I went to see this at my local cinema, a lovely old art deco place that still truly cares about how films are shown. It’s one of those places that’s more than just a box with moving pictures inside. It has the stage at the front that makes you wonder if they were still unsure of whether it was really anything different to the theatre, and the curtains and ceiling decorations which give you something to stare at before the film other than the adverts. It was especially full which was surprising given that it had been on for at least a month by the time I got round to seeing it. I sat up on the balcony right at the front. I went alone, not something I’d normally do, but I hadn’t been able to convince anyone else to dedicate three hours of their Saturday night to it, so there I was.
Which is one of the first things worth saying; it’s a long film. I watched Titanic for the first time at Christmas playing Jenga and having my first taste of sherry, so the time washed away rather comfortably. There was an intermission in King Kong, which was necessary to stifle the disinterest I was generating through the first half as a bunch of hapless sailors wandered around an island. Being with the Wolf however kept me enthralled throughout. The film is amoral, disgusting and gaudy. Thank god for that. It’s an outrageous romp with DiCaprio at the helm, and in this case he finds himself well suited. He calls on self confidence and panache to play Jordan Belfort, an unscrupulous stock trader who manages to make a lot of money off the backs of others.
The film inspires a great deal of anger. It’s fantastic fantasy. I am certain that the events depicted in the film happened in some form or another (the real Jordan is now a motivational speaker in Australia), but on celluloid — I should mention that Wolf on Wall Street is the first film to be entirely distributed on digital format by Paramount Pictures — the absence of gaps, the lack of consequences, the vividness of a computer generated background blow everything up to epic proportions. There is gratuitous office sex, the use of drugs the likes of you have never heard of and a sense of wildness that captivates and disgusts in equal measure.
From the moment I saw the trailer set to the thudding power Kanye West’s Black Skinhead, it had me hooked through my most perverse and self destructive impulses. It is this contradiction of base and beauty that inspires such a powerful reaction. It is like being punched by Mohammed Ali on your left and experience the whistling fury of a nuclear wind on your right. In spite of these grand forces, you remain stationary. There is no recoil, no position to propel yourself back towards. So the energy must go somewhere. It goes up, out, all around you, everywhere it can. Sometimes it works its way through your digestive system, upsetting the delicate harmonies of your body in an unbearable manner you must have more of.
Given its length, it naturally takes you further than your average 90 minutes will. Clearly some will not be able to contain themselves. My chosen cinema, the Nottingham Savoy is popular with local students. Those that absorb theory and find themselves in an insulated pot of ideas about the world. Armed with conceptual frameworks the world does not care, their resulting desires clamber up and beyond rationality. I’d say the shouting started around the hour and fifty minutes mark.
Jokes straddle the line between the throwaway and the sincere. They can contain both and be a bridge from one to the other. “It looks like a Frankfürter!” said someone when Jonah Hill began to masturbate. We laughed along with the joker and it broke the tension all of us wondered if others felt. The theatre — unaccountably ostentatious, being built in the interwar period when the cinema was a destination rather than a diversion . Its dripping gold ornaments were certainly contributing to our mood — became a coffee house and people began to discuss with their friends and newly known neighbours their thoughts on what was played out before them. Validation gives rise to hardiness and the voices became louder and louder.
Eventually the jokes became shouts that didn’t need to cloak themselves in irony, such was their surety. I looked around at the hubbub. It was like no other cinema screening I had ever been in. I had always considered my cinema fantasy to be alone, utterly captivated by the plays of light, able to disregard the external world in favour of a forged fiction. I know now that this two dimensional lust was nothing but a fear, a desire to withdraw from life. “Fucking bankers”, was a popular cry. The zeitgeist’s most simplistic hate figure, sure to gain support among the lowest common denominator. Some people had gotten up to visit the toilet it seemed, not yet in breach of our collective code of stillness despite the noise.
“FRENZY!” I screamed, taken up quite suddenly by the atmosphere. As I made my noise many people around me stood up as if it was a call to action, the permission they had needed. I don’t know quite what I meant by it, but it seemed right at the time. “Frenzy” I heard again, reverberating across the hall out of many mouths. My memory is hazy here because it as hard to make sense of the transition between two worlds as it is to find Narnia at the back of a wardrobe. People were moving and swarming to the point where it was no longer possible to tell what direction any single person travelled in. A man stood at the stage at the front, giving an impromptu speech inspired by the film which still played behind him, obscured by his oversized shadow. I didn’t hear him but I knew what he said, we all did, we were one together.
He spoke of revolution, “we are not limited to the demands of our ancestors. We are not confined by their ideas and expectations of us. We must most of all not make our anger a piece of an old man’s puzzle. If we allow this we will find ourself without sharp edges, a harmless sphere that rebounds from the walls of power. We may not speak truth to him, for he does not speak our language.”
The young man on my right grabbed my arm and stared intensely into my eyes. He was around eighteen, his clothing was trendy and had the hallmarks of the member of an in crowd. But in that moment I saw a naïveté in his eyes. A trait I would have pilloried outside this novel scenario, and yet here I found myself adoring the honesty of his youth. He gripped my arm tighter, clawing at the fabric of my sweater.
I wish I had had the presence of mind to say to him, “Go! Be free in yourself, you don’t have a moment in life until you live as yourself”. Sadly I could only be the goldfish gulping mouthfuls of air and quite possibly he related the same tale I had about him. In truth I do not know who held on to who. The only thing I can be sure of is that moments later he leapt from the balcony with his arms tucked behind his back. He dropped gracefully, I didn’t see him land but moments later he was hopping from seat to seat making his way urgently towards the screen.
I leant over the balcony to see what was happening below. It was a scene to rival any taboo breaker in the film itself. People fucked gloriously in the aisles and over the seats. It was unbridled and yet carefully diverted around the few members of the audience left unintoxicated by the film. They were like those immune to a pandemic, later to be left to rebuild society after disease had ravaged it. Some had torn their clothes half off, or tore at the clothes of others. I saw a man being hurled like a cannonball through the air, careening into the curtains and sliding into a heap.
A crowd that demands justice can control itself. Once the witch has been identified and burned, all is restored and we can return to our comfortable armchairs. We did not want justice, we wanted what they had in the film . Greed has no peak. The self adulation drives self disgust which in turn requires even more indulgence to bury it. The only thing to do with our restless energy was to to generate more of it. Not knowing what to do I placed both hands on the seat in front of me and rocked it back and forward to pull it from the floor. My effort was not enough so more joined me, a woman in her thirties bent down to loosen the bolts that held it down. Eventually we tore it free and rolled it down the steps.
Inside the cinema everything had unravelled. We had become what we apparently sought to destroy and now we were forced to engage in a long running battle against ourselves. Music appeared and filled us as it often seems to do in times of spontaneity. I don’t know whether it was simply inside my head or if it was blasted through the hall by a rebellious projectionist angered by the pacification of his job by the move to a digital age. The young man who was part of my moment of awakening was now part of a throng that tearing with impromptu knives gathered from the food court at the false soft wall showing the credits. I was naked and filthy, caked with an equal mix of sweat and the unknown sticky substances coating the floor.
We spilled out of the cinema, past the manager reviewing accounts and the old lady carefully hanging bags of wine gums on the wall. Do you really think we care, in this state of glory, of the orderliness of your books or the symmetry of your sweet display. Together we laughed at their pettiness, but we did not need to disturb them, they were too small for us. Hooting and yelping, running down forbidden pathways with unknown endings, we smashed through the emergency doors and out into the rain.
My mother came to meet me at the entrance of the cinema, as had a small group of other parents. She winced a little and frowned, turning away. The all of us felt a sense of shame run up our spines and compress our bodies. Suddenly our music died inside us, the conductor slunk away from our hearts, letting the blood run cold, naked without an anthem. I felt dishevelled and wretched.
It is curious how quickly our sense of animalism disappeared, floating into the early evening. Outside bathed in the powerful lights of the cinema car park while buses trundled past, we stood silently breathing heavily. Those that had come in groups found their security within them once again and helped each other to cover their nudity. We were not sick, I try to tell myself. We did not descend, we triumphed over something called society. I doubted myself even as I thought these words.
The manager had come outside into the cold winter night to survey the scene. He stood in his crumpled white shirt, tie blowing in the wind with his hands on his hips. His name badge bore the simple epithet, ‘Darren’. While inside I had thought him scared and frightened, overwhelmed by the our raw power. Now I saw a slight sense of disappointment that our nascent beastly consciousness had been stillborn in the presence of our parents. He walked over to where I was standing — stooping perhaps — and looked me up and down in a way that made me feel distinctly sheepish. He came closer, slightly more than I would have liked, and ran his fingers through my hair, squeezing my cheeks in an unaffectionate janitorial manner. He let go of me, moved even closer and whispered into my ear, “you don’t get this in your multiplex.”
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