audience out fully three hours of its one and only life on earth by the time the nightmare’s over. 

This is a film that asks the searing question, "What happens if you lift a bunch of fictional 'men' out of a Bud Light ad, drop them into an NC-17 playground, and let the cameras roll?"

And then leave nothing on the cutting-room floor?

I’d synopsize the story, but there is no story.

I’d mention the characters, but there are no characters.

There’s just a bloated, depthless cartoon that makes the idiotic mistake of cranking the debauchery knob to an anemic “10” when it’s well over two decades now since Bret Easton Ellis gave us a similarly revolting Wall Street nightmare (American Psycho) with the knob wrenched to 12 and a half.  

If debauchery's all you're going for, and you can’t get your knob to at least 13, what's the point?

 

"Mad Men" and the Myth of Counterculture

How did hip morph, in U.S. culture, from a secret code of the dispossessed to something good for selling semi-disposable furniture and hamburgers?

It seems a pressing question now that hip is so omnipresent in our lives, lurking in every Starbucks coffee cup, every Urban Outfitters store, every Volkswagen ad. It even finds distressingly fertile ground on the Web, winking out at us from a billion images of light saber-wielding cats.

The suspicion for years now has been that the 1960s were the turning point—the moment when hip quit flirting with the mainstream (à la Dizzy and Kerouac in the '50s), abandoning its bungalows and rat-hole apartments to shack up with capitalism. And because advertising was the medium by which so many square Americans made first acquaintance with hip's delights, Madison Avenue has often been cast as the horse whisperer that lassoed hip, made it behave, and sold it to Peoria and Levittown.

For this reason, it's inevitable we look to the celebrated AMC series Mad Men, set on Madison Avenue in the '60s, for theories about what really went on in advertising in those crucial years. And the good news is the show doesn't disappoint, offering a sophisticated, nuanced vision of a love-hate relationship between the advertising industry and the ultra-hip counterculture headquartered just a few Manhattan blocks away.

As Mad Men sees it, '60s advertising didn't just co-opt and defang hip; it also found a soul-mate in it, was infiltrated by it, and even learned to do its bidding—just as hip learned to do Madison Avenue's.  In positing a complex symbiotic relationship between hip and consumer capitalism, not a simple parasitic one, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner throws in with such recent cultural theorists as Thomas Frank, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter, and—especially—John Leland.

Six Pithy to Semi-Pithy Observations about Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"

1. It has to have started as a joke about a novel so complex it turns into rocket science. Actual rocket science. 

2. True, it's a Bakhtinian orgy of a thousand discourses, many of them remarkably specialized. But it's narrated in just two main voices, really: the grandiose, God-sized one that gives us the famous opening line, "A screaming comes across the sky," and the deliberately facile (o-or glib!) one that's in charge for roughly a million Roadrunner & Coyote-type scenes, including the one that gives us the equally famous "fickt nicht mit dem raketemensch!" After a few hundred pages they're both pretty hard to take—the second especially, as it gets to sounding a little too much like this guy:

3. It's like a brilliant, ambitious, thoroughly researched novel about the last days of World War II dropped acid. Rather a whole lot of acid.

4. World War II is to Pynchon what the JFK assassination is to Don DeLillo in Libra: postmodernity's founding moment, o-or the moment at which the modern world's complexity outstripped the human mind's capacity to conceptualize, theorize, narratize, chart, map, or otherwise grasp it (behold GR's several hundred characters and dozens of fragmented, often only semi-followable plot lines, some of them of ambiguous ontological status). This post isn't about Libra, so I won't quote DeLillo. But here's Pynchon on the War—and, by extension, on his own book:

The War, the Empire, will expedite . . . barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity . . . .  Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it.

And here's another interesting passage, courtesy of Pynchon's character Roger Mexico:

"There's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."

5.  It's thrilling, sure, watching a planet-sized brain hit all the afterburners, shake off all the shackles, give itself license to say or depict absolutely anything that occurs to it, propriety and concern for whether the reader's keeping up be damned. (Really: no novel was ever more toweringly indifferent to its audience.) But it gradually becomes clear this avalanche of language, to steal a phrase a friend uses to describe Moby Dick, is concerned mainly (if words like "concerned" and "mainly" even make sense here) with denouncing a nebulous, death-obsessed, hyper-bureaucratized "Them" bent on dragging the modern world, through such insane enterprises as World War II, into its grave. And you almost have to wonder, after a certain amount of the old ultraviolence (there's stuff in this book, to note it, Bret Easton Ellis wouldn't touch with a ten-foot whatever), whether GR is really an indictment of Them or their unwitting agent.

6. I am a Pynchon fan, believe it or not: The Crying of Lot 49 has to be one of my ten all-time favorite novels. If you're looking to get into Pynchon, start with that way more controlled, way more coherent book. It's a maximalist novella.

Now that's funny.

Three Thoughts on Tarantino's "Django Unchained"

1. Though there's no point denying it'll do its part, for better or worse, to shape young Americans' thoughts and feelings on the subject of race, saying Django Unchained is a movie about race is a little like saying Chinatown is a movie about the American immigrant experience. This is because Django does absolutely no serious thinking on the subject of race; it attempts no insights about race as a force shaping American memory and consciousness. What it is, simply, is a movie about movies—and their seldom fully exploited potential for wish fulfillment.

What's the most primal, enervating wish, arguably, a human being can have?

That for revenge. 

In what context might an American filmmaker set a revenge-wish-fulfillment story if his goal is to make contemporary American audiences lose their minds with glee right there in their movie seats?  

Well, how about a scary abusive-husband context? (There's your Kill Bill.)

Or a Nazism/antisemitism context? (There's your Inglorious Basterds.) 

Or—why not?—an American-slavery context? (Hello, Django Unchained.) 

It's hard not to think Tarantino will be doing Crazy Horse and Custer next.