The Wolf of Wall Street and Bodies-in-Greed

Over the past five years, the financial drama has emerged as a major subgenre. Films such as Margin Call (2011), Arbitrage (2012), and The International (2009)--together with their documentary counterparts like Too Big to Fail (2011), Inside Job (2010), and I.O.U.S.A. (2008)--expose for the American public the dangerous criminality of our post-regulatory economic environment. These films tell stories about great risks, baldfaced lies, gigantic profits, and precipitous falls. But the problem the genre repeatedly faces is how to explain (much less make exciting) arcane investment relations like credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, or naked shorts. White collar crime has all the visual and narrative appeal of an Excel spreadsheet, and hardly seems high-thrill movie material.

The new Martin Scorcese movie The Wolf of Wall Street solves this problem by deliberately replacing the cerebral with the corporeal. Jordan Belfort, the film's disreputable protagonist and unreliable narrator (played by Leonardo diCaprio), begins more than once to explain to the audience the financial details of his plots, only quickly to interrupt himself with a reminder that it doesn't matter how he made money, only that by making lots of it he was able to spend it on things that made him look and feel good--like helicopters, cocaine, or prostitutes.

Death and Substitution in Game of Thrones

I am probably the world's least likely Game of Thrones viewer. It took me five tries to get through the pilot episode, and I only succeeded the fifth time because my 13-year-old daughter agreed to watch it with me (turns out, she loves it). I imagine its ideal viewers to be the kind of folks who could play Dungeons and Dragons for months at a time, or who got lost in Lord of the Rings (a book I similarly failed to get more than 30 pages into, despite trying multiple times). Although I appreciate the genre's efforts at alternative worldmaking, I'm just not good at consuming what passes for fantasy--for me, it's too disconnected from history, and too exhausting to keep track of all the characters and plotlines.

Hipsters, Steampunk, and Economic Nostalgia

Everyone, it seems, has become irritated by hipsters, the urban youth subculture whose members so desperately insist on distinguishing themselves from anything and everything popular or mainstream that they refuse even to lay claim to their own name. "I don't have a job, and I don't want one," says hipster style. "I will not be exploited!"

Great Covers of Bad 70s Songs

I consider it an accident of birth that I came to musical consciousness during the early 70s. And because my parents bought me a (red!) Radio Shack handheld transistor AM radio (it looked exactly like this, swear to god) when I was in fourth grade or so, that musical consciousness was moreover shaped largely by the popular songs playing on local southeast Florida stations.

It wasn't until 7th grade that we all discovered FM radio, and it wasn't until high school that we began to realize what utter crap most popular 70s music was. But by then, the damage was done. Vast portions of my brain had been deeply and indelibly marked by the sounds of Sonny and Cher, Tony DeFranco (remember "Heartbeat (It's a Lovebeat)"?), the Carpenters, and Bread, and by songs like "Kung Fu Fighting," "Disco Duck" (people, this actually became a #1 hit) and "Car Wash Song" (and I'm talking about the Rose Royce song, not the Jim Croce one, although the fact that there were two really popular songs about working at a car wash in the 70s should tell you all you need to know).

Gettysburg, Monticello, Homeland

It's hard to decide whether Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson is generating more public discussion this week. Lincoln, of course, because of Lincoln, a film about the sixteenth president and the Civil War that has left historians and others debating its accuracy and wondering how it manages to leave black people out of the story altogether. And Jefferson because of Henry Wiencek's recently released book Master of the Mountain--which according to some misrepresents the third president as a monster and according to others doesn't go nearly far enough in acknowledging his monstrosity. In both cases, it's pretty clear that American audiences prefer to continue revering our past presidents as mythological political heroes, figures we can turn to for stories about American moral and ideological purity, bereft of any complicating details that might taint or compromise that fantasy.

But if you ask me, the most compelling readings of both Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson this week were on Showtime's television series Homeland. I'll admit to being a bit behind on my viewing of the series (and those who are keeping up may by now have little interest in my take on what happened several episodes ago), but the show seems to me to be offering a sustained reflection on why it's a mistake to fetishize America's political figures.

Breaking Bad’s Suburban Shock Doctrine

In season four of AMC's Breaking Bad, fast food store manager-drug kingpin Gus Fring smoothly offers a first and only piece of personal history in response to DEA agent Hank’s probing questions: there is no record of him in his home country of Chile because he escaped during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose regime kept notoriously bad records. This detail and Gus’s (real or invented) history is never mentioned again, and by the season finale, Gus is dead anyway. But this quick and easily dismissed reference to Pinochet’s Chile may just have everything to do with the entire plot and trajectory of the series—not so much in Gus’s story, however, as in Walt’s.