The Wolf of Wall Street: Formal Entrenchment of the Male Gaze

The following analysis was submitted for a New Media Analysis assignment Senior year.

New media, such as films, might be considered “old” by contemporary standards. However, since the dichotomy between old media and new media is indistinct, neither categorization is confined to a certain era of theoretical analysis. In other words, new media may be evaluated by theories predating its emergence, and old media may be evaluated by theories postdating its emergence. Mulvey effectively harnesses older psychoanalytic theories to produce a nuanced feminist argument about a newer medium medium: film. In this essay, I will analyze Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street as a new media object that conforms to Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory. I will first use a scene from the film to elucidate how the male gaze entails pleasure derived scopophilia. Then, I will use a different scene to explore how scopophilia works in tandem with narcissism under the male gaze theory. Finally, I will expound on the film’s formally entrenched male gaze, reiterating how it both objectifies women and reflects patriarchal bias. 

Under Mulvey’s framework, scopophilia involves the exertion of power and power structures, specifically describing the sexual pleasure a viewer gleans from the objectifying act of looking in on a media subject. In theory, a spectator assumes that film’s on-screen content is hermetically contained to the screen. The act of watching the film thus grants “the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world” full of characters that are incognizant of the fact they are being watched (Mulvey, 200). In watching The Wolf of Wall Street, a viewer recognizes their lack of immersion in Jordan Belfort’s actual criminal timeline and reframes the act of viewing the film as an act of peering into the life of the characters. 

As the viewer engages in this scopophilic peering, the film’s focalization situates the audience with the characters doing the viewing in the narrative. Focalization implicitly encourages the spectator to regard particular characters’ gazes as their own gaze. The Wolf of Wall Street guides the viewer to adopt “the power of the male protagonist,” or Jordan’s perspective, via focalization (205). For instance, when Jordan drives Naomi home from their first date, the camera aligns with Jordan’s eye line. Jordan is out of focus and Naomi is in focus, indicating to the audience that Jordan (and by extension, the spectator) is staring at Naomi’s face. The subsequent shot is also shot from Jordan’s eye line, but it cuts out both characters’ faces and focuses on Naomi’s black lingerie tights. The sound over this shot is Jordan’s non-diegetic narration speaking on his sexual fascination with Naomi’s lingerie business. In this scene, the camera’s situation at Jordan’s eye level while they speak and the subsequent shot at Jordan’s eye level as he peers at Naomi’s lingerie situates the viewer with Jordan. Jordan derives sexual pleasure from looking at Naomi so, by proxy, the audience reaps a sort of fetishistic pleasure from looking at Naomi. The audience might be separated from the diegesis, but Jordan’s sexually objectifying glances grant the audience sexual gratification as if it is their own voyeuristic peak of Naomi’s lingerie. As active watchers who take on Jordan's dominating masculine gaze, the audience derives scopophilic pleasure from subjecting a passive Naomi to a sexual object. 

Mulvey’s discussion of scopophilia describes the pleasure a viewer gains from peering into the private lives of the storyworld, but her discussion of narcissism expounds on how a viewer’s resonation with particular on-screen physical forms contributes to the overarching male gaze theory. Under Mulvey’s theory, which was inspired by Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic scholarship, narcissism refers to the process by which spectators mistakenly self-identify with characters in the narrative. To Lacan, the mirror stage is when an infant recognizes the totality of their physical body via a mirror’s reflection. This moment corresponds with the primary stages of Freudian narcissism and heeds the recognition that there exists an “I” that is fundamentally disparate from other physical or human forms. The child believes the mirror image is superior to any prior lived experience in their body and “recognition” (in the form of looking into the mirror) is “overlaid with misrecognition” (in the process of thinking the mirror image is superior to the ego) (201). In watching a film, “curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition,” producing a cinematic allure fueled by the fusion of scopophilia and narcissism (201). Mulvey argues that the act of watching cinema is like looking into a mirror, wherein the spectator recognizes themself in the idealized characters on screen. Given that the spectator exists in a society defined by patriarchal structures, the idealized character is typically the active male protagonist.

The procurement of pleasure and the recognition of self in the dominating male protagonist coincides with a gender binaried active male vs. passive female structure. In the case of The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan acts as the active male protagonist who projects his sexual fantasies onto Naomi, the passive female protagonist (who is already sexualized by costuming/mise en scène). The spectator’s implicit attempt to reinforce their sense of self is paired with formally-constructed focalization, ultimately guiding alignment with Jordan. For example, in the scene where Jordan spots Naomi for the first time, the inter-film gazes guide the  spectator to identify with Jordan and the other men. The camera captures Naomi walking into the party from a high angle. Then, the scene cuts to a medium length shot of Jordan staring down at her from the upper level floor. Thus, the spectator understands that they are watching Naomi walk into the party from Jordan’s perspective. Before the scene’s action progresses, the form has already encouraged the spectator to watch Naomi from Jordan’s perspective. The choice in staging, in which the active and dominating Jordan looks down upon the passive and scandalously-dressed Naomi, might also be taken as a reinforcement of the power imbalance inherent in Jordan’s objectifying gaze. The camera cuts back to Naomi innocently looking around the party, then once again cuts back to the upper level floor where Donnie mimics Jordan and stares down at Naomi. Like a baby looking into a mirror, the spectator recognizes a division between themself and the focalized male protagonist, yet the form guides one to gaze at the objectified female protagonist from his perspective. In this, the spectator narcissistically misrecognizes the male protagonist as themself, takes on his power-subduing gaze, and derives pleasure from looking at a woman contained in the narrative. Narcissism explains how the viewer–in associating themself with an idealized male character–misregards the film’s visual phenomena as their own perception. 

As evidenced by scopophilia and narcissism’s entrenchment at the formal level, the male gaze entails both the objectification of women and patriarchal bias at the aesthetic level. The act of pointing a camera at a subject is an inherently political process that may easily subsume the objectification of a female subject. In the context of The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan’s sexually-charged character becomes a proxy for the audience. Thus, when the filmmakers elect to include scenes where Jordan drools over a scantily-clad Naomi from Jordan’s perspective, the spectator and Jordan operate in tandem to objectify Naomi. Mise en scène and shot selection more explicitly work together in the film’s inclusion of shots where Naomi is wearing revealing clothing. While provocative costuming choices should not ideally encourage sexual objectification, such choices often trigger erotic pleasure for the average heterosexual male. The heterosexual male viewer then feels justified when characters in the narrative act on a similar erotic impulse. The male gaze is a product of a patriarchal society and industry, which explains how it exists as a form of patriarchal bias at the aesthetic level. In other words, the filmmakers reside in a patriarchal society and thus implicitly or explicitly project patriarchal biases into formal choices. The formal choices discussed in this paper sustain a theoretical patriarchal structure in which a dominant man has the inherent right to project their sexual impulses onto a passive woman so as to reinforce his own power. According to the male gaze theory, the film’s formal choices encourage the spectator to procure visual pleasure by following suit.    

     References

Rosen, Philip, and Laura Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.