In this special edition of Christina Newland‘s Screen Women column, she discusses Martin Scorseses’s The Wolf of Wall Street with Kubrick on the Guillotine editor Simran Hans.
Simran Hans: Let’s start off with one of the big questions — the Scorsese question. Do we really need another story like this? And further, do we really need another story like this from Scorsese? The Dissolve’s Tasha Robinson described the film as ”repetitive, redundant [and] grating”, as “very familiar within the course of Martin Scorsese’s work”, arguing that “it didn’t say anything that [we] haven’t heard from him multiple times from him before.”
Christina Newland: Well, the thought did cross my mind while I was watching it — the same ugly male hubris, the same greed and misogyny that you see as a strain through many of his male characters. Ultimately, he’s always been thematically concerned with masculine identity and he’s always been highly critical of the macho culture that men like [Jordan] Belfort come from. Robinson isn’t completely wrong in saying there’s an element of repetition in it, but I think it’s possible that therein lies the point. We, as women particularly, may be exhausted of seeing men like Belfort dominate the narrative viewpoint, but the cold truth of the matter is that, in reality, men like Belfort do dominate the discourse, to the detriment of women.
SH: While I agree that the film is an accurate representation of the dominant male discourse, I don’t think that the fact that something is ‘truthful’ should mean that discourse is exempt from examination. So, let’s examine it a little more closely…
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