By Yasmin Omar
There’s a pivotal early scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) where Matthew McConnaughey’s seasoned banker Mark Hanna lays out his exploitative business philosophy to his newest twenty-something broker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) over lunch at an expensive restaurant. The name of the game, as far as Mark’s concerned, is to ‘move the money from your client’s pocket, into your pocket’. Jordan, abstemiously drinking water while his boss necks martinis, challenges this assertion, proposing a more egalitarian model. Mark sighs, noting conspiratorially to the waiter, ‘It’s his first day on Wall Street, give him time.’
The Apprentice – the highly polemical, Seventies- and Eighties-set villain origin story of one Donald J Trump – appears to self-consciously ape Wolf with its similar opening sequence. Sitting, somewhat stiffly, in the exclusive New York club of which he is now the youngest ever member, a teetotal Donald (Sebastian Stan) is beckoned over to the rowdy table of sleazy lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The powerful men around Roy are his prophets, absorbing his unscrupulous life lessons and guffawing at his dirty jokes as Donald observes, ensorcelled. He is the newest congregant of the church of Roy Cohn...
