12 Angry Men Monologue Analysis

1. Jordan and Donnie both take a bottle of Lemmons - a very strong form of Quaaludes - which has been sitting for fifteen years. Like excited children who are about to smoke marijuana for the first time, Jordan and Donnie meet up to have fun as Donnie cautions that they only need to take one because of the powerful effect of those drugs. After 30 minutes of waiting and not feeling the effects from the drugs Jordan and Donnie take another dose of Quaaludes; and as even more time passed by they took another dose each. At the same moment, Jordan’s lawyer calls and asks Jordan to find a secure phone booth because the FBI taped Jordan’s house communication. When Jordan arrives at the phone booth he is unable to speak and barely able to crawl. This is when he realizes the Lemmons reacted like a delayed fuse and all

the effect kicked in at the same time which made Jordan go straight to the “drool phase” and put him in “cerebral paisy phase”. The scene I have chosen portraits Jordan attempt to get back home from the country club.

2. The editing plays a big role to portray how drugged Jordan was. When Jordan passes out for the first time, the camera replays the moment when he was about to fall to emphasize how drugged the character is. The first falling scene is captured from a classic camera perspective as no effect were added. The second falling scene focuses more on Jordan’s perspective when he was about to fall down. There is a repetition because it allows the viewer to follow and understand the narrative better. The first fall is designed to surprise the viewer and as they are wondering what happened to the character, the director repeats the scene from another perspective (Jordan POV) and explains the effect the old Quaaludes had on him.
The camera used the metallic reflection of the phone booth to portray Jordan’s physical distress and slow motion fall. Furthermore a from-above-shot is used to portray Jordan’s “swimming in the air” scene to amplify how ridiculous this scene is from different perspective.
Rubriquing centered framing is a camera positioning used 80% of the time during this scene. The camera centers and focuses on Jordan as he tries to exit the country club. Jordan is in the middle of the frame and the director used this shot perspective to indicate to the audience that Jordan is the most important thing happening in the frame right now so that audience doesn’t have to look elsewhere. The viewer doesn’t need three or four frame to understand where to look.. Furthermore a tiny tube lens was used to zoom into Jordan’s red eyes to create a zoom in zoom out to create a distortion effect to amplify how drugged Jordan is.
The voice-over narration is also a very important element in this scene selected.

It enables the audience to know what is happening from a “sane” voice. What makes this situation burlesque is that the voice used in this scene is Jordan’s. He is both experiencing and outside of the drugged body. He is both being laughed by and laughing with the viewer. The sound used in this scene creates a humoristic tension. As Jordan crawls away from the country club the voice-over narrator stops talking and only the sound of cricket chirping can be heard. The audience is laughing at the situation as all the elements are adding up and released throughout the scene.

3. The shots work greatly separately as we follow Jordan’s odyssey in his attempt of getting back to his car. However the humorous tension is built throughout accumulation of the different shots that stacks the burlesque on the top of each others. The mise-en-scene is crucial to the meaning of a scene and film as a whole because all the tension is built in order to be release on its climax. The audience laughs and feel emotions because of the way the scene was shot and edited rather than the actual plot

elements.

4. This scene represents the movie The Wolf Of Wall Street and Scorsese's style of “too much” and “excess” where crawling and rolling down the stairs became the new way of locomotion. Drugs and criminal charges are very serious topics but Scorsese coup de maitre enables him to swim through the critics by mastering the art of mise-en-scene. It shows the audience Scorsese’s intention as he doesn’t want to focus on the story of drug users but more on his attempt to entertain the viewers. The meaning of this scene is that there is no meaning. The scene itself doesn’t contribute a lot to the storyline. It is almost as if Scorsese created this scene to delay what was about to happen next. Jordan’s crawling across the country club, driving through the city half-conscious and half-passed out, saving Donnie from choking had no real influence over the narrative. The only plot forward element in this scene is Donnie’s discussion to Swiss banker about his money laundry operation and how this incriminating call on Jordan's taped phone can be used to send him to jail. This twelve minutes scene could have been shortened to a two-three minutes scene but Scorsese decided otherwise. It is a pause the director has chosen to add into the movie in order to prepare the audience to the future scenes that are going to dramatically affect Jordan Belfort’s life.

5. What gives the shots impact is the realism of the scene the director was able to create. While watching this scene over and over, I didn’t feel or looked at what the cinematographer or director intended to do. The director was able to use Jordan’s inner-voice and physical motion to tell the story of a man trying to get back home to save his fortune. Most of the information were conveyed nonverbally. We didn’t need to know that Jordan was struggling to get back home. We saw him crawling on the floor for long lasting minutes and most individuals can relate to Jordan difficulties to get back up because of past personal intoxication stories. The scene creates immediacy, realism, and authenticity through the different techniques used by the director to enable the viewer to see the world from Jordan’s point of view. The natural lightning, the setting, and the placement of the camera made the scene very real and surreal at the same time. For example when Jordan goes to a country club to take a phone call. He dresses casually and nobody is around while he talks to his lawyer. Very small cuts and quick transition are made which makes the dialogue very fluid. The camera is taking a close shot at Jordan and the focus is on him. The attorney yells at Jordan for trying to bribe an FBI agent. The conversation is very clear until the moment the effect of quaaludes kicks in. The editing seems to be smooth, natural.

6. All the care of shooting a certain way to create this scene was aimed to slow the viewer’s notion of time as the character was under the effect of Quaaludes. The viewer physically assisted on a journey along the character as if they also took Quaaludes. The character’s physical movement cannot coincide with what Jordan’s brain is trying to tell him what to do. The character’s thoughts are lucide but his actions do not follow like a drunken man who thinks “clearly” but cannot walk straight.. Even if the viewers wanted to skip this part they couldn’t because they had no impact over what was happening on the screen in the same way Jordan was powerless in the situation he was put in during this scene. However the scene also best represents the movie as whole because of the burlesque situation and unnecessary elements are the backbone of this movie.

7. The meaning of this scene is to show the ridiculousness of Jordan’s behavior. After constantly pursuing his greed and need of wanting constantly more, his whole world hit it at the same time as he tries to save his fortune from the FBI. Scorsese wanted to show the last glance of happiness and “highness” before Jordan immediate fall.

Part 2:

The movie follows a four acts structure. The first act is the setup where Jordan rises as a prominent entrepreneur in Wall Street. During this act, we follow the foundation of Stratton Oakmont and the recruitment of Jordan’s burlesque and grotesque team. The second act is the development phase where Jordan accomplishes his personal and professional goals. He divorces his first wife and marries Naomi, plans and succeeds his IPO, and this is also the period where the FBI and the SEC are getting more curious about Jordan’s suspicious activities. The third act is the compilation phase where Jordan tries to recalibrate his goals. Due to Stratton Oakmont cash overflow, Jordan decides to hide his money in Switzerland as the FBI threats are getting more concrete. Belfort momentarily thought about quitting his firm but sells himself into staying and fighting against his pursuers. This is a turning point as both the FBI and SEC are officially on his tail. Our scene happens between the end of the third act and the beginning of act four which is the climax where Jordan gets arrested and sent to jail.
The Quaalude scene is a pause in the film used by Scorsese to portray Jordan Belfort true nature: a drug addict idiot and selfish man who drives home with the risk of killing someone in order to save his fortune. In order to save his friend from choking, Jordan takes another dose of cocaine. How ironic is it to save his friend from an drug overdose by sniffing a line of cocaine to compensate over the effect of Quaaludes? Furthermore, Jordan tries to save a friend he tried to kill a few minutes ago from choking by performing a CPR which could have killed him. It showcases Jordan’s ignorance and surviving nature as he fights addiction with even more addictive behaviors. Even Donnie’s near death experience is treated as joke. The audience doesn’t believe one second Donnie is going to die from eating a piece of ham because of the way the mise-en-scene is set up to what is going to happen next - a foreshadowing of the fourth act - where Stratton Oakmont will collapse and “choke” because of a restaurant chain laundry money operation. As he drives from the club to his house, Jordan thinks he drove back home without a scratch but the very next morning he realizes the white lamborghini was destroyed. It is at this moment where the audience understands that Jordan lived in an illusion and reality is about to literally catch him. Successive events led to his fall as his second wife demanded a divorce, his boat got destroyed by a typhoon, his helicopter fell into the sea, his plane got crashed because seagulls went through the engine, and Jordan ultimately lost his company and got arrested in his house. Ironically, the first scene of the movie portrayed his white lamborghini, his gorgeous wife, boat, plane, helicopter, house, and company. There is a repetitive pattern to show the journey the protagonist has gone through and how everything fell like a house of cards. Scorsese wanted to show the story of how he accumulated all this wealth, build tension throughout the movie and release the the fall at its climax.
The movie was designed mainly to entertain the audience and not to condemn the real Jordan Belfort and how he scammed his victims who lost hundreds millions of dollars in the process. Black comedy is a distinct form of comedy as it addresses sensible, morbid, and depressing themes. One particular scene represents well Scorsese approach. When Donnie sees one of his workers cleaning a fish bowl in the middle of an IPO operation, he takes the fish and eats the man’s goldfish to teach him a lesson. Scorsese could have made the movie serious because it is a disgusting and tragic act for the publicly ridiculed man who lost his fish, but he decided otherwise. The office claps and praises Donnie for his reckless and wild boss who leads like a president of a fraternity house. Scorsese focuses on the actions rather than the people themselves. Moreover, the cut with Popeye, the anime cartoon, is also a technique used by Scorsese to show the non-seriousness of the situation. Popeye’s spinach is Jordan’s cocaine. When Popeye eats spinach, it enables him to overcome any obstacle in the same way it helps Jordan to overcome his challenges when he takes cocaine. However, Popeye isn’t real and is meant to entertain the children like Jordan’s character created by Scorsese is meant to entertain the viewer. Scorsese decided to not take Jordan and his drug, alcohol and sex addiction seriously, therefore making the whole movie funny.

1. Jordan Belfort doesn’t kill anyone, but he does manipulate the markets, cheat investors and wifes, and break innumerable laws to make outrageous profits which he uses to fuel an aggressively excessive lifestyle. Jordan Belfort embodies the characteristics of an anti-hero, a protagonist chasing less than noble goals who scam other individuals without any scrupule. However watching The Wolf of Wall Street, we take some pleasure in Belfort’s triumph and can’t help pitying him when his empire collapses despite all the debauchery he underwent through. Not every movie must have a happy ending, and the stories that do provide a happy ending are not always dependent on whether or not the protagonist has achieved his goal. Scorsese intention with this movie was to make the audience feel something. Anger, laughter, inspiration, depression, revolt: the emotions can be numerous but the movie did not make the viewer feel indifferent. The scene chosen is relevant to the film as a whole because it is the epitome of Jordan’s addiction to drugs, albeit he is also addicted to power, money, alcohol and sex. All the things he has created led him to this lifestyle and from this point, everything will go upside down. It is also representative of Scorsese’s touch as he doesn’t condemn Jordan’s obsessive and compulsive behavior towards drugs. Rather Scorsese chose to make the audience laugh by shooting the film with a humoristic point of view. Scorsese used this technique to not make the film be seen as a hub of deadly sin but rather as an entertaining film which follows the journey of a wall street entrepreneur.

2. Analyzing this scene is crucial because this the director took a lot of liberty in order to create it. This twelve minutes scene could have been shortened to three minutes if the director wanted to. The reason why this scene is longer than it should be is because this scene represents Scorsese's art to it fullest. He doesn’t need to make it into a twelve minutes scene but he wants to - so he did. In the same way Scorsese didn’t have to include naked women, prostitutes, orgy scenes but he wanted to - so he did. He exceeded other people’s expectation and broke the norms and rules of filmmaking in the same way Jordan broke the rules and laws to succeed. The reason why this scene is representative of the movie is this scene is the tipping point of Jordan Belfort’s success before his life becomes a nightmare.