Any complex film can be used to answer a Media question if you know enough about it before you go in to the exam and you use Media terminology in your answer.
As an example I’m going to use the first half of The Wolf of Wall Street directed by Martin Scorsese just to show you how the essay could be structured. I cannot show this film to you as the rating is beyond what would be legal for most of you to watch. It is an 18 in the UK and an R rating in America because of moral ambiguity, sexual content, presence of drug abuse, vulgarity, (strobe lighting) and use of animals. I am using it as an example of how to structure the essay, not as a recommendation that you watch the film. It uses the “f” word 414 times and there is blatant sexual referencing, nudity and drug use. The film itself is too extreme and adult for you. It narrowly avoided an NC-17 rating which would have taken it out of cinemas in general in the US so some cuts were made. The film itself lasts just under three hours.
Key terms have been highlighted. Try to use the words in your own essays.
It had a budget of $100m and made $392m worldwide. It was the first film to be released into cinemas through entirely digital distribution. The majority of the film was shot on film stock while scenes that used green screen effects or low light were shot with the digital Arri Alexa. The film contains 400-450 VFX shots.
Most Hollywood films can be analysed using Todorov, Propp and Levi-Strauss’s theories of storytelling. Todorov held that all stories had a formulaic structure of equilibrium, disruption, recognition of disruption, attempt to repair disruption and new equilibrium. Propp argued that there were seven different character types in most stories namely, the villain, donor, helper, princess, false hero, dispatcher and hero. Levi-Strauss concentrated on the forces of binary opposition in societies such as good/evil, light, dark, weak/strong or East/West. These in combination with the concept of turning points or key scenes can be used to discuss any film.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Institutional factors
Universal Pictures intro with music to grab attention of cinema audience. Universal is an old Hollywood film maker which is now owned by Comcast. The blues of the Universal imagery segue into the reds associated with the Red Granite Pictures logo. Both images feature globes but the use of red connotes something more dangerous and subversive is about to be seen than the usual “Universal” appeal Hollywood film. The rating warning before any of this also lets audiences know that they are going to see something of an extreme nature. Granite connotes something hard and lasting. The company is relatively new having been formed in 2010. Wolf of Wall Street was their third and most well received movie being both a box office success and having critical acclaim in mainstream media. The final company receiving a mention in the opening institutional credits is Stratton Oakmont, Inc but this is the company the film is going to be about. This well known brokerage firm was shut down in 1996 and one man was indicted for securities fraud and money laundering. The Wolf of Wall Street is a biographical drama about life in America in the 90s. The names of the “innocent” are changed and the only real names are Jordan Belfort and Hanna both of whom served time for their financial dealings. Product placement can be seen throughout the movie. A Ralph Lauren Polo shirt is on screen for 7 minutes, a Rolex gold watch is thrown in slo-mo into a crowd of man full of greed and Ray Bans are on screen as a display of wealth at various points in the film.
Equilibrium – constructing what is normal in the first ten minutes
At the start of the film an old advert for Stratton Oakmont is used as the intro to the movie. This gives the modern day cinema audience a sense of time and place. The narrator of the advert claims that the firm strives to be the best and has stability, integrity and pride. The lion used in the advert implies that the pride in the firm means that the clients will be safe when they part with their money as investors. The honeyed tones of browns, oranges and golds connote wealth without danger. There is a pussycat quality to the roar of the deadly lion on screen. This one scene was made with the use of VFX. A lion handler walked down towards the camera and with the use of green screen the office workers were added in later and the handler was edited out. This was necessary due to health and safety. This advert closes to reveal the men in the office doing a countdown and then an orange and blue-clad dwarf is thrown into a target. The juxtaposition of the safety implied by the ad and the danger shown in the office is an example of Levi-Strauss’s binary opposition used to move on the narrative for the cinema audience. 
As the dwarf is thrown towards the screen with out of focus men whooping and hollering in the background, the narrator of the film reveals himself to be the protagonist in the film in the voiceover. Unlike most leads this is no hero. He throws money on the ground, talks about being angry because he didn’t quite make $1.000,000 per week and is seen driving recklessly in a red car down an American freeway. The camera crew set up this shot by driving in front of him and the camera is pointed towards the red car overtaking a black sedan. The flashy Ferrari looks modern and edgy whereas the sedan looks boring by comparison. Again this binary opposition combined with the rule of thirds on screen is used to connote how different this main character is from the usual social norms. His car then changes to white and his voice off-screen makes the point that he was trying to be like Don Johnstone in Miami Vice. This cultural code reference is used to show both that he is not a stereotype of the Stockbroker in a red car but that he likes to be associated with the “good guy” seen on American TV every week. A fly-over shot is used to show the estate he has earned for himself and an interior shot with a pull back camera movement reveals not only a luxurious bedroom but also a naked alluring blond wife. All the trappings normally associated with success have been shown on screen within 6 minutes of the film opening. She is said to be a former “Miller Light” model which is both a cultural reference and product placement. Miller Light girls were known to be sexually desirable and this man is successful, he is pointing out, because this girl is now available only to him. He is then shown with a hooker taking cocaine and the voiceover continues that he gambles, takes drugs and is under investigation by federal agents. The screen fades to black with white sans serif font which reads “Later that night…” the black is replaced by a very wasted Leonardo Di Caprio crash landing a helicopter on the grounds of his estate. Close ups of the pilot training him and the Jordan Belfort character. The camera movements and angles are oddly askew to connote intoxication and the disarray of the aftermath of an accident. The scene shifts to Jordan Belfort walking down his sweeping curved staircase, smartly dressed in a dark formal suit while bragging about the amount of drink and drugs he takes whilst holding a glass of orange liquid in his hand. Continuity between all these shots has been maintained by the use of American soul music – Dust My Broom and Dust My Blues both by Elmore James- to give the impression that he is edgy and ready to clean up, at least financially. He uses a direct mode of address to talk to the cinema audience so that is seems confessional but there is absolutely no sorrow, only glory, in the life he is leading. He stands for everything that is wrong with American business, but enjoys being on the wrong side of so many laws. We get an extreme close up of cocaine being spread out with an American Express platinum card and this is a cultural metaphor for extreme wealth and all that it affords. The white powder is lit to make it look luminous and appealing, which goes against everything we are normally told by the Media. However the central character tells us that it is money that makes us invincible, a better person. His voiceover continues to tell us that we can give to our church while the camera follows him walking into a large room of stock workers standing and applauding his latest business success. The cultural codes in the first ten minutes suggest that men are the earners and the women are, at best, lacking virtue that you might go on to marry as trophy wives. We are then taken through flashback to where his story started twenty years earlier when he arrived in Wall Street and was told by his apparent new boss that he was lower than pond scum. At this point however Matthew McConaughey, Mark Hanna, enters and he is in fact going to be his boss
Disequilibrium – turning point 1
In the flashback Jordan Belfort realises that Mark Hanna is claiming to be successful because he takes risks as he takes a snort of cocaine. The actors actually snorted crushed vitamin B for scenes involving cocaine. Their noses felt uncomfortable, but they claim it gave them more energy to perform their scenes. They were told how to act out this scene by the real person the film is based on as he was a paid advisor on the movie. The Hanna character is morally ambiguous and far from heroic. This made the film controversial. Jordan tries to stick with water in the restaurant but Hanna laughs and says the only way to do the job is with drugs and hookers. The corporate look of black and grey suits in a restaurant overlooking the New York skyline is at variance with the dialogue where Hanna explains that no-one can predict whether stock will go up or down, that like fairy dust it is all impossible to capture. This face to face shot utilising the rule of thirds is replaced by an over-the-shoulder shot close up of Belfort looking very innocent and disillusioned by the discussion. In the background we see other Wall Street types including once woman in profile and they have the appearance of the legal side of trading that Hanna is saying doesn’t exist. The camera then focuses on Hanna animatedly talking about how to make money and run home. He sounds exciting and believable. He looks very corporate with a black suit, white collared blue striped shirt and red tie but his hair is just a little too long compared with others in the room. He is a chancer who has not been caught. VFX were used to add in the New York skyline to the window exteriors. This allows for multiple takes if necessary while retaining the light quality to maintain the illusion of reality. He gesticulates with finger pointing and hand chopping and hand pincer movements to accentuate his dialogue. His fixed gaze to the side implies that he has Belfort in his sights. Although Belfort looks uncomfortable at the suggestions of Hanna it becomes clear as the dialogue continues that in order to make the money he thinks will make him happy, he needs to be prepared to break the law and take care of only his commission rather than the clients who trust him. High key lighting is used to accentuate the white table cloths, white collars (normally signs of respectability) and sunlight skyline of grey buildings to use binary opposition between what is seen and what is heard. Immorality is the key to success in corporate America. Hanna is the false hero. Belfort is the local boy made good hero who is now going to go bad. Sound is used to great effect when the Hanna character beats his chest rhythmically and hums a tune. This scene, and many others, were largely unscripted and improvised. They made it to the final cut because they were interesting and memorable. Belfort keeps this going and the sound is used to provide a link to the next scene of strippers surrounding Belfort six months later in a strip joint. The lighting is now subdued oranges and lilacs. The luminous lilac drinks seem other-worldly and the woman are stereotypes of dehumanised women in black suggestive of availability in exchange for money. This connotes that success goes hand in hand with seediness. The narration continues to tell the audience that Belfort is now a licenced broker while the music is an upbeat tempo sample of “Hit me with your rhythm stick” by Ian Dury. This number was itself subversive in the late 70s when it was released but the text onscreen helpfully tells us it is now 1986.
Recognition of disequilibrium – turning point 2
Black Monday – Belfort’s first day as a stockbroker coincides with the crash of Wall Street. Belfort’s first wife makes her first full onscreen appearance. She is dark haired, clad in pink and is offering her engagement ring for pawning if he wants to use it to tide them over. The over-the-shoulder shot and low key lighting make her look bathed in warm sunlight despite being inside the home. She looks and sounds like a loving wife. She finds him a job ad in the paper, just as he was thinking of doing something more stable. This version of stockbroking couldn’t be more different from Wall Street. We hear the sound of a toilet being flushed, we see men in short sleeved shirts with woollen tank tops over them and the building itself looks like s store front in a shopping mall. Mise-en-scène has plant pots on the window ledge in the right hand third, coats hanging up on a coat stand in the left hand third and the outstretched hand of the man greeting Belfort. When Belfort sits down we see the other men in the room, eating fries while working, wearing sweats and ordinary watches and paperwork is piled high on their desks. The message to the character and to us is that success will not come by working within the law. One man on the phone is arguing over $3 whereas Belfort has been dealing in hundreds of thousands in his old firm. The set up of the earlier discussion with Hanna is similar in that there are windows in the background and over the shoulder shots but the lighting is warmer more like sunlight on whitewashed buildings and Belfort looks more orangey in appearance. His suit is much less sharp connoting that he has fallen on hard times. This company doesn’t work with computers, trading instead in penny stocks from a pink sheet. Belfort uses his skills to make $2000 in one telephone sale and while he is doing that, the camera gives us close ups of the shock on the faces of the rest of the firm. At the end of this sequence, he says they looked at him as if he had discovered fire. In the next shot Belfort is back to a sharp suit and while his dialogue is about how to spend money the audience is given close ups of various features of a yellow Jaguar car from the period. The link is made in the mind of the viewer between money earned and the display of wealth by spending on certain type of goods. This product placement is another example of how to make money from making movies. The personalised licence plate is RFK 575. This is a cultural reference for cinema goers. The licence plate has been used on at least 4 movies – Zoolander, Long Kiss Goodnight and Final Destination. RFK denotes Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy who was the attorney general in the US who was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan. The licence plate is being used here as a cultural reference that good can be overcome by evil. Levi Strauss’s binary opposition is being used to show the moral dilemma of someone in America who wants to make money. The connotation is that money will only come through nefarious means to Belfort. When Belfort decides to open his own firm he joins up with local men with drug associations. Flashback sequences are used to show the unappealing lives they have led up to this point – low level sellers of “weed” used to body building and carrying baseball bats to enforce their businesses. They sit around an American diner table while the camera moves into position to focus on the current speaker. The cultural codes of burger buns on plates on the table and high tumblers of beers are used to connote every-day Americans who just want to get rich. The dialogue states that only Amish or Buddhists wouldn’t want to have money. This cultural referencing is used to make imply that the law-breakers are the right side to be on and that the people who do not want to be on that side are somehow unusual or foreign to what makes America work. This preferred reading might be at odds with the normal presentation of Americans as God-fearing Christians who only do what is right. A differential decoding might be that this would offend these same God-fearing Christians who would normally be the target audience for films in the cinema. It is clear therefore that Belfort will eventually get his comeuppance to satisfy everyone. The American diner has been used in paintings by Edward Hopper and this cultural code is used by the director to show that the American landscape is a variety of moral attitudes despite what American mainstream media normally try to sell. Regular Joes can be lawbreakers too. The regular Joes become sharp suited men and it suits Belfort’s plans that none of them are too bright. We get cuts from the way they used to dress – looking like blue collar workers in mid shot – to the way they will dress now as white collar workers in an office in wide shot to imply that somehow they are now respectable and part of the system. The next scene is the sun-lit wife shown in an over the shoulder shot being given jewellery by Belfort wearing Ray Bans in the reaction shots in another example of product placement implying wealth needs certain accessories to be believed. Her dialogue focuses on concerns about the legality of what Belfort is doing. Her role is to act as a conscience character. Although she acted as dispatcher earlier in the narrative her dialogue is constantly urging him to do the right thing. Her dark curly hair is lit in orangey lighting on the right hand side giving the appearance of something good and trustworthy. Although under normal circumstances she would be thought of as attractive, she is always shown dressed in a buttoned up covered style of clothing. This connotes she is the saintly wife – who will soon by replaced by a more Princess-unobtainable character.
Attempt to repair equilibrium – turning point 3
Belfort, and the director, uses imagery to connote respectability. Belfort is shown in the left hand third wearing a blue suit. He talks about being a company the clients can trust. His left hand displays a wedding ring and is placed over his chest as if making a Pledge of Allegiance in reverse. Behind him is the new monochrome logo of Stratton Oakmont, Inc. A right facing white lion in profile superimposed on a black globe has an air of respectability and authority. “Kings of the jungle” helping their clients to cope with Bear and Bull markets in a time of uncertainty. He verbally uses the cultural codes of Wall Street and old families and Plymouth Rock which would all be understood by American audiences as the most trustworthy group of people in the US. He references “Blue chip” stocks such as Disney and ATT and again this is product placement. The scam is that this will be a front for bigger risks that the penny stock pink sheet offers that will be pitched to clients later where the real money will be made by the characters in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. This pep talk by Belfort now has “Pedigree” and “Urgency” on the board behind him denoting the key terms the script will call for when the men talk to clients over the phone. He waves papers in his right hand which are obviously the script he has prepared for the men to use in their negotiations. The camera closes in on Belfort as he persuades a client so that his face is in the centre of the shot. The audience, like the men out of focus in the background, has had the tricks of the trade revealed to them in the way that the disembodies client on the end of the telephone conversation has not. There are cuts between the telephone scam and Belfort standing in front of the whiteboard. This makes it more interesting for the audience than if it had been shot and shown in sequence. A set built in an abandoned office building in Ardsley, New York was used for many of the office scenes. The bouncing from present to recent past keeps the audience connected while they listen to quite complicated details about how the scam was done. Each of the men working with the scripts are inter-cut to tell this section of the film in a more interesting and visually pleasing way for the audience whilst also showing us that money is being made because of the high numbers of people working on the scam with different clients whose money is being taken. The cultural hand signal of reeling a fish in is used to show that the clients are being hunted and falling for the scam hook, line and sinker. One desk and telephone is replaced by a few desks and telephones and then again by many desks and telephones each time the camera pulls back. This shows how the business grows over time to become an apparently thriving respectable established stockbroking company. It is respectable enough to now have one woman in pearls working the routine as well. The camera circles the people in the office as the work on and improvise with the scripts to reel in the new clients. The Matrix-like circular motion of the camera is used her to give the audience a lot of information about just how large this company has become. Applause is used to denote success at the end of the day and week for the company but it also connotes performance and playing a role, these stockbrokers are not genuine and the cinema audience will understand this with the way these scenes have been edited together for the final cut. The debauchery of the lifestyle is emphasised by the shaving off of a woman’s long hair in exchange for $10,000 at the end of the week. The camera pulls back from the opening entrance doors to reveal a semi-naked marching band parading into the office. There is a juxtaposition of traditional pursuits being made unwholesome. This further connotes the safe business being portrayed to clients being nefarious and risky. No client would trust such a company with their money if they knew what was really going on. The reveal to the cinema audience means that the audience always knows more than most of the characters in the film. It makes the audience feel more clever than the people being taken for a ride. Even although this is an 18 film, the men in the film are covered over even when semi-naked but the women who rush onto the screen at this point have provocative costumes which bare their breasts. A naked man is still considered “more indecent” than a naked woman. There is an interesting cut-away from the self congratulatory glasses of champagne to men whooping with delight in the background while scantily-clad women dance on desks while in the foreground the almost fully shaved woman looks as if she might be regretting her decision. Behind her is a buttoned up jacket-wearing brunette with her hair in a bun giving her words of advice and a hug. Women making it in a testosterone-fuelled environment in a difficult path for the women to tread in the 90s. The soundtrack music segues into slightly off-kilter, out-of-tune notes to underscore that things are about to change for the worse.
New equilibrium – turning point 4
Publicity in the Wall Street Journal grows the business but also gets the FBI interested. This is shown by the front cover of the magazine being inter-cut with the by now normal scenes in the office which now include a pet chimpanzee and men in FBI jackets sitting looking at computers. The time narrative is played around with again with flashbacks and flash-forwards to show how even the women being used for sex can still manage to marry one of the partners in the firm. Belfort calls it a madhouse. The marriage is shown by still photography of a wedding shot of a “happy couple” and while the narration continues this is replaced by a suicide shot photo in a bath. Belfort’s lack of empathy is highlighted by this cinematic technique as he is damned by his own words while the images are very uncomfortable to view. At this point in the film, after seeing the FBI jackets, we are being encouraged to think that we are hearing the confession of a guilty man. The “one of us” thumping on the table scene replicates a famous scene in “Freaks” a 1932 horror film which caused quite stir at the time. This is a cultural code for Americans and is often used in American Media to connote that some things that you know are wrong pull you in anyway. It has been used in The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, and the film The Dreamers. Opera music – Cold Genius Aria “What power art thou” – King Arthur – Henry Purcell – and slow mo are also used to good effect in a sequence after this to denote the effect of Quaaludes. This scene is powerful but it depends on the audience’s perceptions and life experience whether they will interpret this scene as anti or pro drug in its reading. According to reviews written around the time of release Wall Street employees cheered at different places in the film to what would normally be expected. They were rooting for the bad guy in the way that most people would root for the forces of law enforcement.
You can read more online using IMDB, Wiki and the official Wold of Wall Street site.
