“The Utopia of Finance Capital: Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street”
In this talk, derived from a book forthcoming in the fall of 2016, I argue that Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street is best understood via the critical theory of Fredric Jameson. Just as Jameson argued The Godfather is really about capitalism, we can see that Scorsese’s film is really a gangster picture. Further, through its mobilization of a “brocialist” subjectivity, the movie offers a critique not only of finance capital, but also of a certain naive left tendency, alternately nostalgic for blue collar labor and implicated in a fantasy of libidinal transgression.