On the surface, The Wolf of Wall Street is your typical outrageous Martin Scorsese picture, a much more extreme rehash of the basic story idea of Scorsese’s Goodfellas – criminals living the wild high life, until it all comes crashing down on them. All of Scorsese’s trademark themes are there: criminality, violence, drug abuse, and the objectification of women. It’s quite a spectacle, let me tell you, and consumed without reflection it’s very entertaining, and rather funny, in a sick kind of way. Leonardo DiCaprio gives a classic, showy “Scorsese lead performance”, probably one of the better ones I can think of. The sold out theater of wage-slave hipsters in the Union Square 14 certainly found it very, very amusing. If you like this kind of thing, I doubt The Wolf of Wall Street will disappoint you.

But I think The Wolf of Wall Street deserves a more careful consideration than to merely praise Scorsese for again producing the kind of film which he has proven over and over he can make well. Unlike Goodfellas which glorified the Mafia, an organization so remote to most Americans that it might as well exist on another planet altogether, The Wolf of Wall Street deals with the financial industry and its culture of greed, which is hugely impacting people’s lives, and to which any American can aspire to one day be a part of. It is fair to wonder: Is Scorsese doing anything more than exploiting this subject for the mere titillation and avaricious excitement of his audience?

There is in this film an extreme indulgence in voyeuristic admiration that is disconcerting, even angering. The minute details of Jordon Belfort’s life of obscene privilege and debauchery completely dominate the film, and are endlessly lurid: the Ferraris, the gigantic mansions, the 200 foot yachts complete with helicopter, and especially the ridiculously extreme and glamorized drug abuse, and a depiction of female subjugation more excessive than any I’ve ever seen: the ultra-rich are apparently surrounded by armies of brainless fucking machines, bred only to suck men’s dicks and get fucked like ragdolls in wild, enormous group orgies. Incredibly, this alluring spectacle is not counterbalanced by anything. The FBI agent, played by grim-visaged Kyle Chandler, is a cardboard figure who’s only developed insofar as to emphasize that he is a colorless bore who is too mentally and motivationally inferior to ever be anything more than a glorified flunky. Belfort’s first wife (who he replaces with the super-hot Margot Robbie) is an ugly hag who’s dragging him down. His dad is a working-class dip-shit who quickly falls in line with his cause once the money starts pouring in. And Belfort’s eventual arrest and convictions on various white-color charges is treated as worse than a joke; it’s treated almost as a miscarriage of democratic government.

Jordon Belfort himself is portrayed in the film as a remarkable man with a few character flaws -a smart, funny, handsome everyman who’s simply pursuing the “American dream,” and enjoying it once he gets there. The poor people he defrauds are laughable, ignorant morons who deserve to lose their money; the rich people he defrauds are respected equals (read: criminals) in what is very clearly the only game in town: the insatiable amassing of obscene wealth. The ghastly shallowness of Belfort’s worldview is consistently obscured, buried under a benighted celebration of his talents and distinctly American fighting spirit. Even at the very end of the film, after Belfort has been convicted, served his time, and finally arrived at his right and natural place in the world among big-money self-help frauds, we are confronted with him leading a Tony Robbins-like seminar scene which is carefully crafted as an invitation to sneer contemptuously at the audience of average people in attendance, who only want to learn how to achieve Jordan Belfort’s prior life.

Now, it’s all fine to say that Scorsese’s film is some kind of bold satire, and his intention is to rub our faces in the undiluted bile of Jordon Belfort’s mind in order to arouse our indignation. But if this is the case, I think he failed miserably. Costa Gavras’ masterpiece Capital (2012) is an example of a bold and successful satire of the financial industry, one which leaves the viewer with an incredible array of constructive thoughts and emotions about the deplorable condition of our society and its current values. In contrast, the main thing I took away from The Wolf of Wall Street is the question “where did I go wrong that I’m not snorting cocaine off a $20,000 hooker’s ass every night?” This film embraces the tragedy of American democracy like few films I’ve ever seen. Our society now completely justifies itself by the existence of a tiny group of elites blessed with almost limitless power, privilege and security; the “American dream” is in turn reduced to the feckless delusion that we average people might one day join the debauched elite ranks and start shitting on everybody else. In light of the peril the world finds itself in as a result of these perverted values, it strikes me as deeply irresponsible for Scorsese to make a film that offers up Jordan Belfort as a paragon of the American spirit, and reducing industriousness and creativity to the mere separation of “winners” from “losers” in a monstrously cruel, dog-eat-dog world. Unless the final shot of the triumphant FBI agent – glumly riding home on the filthy subway, looking at all the ugly, down-trodden, penniless working stiffs he’s commuting with – is supposed to reassure us that Jordan Belfort’s life wasn’t all that great.

I think the debunking of Scorsese’s supposed intentions boils down to one attribute of his film: the snappy narration. Without this constant stream of funny, winning lines from Leonardo DiCaprio, humorously excusing the endless deluge of criminality, narcissistic aggrandizement, exploitative misogyny, and stupefying bacchanalia, this film would be so sickening it would be completely unwatchable. Without the narration, you might have had the mental space to actually care a little bit about all the people Belfort is defrauding and robbing, to realize it’s actually pathetic that Belfort and his associates can only have fun by getting fucked up on quaaludes every night, to feel sad that the women in Jordon Belfort’s world allow themselves to be so publicly debased, and to lament the financialization of the world economy which has been rotting human society for forty years.

And you might even find yourself pondering the fact that Jordon Belfort is the kind of smart, working-class guy who 75 years ago would have proudly belonged to a union, fought for workers rights, and maybe even attended meetings of socialist, Marxist or Anarcho-Syndicalist organizations. And you might begin wondering to yourself why there is currently nothing in this society beyond greed and excess for a talented and persuasive guy like Jordan Belfort to value and aspire to.

See The Wolf of Wall Street if you must, and if you have the stomach for it. But remember: there really are better things to do with your life besides snorting cocaine out of some woman’s ass-crack.