The late period of filmmaker Martin Scorsese is entrenched in the
manifold meanings of illusion, a theme of grave importance as our
collective collision with images has accelerated along with available
technology and the encapsulating web of cyberspace when, while a world
so widely canvassed would seem to be becoming more objective, our senses
are saturated in manufactured images—or illusions, and so susceptible
to gross manipulation. Scorsese has successfully migrated from the
idiosyncratic crystal explosions and chemistry of analog moviemaking to
digital’s binary code, yet what’s interesting about the trajectory of
his career, along with the technology of his profession, is how he’s
linked the art and business of image production to the psychological and
spiritual problems he, as an artist, is bent on exploring.
His controversial new film The Wolf of Wall Street, about
corrupt and decadent Long Island broker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo
DiCaprio), is much more than another rise-and-fall (or “fall”) arc of a
criminal overwhelmed by his luxurious excesses (it seems like a WASPy
white collar version of Goodfellas or Casino); in its
dizzying whiz-bang episodic carnivale of unreliable anecdotes, Scorsese
has made an indictment of our present day submissiveness to the
profit-motivated allure of moving pictures, the dulling narcotic of
visual sensory intake that aids the evasion from existential realities.
Scorsese has made the antipode to his preceding feature, the earnest and
moving ode to illusions, Hugo, in which fantasy opened the real world up to transcendent irradiation. The Wolf of Wall Street is
also a fantasy, but the sanctuary of images, where the viewer is
transformed, is replaced by the passive lull of television. The screen
isn’t in dialogue with reality. It's the Leviathan Hellgate mouth that swallows reality and replaces it.
No comments:
Post a Comment