Before I see any movie, I usually avoid reading reviews. I like to have my own opinion first, and then see what others think (especially if I plan to write about something). But it’s impossible to completely filter out the chatter, so I went into this movie knowing that it was divisive. Does it celebrate the excess of its characters a little too much – and then fail to condemn them? I checked it out for myself.

Let me start by saying I don’t think any narrative should be charged with condemning its characters for “immoral” behavior. That’s like horror movies killing off the promiscuous girl with big boobs before the big finale – it doesn’t make us think, it just implies that there are dire consequences for breaking the rules. As a great Y.A. lit teacher I once had warned, never make any story a moral lesson. Even children see through that kind of thing. So why are we expecting a Scorsese movie to do that?

But nonetheless, I did feel compelled to see what the film’s attitude about it all was, and to find out what – if anything – was so offensive.

The characters are womanizers yes. There are no well-developed female characters, also yes. But while many all-male heist/action movies feel like a glorification of a subversive group of men, this movie did not feel that way. At one point Leonardo DiCaprio gets his neck caught in a phone cord while Jonah Hill chokes on a piece of ham. It felt like it was laughing at the very idea of a certain type of man being aspirational.

In particular, it’s laughing at douchebags. Bros. The kind of guys who fuck bitches and wear expensive watches and turn their substance use into its own epic narrative. The kind of guys who hijack the entire country in the service of their own greed and horniness. The kind of guys who can pay off anyone they hurt and continue living their lives.

But more interestingly, this also movie understands the love of douchebags, a love that was borne of necessity for a long time in this country. When a certain type of person is in charge, we can’t not love them just a little. We want to be like them, the same way we all idolized the popular kids in high school. We get praise for pleasing them, and this teaches us to like them. We see their approval as something that can raise us up in society. And this movie teases out the aspirational nature of these bros in every form, to a grand, fun excess. These were the people we wanted to be like. If only bros really were such a carnival, we would have liked wanting to be like them a little bit more.

But this movie knows that the bro has fallen from his thrown, that the aspirational bro is a dying breed.

We live in an age of transparency, where men can’t just steal our money and cheat on their wives the way they used to. Or if they can, at least they’re not the star of our narrative anymore. Sure rich white men can get away with everything. But that era is – hopefully – coming to a close.

The Wold of Wall Street is a giggling, loving last hurrah to a dying era of manhood. Sure it makes us care about them, but only because it’s so funny how much less and less society does.

–Becky Lang