There were two scenes in “The Wolf of Wall Street” that summed up the entire movie. Both ended with Leonardo DiCaprio, as former scam artist and stockbroker Jordan Belfort, stopping in the middle of an esoteric soliloquy about how Wall Street works to proclaim, “None of that really matters anyway. All that matters is that I got filthy rich.”

These scenes did with spoken words what the rest of the movie did with visuals — focused on the excesses of Belfort’s uproarious life while neglecting the educational details of his illegal stock market manipulation.

Director Martin Scorsese got away with romanticizing excess instead of teaching us about white-collar crime. He struck two fundamentally American nerves: the capitalist nerve and the freedom nerve.

Let’s start with the capitalist nerve. The movie played on the popular conception that in a meritocracy, money absolutely, positively does not lie. If Jordan Belfort is rich enough to afford a yacht, a mansion in the Hamptons and a lifetime supply of contraband, he must be smarter than schmucks like you and me.

That’s why the final scene in the movie portrayed a room of schmucks mesmerized by Belfort — in his post-prison career as a motivational speaker — lecturing about how to be a great salesman.

As much as we admire Belfort because he is rich, we admire him even more because he was a long shot.

Belfort was not some anointed son of Wall Street insiders. His parents were middle-class, Jewish accountants. He didn’t graduate from some Ivy League factory. He graduated from American University with a degree in biology.

Belfort was an outsider who took the finance capital by storm. This is why his story, despite his obvious malevolence, struck the freedom nerve that is an integral feature of the meritocracy narrative.

Scorsese has fused the capitalist and freedom nerves into a familiar American theme: It does not matter how you get rich. All that matters is that anyone can.

Since anyone can get rich, anyone who is rich deserves it.

This ideal is precisely why we usually let white-collar criminals off with a slap on the wrist.

If Belfort had been locked away for years instead of 22 months, it would look like we are punishing him for being rich. For being smart enough to accumulate money at the expense of others. For being smarter than the rest of us.

It would be an indictment of a capitalist system where all of the wealthiest people accumulate money at the expense of others. And where all of them are considered smarter than the rest of us for doing so.

We believe this meritocracy narrative because of underdogs like Belfort. According to the narrative, the Belforts of the world separate our meritocracy from an aristocracy where only the privileged can make it to the top.

If underdogs, outsiders and long shots couldn’t make it every once in a while, America would just be an aristocracy with free elections.

In Belfort’s case, he penetrated Wall Street — the ultimate American insiders club — and became as rich as the privileged fat cats who dominate the financial capital. This story is a lot more compelling and entertaining than an exposé of white-collar crime.

That’s how they get us. That’s how the Belforts of the world make us believe in the meritocracy narrative again and again, even when the meritocrats are stealing our money. We believe that we, too, can become Jordan Belfort. And we cannot do anything to compromise that possibility.

Jarrad Saffren is a senior political science and newspaper and online journalism major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at jdsaffre@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @JarradSaff.

Published on January 13, 2014 at 1:50 am