The movie also reminded me of another movie I watched called Sorry to Bother You, which, like The Wolf of Wall Street, is a dark comedy. Of course, the storylines are different. Jordan Belfort is white and Cassius is a Black guy, and their narratives are different. However, both films make excellent social commentaries about wealth and capitalism. If you haven’t seen the film Sorry to Bother You yet, it’s about this young Black man named Cassius, or Cash, who lives in this alternate universe version of Oakland, California. He works as a telemarketer and spends time with his girlfriend, Detroit, who works two jobs to make ends meet so she can fund her artistic projects. He fails to upsell the company’s products at work and constantly has people hanging up on him. His Black coworker, played brilliantly by Danny Glover, tells him that if he wants to succeed in the world of telemarketing, he needs to put on a “white” voice (Patton Oswalt provides the “white” voice.) At first Cash is skeptical, but because he is in a dire situation with his job and his finances, he acquires the “white” voice and starts talking on the phone in a stereotypical white American man’s voice. Customers start treating him with more respect after he acquires a white voice, and he makes more money in his career and wins the approval of one of the higher-ups, Steve Lift, played by actor Armie Hammer, who offers Cash an extremely high salary for moving up the career ladder. At this time his friends are protesting against corporate America, and when Cash talks with his friends about the promises of moving up at work, his friends tell him it’s all just a dream and that moving up in the corporate world isn’t worth it if it makes him a sellout. And when Cash does become a sellout and starts living a materialistic lifestyle, his friends and his girlfriend see how much he’s changed and they go their separate ways. However, Cash realizes that Steve’s promise of corporate success comes with a dark price because Steve is the CEO of a program called Worry Free, an exploitative program where people’s lives revolve around productivity for the sake of the corporation. He plans to turn them into equasapians, people who have superhuman strength and are part horse, by having them snort a cocaine-like substance that turns them into these creatures. Cash, while in the restroom at Steve’s office, knocks on the door and an employee of Worry Free, who is an equasapien, falls onto the floor (honestly, this scene shook me.) and he runs out of there and realizes he needs to stop Steve before it’s too late.
The Wolf of Wall Street makes a similar commentary about materialism and wealth. Of course, I acknowledge that Jordan and Cassius have two totally different narratives, but for some reason I kept thinking about Sorry to Bother You when watching Wolf of Wall Street. I think it’s because like Cassius, Jordan started out not knowing much about the corporate world. He was pretty happy with his wife and his life before he took on Stratton-Oakmont, and similarly Cassius was pretty satisfied with his life and his wife Teresa before he was told to move up that he had to become someone he wasn’t. Similarly, Jordan was told that to move up in the corporate world he had to become someone totally different. He meets another woman and Teresa tells him he has become someone totally different, and they divorce. His accumulation of wealth affects his entire life to the point where he doesn’t even get sad like his new wife Naomi does when her mother dies later on in the film because he’s focused on his negotiations with the Swiss broker firm he’s dealing with (he opens a Swiss bank account in her name.)
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