The Invisible Counterpoint

The Wolf of Wall Street (part two) Richard Brody just wrote a review of “Wolf of Wall Street” where he began by discussing “Inside Llewyn Davis,” showing how anything good—he really liked both films—is “about pretty much everything.” Specifically, referring to Llewyn’s catching a glimpse of Bob Dylan on a stage that he's  sort of owned for years, he says that the film's about the “terrible, subtle blow that knocks a person from the vanguard to the sidelines, from the promise of youth to the nostalgia of age in a single moment.” He then gets to his discussion of “Wolf,” about the particular fashion in which it's about pretty much everything—or rather, the considerable part of the human that involves huge internal energies we tend to want to suppress or deny. I wished he had paused before rolling along, for it'd have been the right thing to have done, and inadvertently he had handed himself a solid prompt to have done so. For what Brody does not end up con...

Wolf of Wall Street (part one) There are no victims at the beginning of the movie. Basically, it begins with a lad finding himself in what turns out to be one of the engine rooms keeping a whole society running, that needs to be kept going smoothly lest – collapse.  To their "customers," they flood confidence, their own ego, surety, and unflappability. Anything equivocating must be "other side" – on the side of those investing in stocks, who need to have every bit of wavering greeted with an immediate return of reassurance. To be this for them, for society , means affixing themselves with the right mix of chemicals so to be a stable base of relaxed bliss from whence confidence can be spurt out as required. There are no victims, because the movie begins with a sense that this is just where society is. Whatever might have driven societies before then – which might in the past have been "righteous" war and sacrifice (the 40s), cautious but r...