Film Adaptations: The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street

This post is a bit of a cheat, because it is about the film adaptations of books rather than the books themselves. However, while the film of The Great Gatsby inspired me to read the original there is no way on earth I'm touching The Wolf of Wall Street, as I feel I wasted quite enough of my life watching the film. (Three hours! Are you f'n kidding me?) So this post is about the films, though it's more about the narrative arc than its visual representation.

Both feature Leonardo DiCaprio playing a disgustingly rich man with the gift of the gab who became wealthy by shady means. The former is a mysterious millionaire who worships women like objects on a pedestal, throws enormous parties he does not attend, and drinks gin like it is going out of fashion. He is based on a fictional character. The latter is a slimy stockbroker with a defective moral compass who treats women like objects for his consumption, defrauds everyone he encounters of their money and hoovers drugs like they’re going out of fashion. He is based on a real person. Neither film, in its depiction of excess, gave me any desire to ever make money, which I suppose is the point. Both create the impression that people, as a species, are awful, and if they make too much money they just acquire the means to become more prolifically awful.

The Great Gatsby is a cross between coming-of-age narrative, (for the narrator) and star-crossed-romance (for the subject, Jay Gatsby). If you’ve read the book, you’ll know the plot anyway, but here’s a summary: a Good Young Man (Nick Carraway) moves into a small cottage next door to the decadent mansion of Jay (The Great) Gatsby, who throws debauched parties featuring cocktails, partial nudity and feathers on a nightly basis. Nick receives an invitation to one such party, where he discovers that most of the guests have never seen Gatsby. It transpires, after much mincing about in evening dress and necking gin, that Gatsby only wants to be reunited with Nick’s cousin Daisy, for whom Gatsby has had a thing since adolescence. It is to gain her favour that he has amassed his ill-gotten fortune, and the endless decadent parties are held in the hope that she will one day wander in to see what the fuss is all about and drink some gin. Daisy is, unfortunately, married to a man with a moustache, a drinking problem and a bad temper. With Nick’s fortuitous intervention, Gatsby and Daisy meet, they have sex, and pledge their eternal love. Daisy’s husband gets jealous despite being constantly unfaithful himself, and finally Daisy’s impossibly bad driving gets Gatsby murdered when she runs over her moustachioed husband’s lover outside a petrol station. Cousin Daisy and her moustachioed husband wiz off into the sunset as if nothing has happened, and nobody wants to come to Gatsby’s funeral because there isn’t any free booze. Nick concludes that they are all rotten bad sports.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a baffling object. One reaches the end of the film feeling that, firstly, it should have come a great deal sooner, and secondly, it is unclear what one is meant to be feeling or thinking about the mind-numbing three hours of footage of Leo-as-Wolf (aka Jordan Belfort) snorting cocaine off various women’s intimate areas, often with no regard for basic hygiene. Some of the drug fueled escapades can be considered funny, but they are by no means harmless, which tinges any laughter or enjoyment with an edge of horror and self-loathing for laughing at something so awful. Belfort hurts everyone around him, including himself in the long run - only he is too fixated on the importance of being rich to realise he is a miserable bastard with no friends. I mean, I like a good champagne as much as the next person, but I’d rather have a happy marriage than neck bottles of it at work while pretending to myself that I’m doing things that are great and clever. Drunk people are never clever. All you need to do to verify this statement is stay sober at one party where everyone else is drunk. Just sayin’. Anyway, the moral of the story seems to be that Brokers are Bad. But also that if you sell bullshit with sufficient fervour you will come out on top every time.

Both films left me with a distinct aversion to the idea of having money. In both films, the main character starts out with a problem and the conviction that its solution is to become extremely rich; in Gatsby’s case, his problem is that he is in love with the idea of a woman who in reality is a dishonest greedy cow who is emotionally as deep as a puddle; in Wolfie’s case, his problem is that he is a complete psychopath. Both narratives demonstrate that the quest to become wealthy solves no problems, and instead erodes the seeker’s integrity, leaving him in the end with nothing but his salesman’s patter. In Gatsby, this represents the end of an imagined golden age in which there was human integrity and the possibility of Great Romance - Gatsby himself is the last gentleman. Similarly, in The Wolf, the narrative arc could be read as a chilling warning against the moral decrepitude of the values of the present day - despite all his devious machinations and morally bankrupt strategies, and despite getting caught, he continues to make money after his release from prison, by, irony of all ironies, becoming a motivational speaker. The main difference is that in the case of The Wolf, there is no imagined golden age - the degeneracy of the human spirit is timeless, making the whole thing more depressingly hopeless.

From the two films, one gets the impression that DiCaprio wants to warn us all against the pursuit of wealth, by showing that all rich people are morally bankrupt, not to mention utterly miserable. This is odd, because one imagines he is rather rich himself, mainly because all the teenage girls of the 1990s fell in love with his floppy blonde hair, and he subsequently made a soppy movie set on the sinking Titanic, in which he played someone poor who fell in love with someone rich. Maybe these films are meant to warn against potential pitfalls of extreme wealth, rather than represent the inevitable outcome of making money. Or maybe DiCaprio is a Miltonian devil-character, degenerate but aware of his own degeneracy, and dashingly romantic as a result. Either way, these films made me worry a whole lot less about the fact that my decision to study literature means I will never make any money. The resulting debauchery just looks too exhausting.