The 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street is a representation of capitalism at its finest within the stock market world. This film came to mind when the clip of Kevin O'Leary was shown in class in regards to what is important to businesses; returning money to shareholders. This mentality does ignore labour value and the production aspect of generating profits from businesses back to shareholders of a company. In the case of Jordan Belfort who is the main character and who in real life excucuted the operations portrayed in this film, the whole point of business is to earn profit... primarily for yourself. The shareholders or stockholders are merely pawns in the game, they are to be used to your advantage. This mentality is very problematic as it promotes unequal wealth distribution and insecure investments of high volumes of money. The question is however, if given the opportunities Jordan Belfort was offered to earn millions upon millions of dollars, in our current societal structure, would you lose all morals and use shareholders to earn extremely high levels of commision?As Kevin O'Leary stated, it's all about making money and generating cash...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iszwuX1AK6A - The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) trailor
http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/the-wolf-of-wall-street.php - facts about the true story of Jordan Belfort
The movie Wolf of Wall Street always reminds me of Warren Buffet, one of the most famous investors of our time's quote "the things you own end up owning you". I believe that Buffet is pointing towards both material and immaterial objects. In this movie, the "things that own" Leonardo DiCaprio are not solely his material objects, but also his capitalistic way of life.
ReplyDeleteIn one of the opening scenes, you see Leonardo's character sell penny stocks for thousands of dollars to middle class white collar workers over the phone. You feel a sense of moral disposition because you know that this other middle aged man is exploiting the good faith of another. He does so for his own capital advantages, something that Boutang discusses in his article on Cognitive Capitalism.