I’ve been watching a lot of Wall Street movies lately. The Big Short, Margin Call, Boiler Room—these movies have been scratching an itch for me, for reasons I don’t fully understand. I am not interested in the world of high finance on its own. I barely understand what’s going on there, and at some level, don’t even believe what they’re talking about is real. High dividends? Security-backed options? Fairy dust and leprechauns, as far as I’m concerned. Yet maybe that constitutes the very appeal, for me. I’m interested in belief, in the way it organizes personal relationships and social structures. That’s why this newsletter is about, after all. And Wall Street movies, for all the slickness and cynicism they may espouse, are about belief. Belief in money, in the American dream, in success. More than that, the movies are about believers, those who devote themselves to this belief in money and success with the rigor of Buddhist monks sitting cross-legged in the dirt for 40 years. True believers, with Brooks Brothers and Windsor knots in place of cassocks and and collars.
Perhaps no movie demonstrates this sense of desperate belief better than The Wolf of Wall Street. Chalk it up to director Martin Scorsese, famously raised in an Italian-American milieu awash in Roman Catholicism, possessing an innate feel for how belief, often religious belief, shapes his characters and their motivations. Belief as a force to compel you, or an object to push against. Though, in the case of The Wolf of Wall Street, a sense of belief may not be all that evident at first glance. The story of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a stockbroker in the 1980s and 90s, who made his proverbial millions in shady fashion before facing the proverbial consequences, Wolf portrays a world whose characters are wholly devoted to their own pleasure, the pleasures of the flesh, pleasures which only money can buy. The world of Wolf is particularly debauched and depraved, which is saying something for a Wall Street movie, famously a genre where rich white men commit as many sins as they can before the bill arrives. But Wolf’s carnality follows from the movie’s operating principle, what I think of as the gnostic prosperity gospel. The belief that money, while all-powerful, isn’t really real, or at least not as real as the body, the flesh, and so the only way to demonstrate money’s power is by consuming it via the flesh, in copious amounts.
Gnosticism, if you’re a religious studies nerd, was a heresy that threatened the Christian church during the 3rd and 4th centuries, just as it was rising to consolidated political power thanks to Emperor Constantine—the origin of the Holy Roman Empire whose effects little Marty Scorsese would feel in Little Italy, New York City, sixteen centuries later. Where the Church saw Jesus Christ as the Son of God, come to save humanity from its sins, Gnosticism sees Jesus as a kind of metaphysical freedom fighter, come to free humanity from tyranny. Jesus was not the Son of God, because God was not God at all; rather, he was a cosmic villain called the Demiurge, who had trapped humanity’s infinite spirits in the prison of flesh. Christ came to earth to aid humanity in realizing their oppression, to rise up against the Demiurge and free their spirits from their bodies. Was Gnosticism an elaborate form of 3rd century fan fiction, where heroes were recast into villains to thwart the aims of established content creators, ie church leaders? I’m not saying that, but I’m not not saying that, either.
One consequence of Gnosticism is that its adherents held a very low view of the body, as it was, after all, a prison. (Women were held in especially low regard, as they were the ones chiefly responsible for bringing more bodies into the world. Gnostics, consider yourselves canceled.) Since those lame Christians were rather ascetic with their bodies, with prohibitions placed upon consumption and especially sexual activity, Gnostics went in the opposite direction, in the interests of spiritual liberation. Drunkenness, gluttony, concupiscence—you name it, the Gnostics were down. And perhaps, Gnosticism drew adherents not because their belief system was especially attractive, but because it authorized the pursuit of all-out hedonism? Gee, never heard of anything like that before!
Jordan Belfort is a kind of Gnostic prophet of Wall Street. He wants to get rich, yes, and possesses precisely zero scruples when it comes to the acquisition of wealth, selling penny stocks to clueless schmucks and pocketing 50% of the sale price as his commission fee. But he doesn’t want money for its own sake. He’s not content to let his wealth sit in stock portfolios, accruing interest. He wants to spend. He wants to see his money affect the real world, to call forth pleasures for his own amusement.
There’s a famous scene at the beginning, where Belfort, at the start of his career as a stockbroker, receives some advice from a senior broker played by Matthew McConaughey. Money, McConaughey says, is not real. It’s a ‘fugazi,’ as he says, his Texan twang mangling the Italian slang word. To combat the unreality of money, one must remember what is real: the body. One must stimulate one’s body at all times, through countless methods: alcohol, cocaine use, a punishing schedule of self-pleasure. Only the body is real, and only by constantly reminding yourself of the fact can you free yourself from the grip of the Demiurge that is the almighty dollar.
Belfort takes this lesson to heart. His office is a nonstop bacchanal fit for a Roman emperor—Caligula, not Constantine. Drugs consumed by the boatload, with quaaludes serving as Belfort’s preferred poison. Prostitutes are a staple of the office, their services called upon more frequently than the Xerox machine. At home, Belfort lives in an elaborate mansion out on Long Island, helicoptering onto his front lawn at 3am and waking his sleeping daughter in the process. Inevitably, his wife discovers his countless infidelities, resulting in the bedroom screaming matches that are Scorsese’s bread and butter. But as much as Wolf may look like a cautionary tale, that of how one man’s hedonism ruins his home life, the story keeps slipping away from that reading. Belfort’s Wall Street Gnosticism keeps asserting itself, insisting upon bodily pleasure in the midst of marital collapse.
The best example comes in a sequence showing Belfort’s bachelor party, followed immediately by his wedding. The bachelor party is an over-the-top bacchanalian blowout, shameless rutting in a flying airplane on the way to Las Vegas, Belfort renting out an entire floor of the Bellagio, thoroughly trashing it in the process, the whole party costing him 2 million. His wedding follows, a lavish affair on a Caribbean island, friends and family flying in from all across to drink champagne and eat crab legs, the whole affair costing him another 2 million. It may look like a display of Belfort’s bone-deep infidelity, his inability to commit. But it’s not; it’s an expression of his faithfulness, his commitment to the gnostic prosperity gospel. The point is to spend money, to transmute what is immaterial into the physical, the flesh. Whether that transmutation takes the form of a bachelor party or a destination wedding hardly matters. All that counts is that it takes place, that the power of money is felt within the flesh.
Belfort does lose everything, before too long. Even when he should step away from his brokerage firm to deflect the attention of the FBI, constantly looking into his clearly-illegal business practices, he remains. He can’t help himself. He tells the whole office he’s staying, in one of his many speeches that recall the manner and syntax of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, even if the gospel he preaches is wholly different. But he doesn’t learn his lesson. He doesn’t clean up or stick to the straight and narrow. In prison, he learns how to manage the contraband black market as efficiently as a stock floor. Released, he gives seminars to would-be entrepreneurs, spreading his message to all who have ears. He is a prophet practicing the true faith of America, whether or not he is appreciated.
Gnostic prosperity gospel .... brilliant!