THROUGHOUT history the question of what defines a man and masculinity has stubbornly persisted. However, more recently American cinema has provided at least one prominent response. By examining several popular films such as The Wolf of Wall Street, American Psycho, Fight Club, and the economic circumstances surrounding their releases, a narrative from contemporary Hollywood begins to take shape. In these films, masculinity finds its origin in the male lead’s socioeconomic struggle. Whether the film depicts a character fighting his way to the top or attempting to tear the whole thing down does not matter. What matters is he fights against the system, no matter what that system may be.
The following essay contains spoilers for The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), American Psycho (2000), and Fight Club (1999).
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street showcases the story of real life stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). It illustrates his acquisition of wealth and the subsequent destruction of his empire, quickly followed by him dodging any substantial punishment. Released in 2013, The Wolf of Wall Street can be read as a direct response to the Great Recession beginning in 2007. With the help of a number of Scorsese’s filmmaking techniques, the film’s visuals directly appeal to the crowd hit hardest by the failing financial systems. Instead of responding to the destruction of Belfort’s life, audiences latch onto Belfort himself due to the spectacle inadvertently replacing the message.
As the film opens and Belfort describes how he,
“…gambles like a degenerate…”, “…drinks like a fish…”, and has “…three different federal agencies looking to indict [him]”,
Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street
the audience gets to watch a medium close-up of him doing cocaine off of an attractive woman’s butt. So while the film’s dialogue details a life teetering on the edge, the visual is much more engaging and desirable to a stereotypical male audience. Much like American prescription drug commercials, the potential horrors are audibly listed off while accompanied by eye candy.
Not only are the undesirable portions of Belfort’s life overshadowed, but the desirable pieces are paraded across the screen. When celebrating a week’s earnings, the office transforms into a dazzling house of debauchery. Marching band music plays, the band members march through the halls in their underwear, and then the servers and strippers follow close behind. Quick cuts between medium shots of two groups of strippers charging at each other fill the frame, with a strobe effect turning the whole scene into a dream. A close up of Belfort’s face appears near the end, as he pridefully watches over what he has created. Numerous scenes of this scale appear throughout The Wolf of Wall Street and they all end up distracting a sizable segment of viewers from the morally reprehensible nature of Belfort’s business and his looming demise.
The film presents all of this as easily accessible to the audience as well. According to the film Belfort’s only qualification is that he decides to move to Wall Street because of his love for money. He quickly finds himself working up the ladder as a stock broker and when that fails due to circumstances out of his control, he immediately pivots to penny stocks and experiences almost immediate success.
Finally, the film ends with Belfort proclaiming that for a,
“…brief fleeting moment, [he’d] forgotten [he] was rich”.
Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street
At this point the film notes that despite all of his crimes, all of those he hurt along the way, and even the destruction of his own personal life, he would not be paying a hefty legal price. It gives audience members the illusion they could experience the three hours worth of hedonistic depravity as well, at little cost. Further driving this point home, the real Jordan Belfort appears in a cameo in the final scene to introduce Leonardo DiCaprio’s character version of himself at a get-rich-quick seminar. Not only did Jordan Belfort dodge consequences for his actions, he now gets to appear in a Hollywood film directed by legendary director Martin Scorsese. In the final seconds of the film, the camera pans over the audience in a medium close-up at eye level, a metaphor for the real audiences’ aspirations to achieve Belfort’s supposed success.
Thomas Salek notes,
“…the film’s cultural reception demonstrates a public ambiguously mesmerized by a wealthy individual and his ‘get rich quick’ philosophy.” Following the Great Recession, “In a 2013 political poll, more than half of U.S. adults said they did not think the government and financial industry had done enough to prevent future financial crises”. Yet, “…they are hesitant to impose any form of regulation on financial markets”.
Thomas Salek
The Wolf of Wall Street released at a time when many Americans were economically struggling, but also refusing to punish the individuals who put them in that position, possibly out of the hope that one day it may be them on top. The Wolf of Wall Street showed the disillusioned audiences how that may be possible for them. In the United States where money is so tightly intertwined with power, the men who felt emasculated by the recession now had an outlet of escapism. The Wolf of Wall Street said by fighting their way out of poverty to reap the rewards of capitalism, men could regain their masculine identity and the rewards that accompany that (mainly women and power). Society will not simply hand out this identity, but instead it will only award it to those willing to struggle against their current socioeconomic condition.
Much like The Wolf of Wall Street, Mary Harron’s American Psycho found itself released during tumultuous economic times. It reached theaters in the year 2000, with the dot-com bubble having recently burst. American Psycho follows investment banker Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) as he strives to maintain an impeccable image for his yuppie colleagues, acquaintances, and fiancee. As the film progresses we watch as Bateman lures in and brutally murders numerous women. It concludes with Bateman being denied the condemnation he seeks by his peers, and the other characters merely continuing to focus on their own lives.
Similar to how The Wolf of Wall Street parodies the excessive lifestyle of Jordan Belfort yet the pure spectacle of it all still carries the audience away, American Psycho shows the monstrous side of Patrick Bateman but offers no in-universe condemnation of his character. Bateman’s closing monologue over an extreme close-up of his eyes states,
“My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself”.
Mary Harron, American Psycho
This lack of a clear condemnation from other characters allows the excesses of his life to outshine the horrors for those already looking to ignore them.
As Peter Deakin points out,
“Bateman becomes so fragmented and de-individualized (in addition to being defined) by his insane consumerism and his hyper-yuppie vision that, composed entirely of ‘inauthentic’ commodity-related desires… he cannot… exist as a person.”
Peter Deakin
This explains how the film itself, but not the characters within the film, does condemn Bateman. However, it also describes how his masculinity and monetary goals are interconnected. He sees every financial conquest as a means of increasing his desirability in a world he perceives to be constantly attempting to rip it away. American Psycho may mock this notion by showing how all of the yuppies mix up each other’s names due to a loss of individuality, but it is this same rampant materialism that allows Bateman to live in a fantastic apartment, make more money than he knows what to do with, sleep with beautiful women, and ultimately face no consequences for his actions. To the men directly hurt by the economic downturn of 2000, Bateman may come with a lot of baggage (the brutal killing of innocent women is no small thing), but he also represents a lost lifestyle that is waiting for reclamation. A lifestyle only available by fighting against the economic forces of the time.
So once again a film presents a conventionally despicable character and depicts his failings, yet the character’s lifestyle causes audiences to use his material possessions as a goal to guide their lives in troubled times (even though the film itself condemns this). For a country that sees,
“Achieving financial prosperity [as] tied to the American dream”,
Thomas Salek
characters that provide a blueprint for that are highly valuable since,
“…most Americans [now] contend that it is harder to become wealthy and there is little chance they will achieve financial prosperity”.
Thomas Salek
Counter to both The Wolf of Wall Street and American Psycho, David Fincher’s Fight Club released just prior to the dot-com burst, during an economic peak. It depicts its disillusioned narrator (Edward Norton) and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) as they form the titular Fight Club, a place for aimless men to let loose their growing aggression. Increasingly fed up with a materialistic world, the members set out on a number of vandalism related plots, ultimately culminating in the destruction of numerous buildings housing countless debt records.
Fight Club parodies brands and corporations, and men’s increasing tendency to use them to define their lives. Mark Ramey states,
“The film is a powerful critique of a superficial consumer culture and the moral vacuum created by consumers who buy into that superficiality.”
Mark Ramey
Fight Club claims a generation without a war or depression to fight has it too easy and becomes effeminate as a result. It goes on to say men on some level crave violence and to fight and feel pain, feel themselves, and feel masculine. These men must fight to form their individuality and in death they will have a name. Their struggle gives them identity.
Of course much like the preceding two films which either depict their characters’ fall from grace and/or condemn them for their actions, Fight Club denounces the outright anarchy it depicts for much of its runtime when it has the narrator shoot out the part of his brain responsible for projecting the image of Tyler Durden, thus killing his aimless cravings for anarchy. But by depicting a lifestyle free of needless consumerism prior to this point, Fight Club offers an explanation to the men who feel like their lives lack purpose when their economic conditions are just too good. Fight Club tells these men to reject their financial bounties and instead embrace the primal nature of their identities. Toss out the comforts of modern life to get in touch with who you really are and what you truly desire. Those who stand in the way of this progress fail as men and (in the film, quite literally) find themselves castrated. Although this time Hollywood is not telling men to fight to climb the socioeconomic ladder, it is still telling them to fight, just this time to tear it all down.
These films expect men to pursue materialistic goods, but once they have acquired them they have either lost their individuality or have been so thoroughly consumed by their drive they have lost true autonomy. Films then encourage these same men to rebel against the broken system to tear it all down. And then films once again encourage them to strive for greatness because, without anything you are nothing, not desirable nor a real man. Throughout the years this cycle of societal and Hollywood based expectations has endured. A man must always be fighting in one direction or another to maintain his virility. To give in to the system, no matter which end of the spectrum the system is currently leaning, is a loss of decision making, agency, and therefore masculinity as often portrayed by American cinema.
Works Cited
- Deakin, Peter. “‘I Simply Am Not There’: American Psycho, the Turn of the Millennium and the Yuppie as a Killer of the Real.” Film International, vol. 14, no. 3–4 [77–78], 2016, pp. 85–101. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1386/fiin.14.3-4.85_1.
- Harron, Mary, director. American Psycho. Lions Gate Films, 2000.
- Fincher, David, director. Fight Club. 20th Century Fox, 1999.
- Ramey, Mark. Studying Fight Club. Auteur, 2014. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000tna&AN=828933&site=eds-live&scope=site.
- Salek, Thomas A. “Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears: The Wolf of Wall Street as a Homology for America’s Ambivalent Attitude on Financial Excess.” Communication Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 1–19. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/01463373.2017.1323767.
- Scorsese, Martin, director. The Wolf of Wall Street. Paramount Pictures, 2013.
