is incredible how The wolf of wall street and the big short are so starkly the obverse face of one another, the negative space, the polar opposites.
they are both an examination of the world of wall street, they are both a look at the kinds of people that inhabit that world, the kinds of people who handle millions and billions as a daily matter, about the gross excesses of this world, about how these people cause untold, unnacountable, reckless harm, and how vapid and cynical and empty their greed is.
they are, in short, these big criticisms of capitalism and of the capitalists that keep the system as rotten as it is.
and yet they are such incredibly different movies on almost every regard. its almost like a caricature of a personality test. "the chad X/the virgin Y"
the wolf of wall street is this big, loud, bold, boorish movie about outrageous people doing outrageous things. its about excess and decadence. its all about an evil man and how evil and morally bankrupt and degenerate he is. he does wild things like kinky sex and hardcore drugs and these are some of the indicators of how morally repugnant he is (along with his racism, sexism, exploitation of people, etc). its a movie that is grotesque and cartoonish and over the top and slimy, and its specifically about this one man, this one evil individual who works as the avatar of capitalism itself, the incarnation of the capital sin of greed. this guy is The Billionaire (tm) who commits all the sins of billionaring too hard. its about how this one evil guy got away with everything and ho the forces of good (represented by a humble, working class fbi agent) were ultimatly powerless to really stop him.
the big short on the other hand is an almost painfully dry, sardonic, unassuming, extremely academic work. often confusing, hard to keep track of what the hell is going on or what people are talking about. a lot more concerned with structures, with incentives and regulations. Is a thoroughly systemic critique. It allows itself to be much more dour and depressing. Whereas the wolf of wall street never lets go of the gas, the big short has many quiet somber moments that hit you like a splash of cold water. There is also no real good guys or bad guys in it. Well, there are some bad guys but the movie makes it clear that they are ultimatly as much a cog on the machine as the good guys. The protagonist themselves keep being hit over and over with how much their own hands are dirty and how powerless they are to stop any of it.
you can probably tell which work i think is the superior one.
I think what ultimatly cinches it for me is how they deal with the common man. The people who ultimatly get screwed in the proceedings.
In the wolf of wall street the victims are just disembodied voices on the other side of the phone. And they are suckers. Ultimatly they choose to give their money to a conman. They are naive and trustful and ignorant. The way in which they are presented leaves you with the reassuring idea that you would never fall for a conman as obvious and sleazy as belfort. Just say no.
In the big short we see their faces, we see them as people, with families, with jobs, struggling to pay rent. Trying to keep their home. And most heartbrealing of all we see one of the families having lost everything and presumably living in their car by the end of the movie. And there is nothing they could have done. There was no action, no knowledge, no wisdom they could have had that could have saved them. That is just how the system works.
I am someone who likes to think of systems, of institutions. I am someone who thinks that big systemic critiques and analises of giant sociological forces are the most effective lenses to understand the problems in societies.
So, yeah, the second movie flatters my intuitions a lot more
