Jordan Belfort’s Male Gaze and Its Effect on Filmgoers

The male gaze in film has dominated the Hollywood landscape as the most prevalent editing style. This concept is popularized by film theorist Laura Mulvey, whose main argument in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is that films treat the camera as male, which in turn forces the viewer to see the world from their perspective. This male dominant angle provides viewers with two options when regarding Hollywood movies. They can view the motion picture by way of the biased patriarchal point of view, or they can choose not to engage in the consumption of this chauvinistic interpretation of popular culture.[1] Adopting this male viewpoint can lead to an unfavorable depiction of females. This tool taints Hollywood by influencing viewers to believe that looking at women in this manner is copacetic.

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street follows the life of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he secures a high-powered job on Wall Street. The greed and ill-motivated drive of his career transform him into a sex, drug-fueled, and money obsessed stockbroker. He amasses a scandalous amount of wealth and power at the expense of any moral fiber. After he achieves unimaginable financial success in combination with his vices, Belfort is placed under investigation by the authorities for his corrupt activities. This investigation determines that he has indeed engaged in criminal activity and is destined for prison.

The depiction of women as objects in The Wolf of Wall Street is made very clear from the outset, as Belfort walks into what is assumed to be his dream career. Here, we witness a room full of male stockbrokers, adorned in their professional accoutrements. During this scene, he passionately discusses his unabashed love of money, stating that, “Money doesn’t just buy you a better life, better food, better car, better pussy, it also makes you a better person.”[2]

This immediately sets the tenor of the film by introducing its representation of women as a commodity that can be purchased like food and cars. The movie appears to be heading in a misogynistic direction after just a few minutes. As the movie proceeds, this interpretation is reinforced by camera angles that are demeaning to women and that reinforce this negative image. For example, as Belfort meets the woman who would become his second wife, the camera captures Naomi with the lingering gaze of Belfort and two friends who point out that, “I would fuck that girl if she were my sister” and “I would let that girl give me fucking AIDS”. The camera does not even show the men as they are talking, emphasizing Naomi’s role as an object that these men are determined to attain.

The male gaze plays a role in emphasizing the power of men and the submissive role of women in the world of Wall Street. Women are objectified and made submissive to the male centered universe of power. Clearly, Mulvey would have spoken volumes about this film as it relates to scopophilia.

Scopophilia is defined as deriving titillation from merely viewing images. In an article about cinematic scopophilia, Linda Singer writes that, “contemporary film theory is preoccupied with the question of pleasure”[3] The Wolf of Wall Street casts women in a manner that will provide pleasure to the viewers. The scantily clothed women that Scorsese includes in many party scenes underscore female objectification as a recurrent theme in this movie. In fact, many of today’s Hollywood productions portray the female body as a fundamental focus of the camera. Because the editors oversee which images are ultimately projected on the screen, they have total control over the culture of gender. Ultimately, they are responsible for men receiving camera shots that are more approbatory than those of the women. Strangely enough, however, cinematic editors have not been able to offer viewers alternative options in which women are portrayed by the camera not simply as objects. At least not yet.

In Clifford Manlove’s “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: reading gaze theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey”, he analyzes the male gaze and points out that, “once the power of patriarchy to control cinematic pleasures has been revealed, Mulvey suggests it may be possible to create a new form of cinema”.[4] This idea can be directly correlated with Mulvey’s opinion that due to the power of editing, “the camera becomes the mechanism for producing an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude” (Mulvey, 403). By this, Mulvey is remarking that an exemplary editor is one who is capable of stringing together the snippets of film in a fashion that allows the viewer to be comfortable in the fact that they are witnessing a movie without a male bias. A preeminent editor will generate a movie that seems as though it is in fact, reality. Manlove concludes that as viewers recognize screen images to be a false truth[5] which is monopolized by the male viewpoint, a new style of film may evolve. If this is the case, then the current and prevalent biased perspectives in our films will be exposed as such and unwind a culturally engrained phenomenon. This will be the driving factor in forcing a new reality.

If a less gendered editing method were created, viewing film would diverge vastly from what is today’s norm. Imagine this: The Wolf of Wall Street through the eyes of a woman. Andi Zeisler discusses how alluring and provocative it would be to tell the story of Jordan Belfort using the viewpoint of a female stockbroker. The plot of the story would remain consistent, it would merely be depicted in a different light. Zeisler points out that the same movie would portray things in a distinctive way but that this interpretation could potentially harm the consumption of the movie. The story through the eyes of a female would not be as rewarding either, “for the filmmakers nor for Belfort himself”.[6] The filmmakers would suffer from box-office failure, and Belfort would not experience as much self-satisfaction because the story would not focus on his character. Joanne Lipman reiterated Zeisler’s claim that the film would not have been so highly acclaimed if it were told from a woman’s perspective. She wrote in Time about her experience as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. In her view, the world of finance in the 80’s has not been chronicled with a women’s context because “no matter how large the screenwriters’ imagination, they couldn’t come close to the true absurdity of the era, as seen through the eyes of the women who were there”.[7] According to her experience, women were subjected to far more extreme circumstances than men, it would be impossible to represent this absurdity in a Hollywood film. It is doubtful that the producers could successfully accomplish the task of realistically portraying these events through a female principal character. Because this movie has a targeted demographic, the film probably would not have received as much positive consideration if the chauvinistic Belfort were not the central, narrating character. When examining the intended audience, Andrew O’Hehir says, “If you’re getting the impression that The Wolf of Wall Street is pretty much a guy’s movie, you are correct”. In his article “The Wolf of Wall Street, inequality and the Gatsby myth” he elaborates on this point by clarifying that this male audience is a response to the depiction of female actresses in the film. Men savor this film because it is very much scopophilic.

Although most film critics have raved over Scorsese’s movie, saying that “this telling of the tale possesses enormous cinematic energy and a killer supporting cast full of hilarious delight” [8], some are not so enthusiastic. This negative chatter partly results from the way that the camera depicts the women. By including overtly sexual shots of women such as the first glimpse of Naomi, viewers become a part of the false narrative that demonstrates that gawking at women in this manner is not merely acceptable, but mandatory. Given that editors do not include scenes in which female actresses are adequately clothed, the message is broadcast to viewers that they must either objectify the women with their gaze or not watch at all. The camera, the angles and the editing incessantly reinforce this point. Moira Herbst writes that, “what has received far less attention than merited is the film’s portrayal of women. While The Wolf of Wall Street is based on a true story and real characters, there is a fine line between accurately depicting the rampant objectification of women in Jordan’s world and succumbing to it”.[9] This critique underscores the reality that degradation of women was commonplace in the workplace throughout the 1980s and 90s. This actuality, however, does not justify the fact that these movie makers should freely promote this attitude today and participate in this rampant objectification of women. The film perpetuates the sexualizing of women using scenes that depict prostitutes and female nudity, neither of which are necessary to the plot. These shots are included solely to sexualize the female characters.

Some of the events in The Wolf of Wall Street are not as absurd as they seem. Joanne Lipman notes that “the experiences my female Wall Street friends and I had would be considered outrageous today. Yet the incidents barely registered at the time because they were so … normal. We didn’t even notice enough to be offended”. She goes on to recount that she had interviewed a businessman who was only clad in underwear. Her roommate who worked at Lehman brothers had a boss that brought her on cocaine runs to safeguard his car. Another friend was “so accustomed to strippers in the office that after a while, she didn’t even bother looking up when naked women began gyrating near her desk”. In today’s working environment, these events would be considered wildly inappropriate and would likely result in disciplinary action, but for women involved in finance in the 80’s, this was just another day in the office. Alarmingly, Lipman says, “Ask any woman who worked around finance back then what she thought about sexual harassment, and her answer will likely be a shrug: ‘We called it going to work’”. Lipman indicated that the most believable moments of the film lie in its perfunctory prejudice against women. The apex of uneasiness for Lipman was the philistinism that the filmmakers seem to possess. They disregard intellectual value and target simple and easy unethical values through their editing tools, and the film itself. [6]

Based on the accounts of the time, the portrayal of Jordan Belfort’s lifestyle does seem historically accurate. The controversy regarding The Wolf of Wall Street comes from the editing and cinematography of the film. A questionable camera shot occurs during a provocative scene in which Naomi is teasing Belfort in a very scandalous outfit. The point of view alternates between Belfort’s eyes and Naomi’s erotic leg. The second dubious shot reveals the infatuated look on Belfort’s face. His gaze is one of complete and utter sexual desire, with Naomi as the object of his passion. Although, objectification of women was not out of the ordinary in the workplace in the 80’s and 90’s, there is no reason that the film production should perpetuate this culture and disregard the gravity of sexual harassment. This is precisely Mulvey’s argument. She proposes that in the editing room, “the conscious aim is always to eliminate intrusive camera presences and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience” (Mulvey, 403). This is the dangerous problem with continuity editing because it tries to convince viewers that they are seeing reality, at least for the three hours spent in the movie theater. In fact, the image is a mirage, and the editors have cleverly perpetrated a false reality. The angles, the cuts, the framing, and all of the editor’s inputs converge to create a distorted image, an image that they implore the viewer to accept as their reality as well.

In Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort’s male gaze, around which the filmmakers have centered the story, re-emphasizes the culture of inappropriate behavior towards women. The editorial tools synergize with the theme of the movie itself. The editorial male gaze underscores the storyline in a more subtle but devious fashion, attacking the unknowing viewer. The editors apparently support this dominant male behavior, as Belfort’s misogynistic lifestyle leads to financial success and staggering power, the holy grail for many. The movie practically screams to viewers that disrespecting women will lead to inconceivable wealth. Evidently, the camera is a dangerous and perilous tool when it falls into the hands of Hollywood’s powerful and persuasive filmmakers.

Written in the style of: David Foster Wallace

Read by: Ian Pultz-Earle

[1] Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, 2001, pp. 393–404.

[2] Scorsese, Martin, director. The Wolf of Wall Wtreet. Paramount Pictures, 2013.

[3] Singer, Linda. “Eye/Mind/Screen: Toward a Phenomenology of Cinematic Scopophilia.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 12, no. 3, 1990, pp. 51–67.

[4] Manlove, Clifford T. “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: reading gaze theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey.” Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, 2007, p. 83+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A166350930/AONE?u=mlin_w_willcoll&sid=AONE&xid=ec05ee8a. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

[5] Something that is believed to be true but is not. In this situation, the false truth would be that you, the viewer, are a man working on Wall Street in 1987.

[6] Zeisler, Andi. “Thoughts on Women and The Wolf of Wall Street.” Bitch Media, 2 Jan. 2014.

[7] Lipman, Joanne. “What The Wolf of Wall Street Is Missing: The Women.” Time, Time, 30 Dec. 2013.

[8] O’Hehir, Andrew. “‘The Wolf of Wall Street,” Inequality and the Gatsby Myth.” Salon, 28 Dec. 2013.

[9] Herbst, Moira. “The Wolf of Wall Street’s Male Gaze.” Al Jazeera America, 9 Feb. 2014.

References:

Herbst, Moira. “The Wolf of Wall Street’s Male Gaze.” Al Jazeera America, 9 Feb. 2014.
Lipman, Joanne. “What The Wolf of Wall Street Is Missing: The Women.” Time, Time, 30 Dec. 2013.
Manlove, Clifford T. “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: reading gaze theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey.” Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, 2007, p. 83+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A166350930/AONE?u=mlin_w_willcoll&sid=AONE&xid=ec05ee8a. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, 2001, pp. 393–404.
O’Hehir, Andrew. “‘The Wolf of Wall Street,” Inequality and the Gatsby Myth.” Salon, 28 Dec. 2013.
Scorsese, Martin, director. The Wolf of Wall Wtreet. Paramount Pictures, 2013.
Singer, Linda. “Eye/Mind/Screen: Toward a Phenomenology of Cinematic Scopophilia.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 12, no. 3, 1990, pp. 51–67.
Zeisler, Andi. “Thoughts on Women and The Wolf of Wall Street.” Bitch Media, 2 Jan. 2014.

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Jordan Belfort’s Male Gaze and Its Effect on Filmgoers