Money Porn

Enjoying my winter break with a couple movies.  Saw "The Wolf of Wall Street" this afternoon.  While I was hoping to see a movie on the evils of Wall Street excesses, equating bad boy stockbrokers to the mafia thugs that Scorsese normally portrays, I think I may have wandered into a soft-core porn screening.  At no point did I find any of these characters compelling or likeable, but I feel that the treatment of the subjects was stilted... like they were holding back from showing these people as they deserved to be treated.  I can only think that the protagonist being the writer of the story clouded the way in which he was portrayed - as if that last knock-out punch was withheld.

There's a moment when you meet someone, and your spidey-sense starts tingling that this person is bringing trouble and misery into the world.  It makes you skeptical of what that person says, and puts you on guard for the future.  It's a very handy voice to have in your head when you sit through a time-share pitch in exchange for attraction tickets.  The movie spends three hours looking at those who would take advantage of those who do not have this voice guiding them through financial decisions.  In short, it's exploiting a market failure of two parties with equal information making a market transaction that is advantageous to both, and replacing it with a system that destroys American Capitalism.  It's abhorrent.  The glorification of sex, and drugs, and money (seriously, does anyone go around talking about how much their suits cost?  How gauche!) leaves one thinking that Wall Street may be a pretty nifty place - martinis with Matthew McConnaghey, hookers on the office expense account, fast cars and yachts - no talk about the people who are losing everything.  Instead, because postmen and garbage collectors want to make money in the stock market, they deserve to be taken advantage of.  Their greed gives Stratton Oakmount the ethical right to take all of their money.  Pushing penny stocks off pink sheets might be one issue, but the full-out stock price manipulation that undoes the firm is pushed to the side and not treated with the same amount of time as the "Look at these poor people who want to be rich, the shmucks!" story-line.  It trivializes their pain in order to tell the story of money laundering and Quaaludes.

But, this is something to consider - why DOESN'T Hollywood look at the way that the middle income household is impacted by such things?  Why do you only see the 1% on screen?  Or, if it is a "middle class" family, then the top 15%?  I'd love to see a serious turn towards showing families who earn ~ $52,000 per year in the U.S.  It would be a jar to see how the median household actually lives, and more pressing to see how such families are impacted by asshats like Jordan Balfort.