The Wolf is the Warmest Color

What do the year’s most controversial films — “Blue Is The Warmest Color” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” really have in common. Hint: (It’s not sex, although it kind of is)…

“Blue Is The Warmest Color” directed by Abdellatif Kechiche has been awash in controversy since it premiered at Cannes, controversy that reached a deafening pitch when the film went into wide release stateside. The attacks came from such disparate sources as the film’s lead actresses protesting Mr. Kechiche’s tyrannical directing style and feeling victimized by the graphic sex scenes, the director shooting back at his “spoiled” actresses, film critics with a feminist slant who viewed the film as a 3-hour exercise in what’s known in film studies parlance as “the male gaze”, even Julie Maroh — the author of the graphic novel the film was adapted from — chimed in with her own set of complaints, mainly that it was a film more concerned with gynecological gymnastics than characters.

Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” — unveiled to the general populace on Christmas Day — has in two weeks kicked up such intense reactions that definitive battle lines have already been drawn. The film has been castigated and celebrated for it’s length, it’s excessiveness depicting sex and drug use, it’s black comic tone, it’s Felliniesque carnival atmosphere — right down to the midgets — and having a perversely insular view of an industry that caused harm to so many — banking. And by “perversely insular”, I refer to some critics who felt the audience should have seen Jordan Belfort — the aforementioned Wolf’s — effect on his victims, who in some cases ended up penniless. The film never leaves the Wolf’s side.

I’m not going to mount a sustained defense for either film based upon the talking points the media and independent journalists have laid out. I’m not going to defend Kechiche’s right to filter a lesbian love-story through a heterosexual man’s perspective. And I’m not going to try and convince you that Martin Scorsese hasn’t been seduced by the Wolf’s lifestyle and isn’t glorifying his criminality, but rather pointing a mirror at the materialist hole in America’s heart. Both arguments are already reaching terminal decline, and crucially, aren’t even the most interesting ways to look at these films, which regardless of how you feel about them, give you plenty to talk about afterwards.

So after dispensing with the preordained talking points, let’s let Manny Farber, painter and famed film critic, lead off our discussion:

“Good work usually arises when the creators…seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture, but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything…The craftsmen can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes from it.”

Farber’s words come from his oft-quoted 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art”. The above quote is his definition of “termite art” and the below is his definition of “White Elephant Art”:

“…The need of the director and writer to overfamiliarize the audience with the picture it’s watching…to blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion.”

At the risk of being vulgar, both “Blue” and “Wolf” are the work of directors who don’t give a fuck what the audience wants and have decided to follow their own obsessions at all costs. That pose isn’t a surefire way to guarantee a successful film, but it will without fail get you one that will polarize the public. Maybe years later it will be reevaluated as a misunderstood masterpiece, but both Scorsese and Kechiche’s are committed “termite artists”, and I’m sure potential critical reappraisal isn’t even on their radar right now. They had something to say and didn’t care whether only their own echo answered back, and particularly in Scorsese’s case, they spent a great deal of other people’s money to hold a private debate.

As if to match their director’s single-minded claustrophobic burrowing, both films are rigorous first-person narratives, allowing no other point of view than the lead character, and both films are stretched out to a length usually allotted to period movies featuring gabby ensembles either trekking across a desert during war, fighting a war, or falling in love against the backdrop of war. It’s as if both directors took the rigorous and restricting point-of-view aesthetic of “Taxi Driver”, or to not use a Scorsese film to talk about another Scorsese film, Bresson’s “Diary of A Country Priest”. I literally can’t think of two recent films that have attempted such a daring formal exercise.

So just how long are these movies? Well that’s another example of superlative “termite art.” Both “Blue” and “Wolf” clock in one minute under a bladder-bursting three hours. And who are the subjects of such temporal indulgence? In “Blue” we have Adele, a blank, stifled petit-bourgeois teenager who we follow on a sentimental and sexual journey into her mid 20’s. In “Wolf” we have Jordan Belfort, a Queens born son of two accountants, who rages against the Wall Street caste system that denied him entry by beating them all at their own con game. These are not the typical subjects of three-hour films. They’re not John Reed, Lawrence of Arabia, Jesus Christ, or stiff-upper lip Brits performing “Hamlet” while the blitz rains down. They start off trying to play the game their parents played, find it unfulfilling, look for fulfillment through societal transgression, and end up defeated. So Jordan and Adele are a lot like all of us.

Which is exactly why we don’t go to the movies. The last thing we want to see when the lights go out is ourselves.

Both Scorsese and Kechiche have made films close to three hours before, but they’ve generally been ensemble films rooted in a particular social or ethnic enclave. Not for nothing, both men are immigrant filmmakers par excellence, and have made their politics — firmly trending left — well known. And this is another reason why some audience members, intellectuals, and critics have been having such trouble with “Blue” and “Wolf”. Two “political” filmmakers have presented outré subject matter without taking a stand or telling you how to feel. Yes it’s true, even intellectuals and critics, like their outré subject matter presented with clear moral instructions.

So just how outré are these films? Well they take on two of the three topics still guaranteed to piss off most people, particularly Americans: sex and class. And they take them on in a way that got them in huge trouble with the ratings board. “Blue” carries an NC-17. And somehow “Wolf” managed to please the board enough after being initially slapped with the same rating.

So how’d they earn their NC-17’S? Well on the surface “Blue” is a standard “bildungsroman” about Adele, a teenager who finds liberation through a doomed love affair. The twist is that she finds her outlet in Emma, a college student studying painting. Halfway through the film there’s an extended lesbian love scene — close to 12 minutes — that is genuinely pornographic, however, the scene is not only an expression of lust, but also of escape to outsider status, which is why it had to be so long and graphic. The film literally exploded from all that stifled passion inside Adele. Several other sex scenes follow, all equally graphic. “Wolf” also hails from a similar archetypal plot. A boy from humble origins makes it big based solely on ingenuity. But “big” never meant anything like this before. The levels of conspicuous consumption and destruction in the film would make Caligula consider a detox. There’s group sex, cocaine snorted off and out of every orifice, a woman shaving her head for breast implants, and Leonardo DiCaprio — pretty fucking far from “Titanic” here — having a candle ripped from his ass by a dominatrix and having wax dripped over his back while he calls himself “Wolfy”.

But let’s be clear on this final point: the true common thread running through these films is the director’s clear contempt for the type of people who 3-hour movies about outré subjects generally beg and pander to for support: the taste-makers who demand that — especially with outré material — the director follow the dictates of “white elephant art.” And let’s be clear what Farber meant by “white elephant art” — he meant art that makes the bourgeois leave the theatre comfortable.

The biggest sin and the biggest “termite art” triumph that both films can claim is that they are essentially anti-bourgeois, in fact, they flip a defiant middle finger at the class that purported “important” and “difficult” movies need to survive. In “Blue” the most contemptuous characters aren’t only Adele’s narrow-minded, suburban petit-bourgeois parents, but Emma’s obnoxiously “cool-with-lesbianism” Mom and Stepfather. In fact, I think Kechiche may hate the “cool” parents even more than Adele’s who tiredly spoon spaghetti and zone out in front of the cathode tube in the kitchen. Scorsese though, may have committed the bigger sin. Not only does he refuse to condemn the Wolf’s behavior, but he views him as an anti-bourgeois renegade. Denied access and respect by the blue-blood financial institutions — incidentally, the same one’s that would crash our economy in 2008 — the Wolf becomes their doppelganger, becomes the truth of what they are. He doesn’t hide his money or his corruption. He puts it all out there and goes up in a blaze of his own making that’s so epic you can still sense Scorsese’s years at the seminary on screen.

“Termite art” will always be inherently anti-bourgeois because it denies them the niceties and clarity they expect, nay demand, from art in general. “Termite art” will always be punk because it’s about an artist going somewhere on his own terms and risking that the audience may not be willing to come with him. Both Scorsese and Kechiche risked big, followed their own obsessions and won huge artistic victories, and in turn, alienated many. That’s the essence of “termite art”.

However, the current status of some other much-maligned examples of “termite art” fills me with hope for both “Blue” and the “Wolf”. Michael Mann’s “Heat” was greeted with similar calls of indulgence, bombast, and ambiguity upon its release in 1995, and has now become a genre staple. In 1999 both David Fincher’s “Fight Club” and Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” were gleefully pounded by the press and are now acknowledged classics. Something tells me that time will be similarly kind to both Scorsese and Kechiche’s “termite art” as well.