The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis.
Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street offers a concise introduction to Jameson in jargon-free language and shows how his Marxist theories can be deployed to interpret Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 2013 film
The Wolf of Wall Street.
Beginning with a detailed account of Jameson's extensive writings on Marxist theory and how they have been deployed in the analysis of film writings, Clint Burnham then illustrates how Jameson's theory can help to make sense of
The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that shows in all its glory the excesses, lunacies, and inner workings of 1990s finance capitalism. As Jameson has influentially argued, films like
The Wolf of Wall Street are both complicit in and critical of their historical subject: Scorsese's film is not about the richest stockbrokers, but the Long Island penny traders who made it big. As a narrative of American success, it is also a film about failure. Clint Burnham's reading of Jameson and
The Wolf of Wall Street is a book about a contemporary film, and contemporary events, and contemporary theory.
"An exploration of Fredric Jameson's film theory and how it explicates Martin Scorsese's film The Wolf of Wall Street"--
Clint Burnham provides a patient and ambitious introduction to our greatest cultural thinker, Fredric Jameson, whose intellectual virtuosity has often eluded such clear engagement. This is an act of real generosity. At the same time, Burnham produces a bravura reading of
Wolf of Wall Street and of Martin Scorsese, who may be the Jameson of US filmmaking. But the great achievement here is not simply to do these things together, but do them at once. It is a show-don't-tell triumph of dialectical thought that illuminates the real object of study here: not Jameson, not Scorsese, but the dialectic itself.
