Giacomo Tagliani and Maria Cristina Addis

The Wolf of Wall Street. Sopravvivere nello stato di natura.

Abstract

Contemporary cinema has widely inquired the regime of violence deployed by financial capitalism and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) by Martin Scorsese elaborates an appropriate representation of power relationships arisen from market globalization and the dematerialization of goods. The narration of a return to a savage and primordial dimension of violence thus stages a state of nature which is foreign to the laws ruling social behavior and nevertheless becomes the ground for a new contractuality opposed to the existing state of right. In turn, this thematic dimension seems to be constantly doubled by an enunciational level, since it is the image itself which uses violence against the spectatorial gaze, imposing the main character’s unique point of view, which seems to expunge any form of otherness and difference. This paper aims at proposing a reflexion through images about the forms of subjectivation specific of the animal competition transposed to the virtual world of financial trade, intertwining the theory in action inside the film with Aesthetics and Critical Theory positions.