Transgressive Voiceover Narration and Contested Audience Complicity in The Wolf of Wall Street: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse-Reception Analysis

Abstract

This study examines how a transgressive voice-over narrator sustains charisma
while recounting fraud, addiction, sexual excess and legal exposure. Data comprise
199 JORDAN (V.O.) units from The Wolf of Wall Street screenplay and an IMDb
reception corpus of 2,063 user reviews. The full review corpus was searched for
recurring reception terms, and a purposive sample of 200 substantive reviews was
qualitatively coded. Using corpus-assisted interactional-pragmatic discourse
analysis, the study investigates how the narrating-I converts wrongdoing into
performance, quantification, comedy and legal procedure, while positioning an
implied audience as witness, consumer and occasional accomplice. The findings
show that the voiceover is strongly self-centred, frequently quantified and rich in
money, sex/body and drug vocabulary, but comparatively poor in explicit moral
vocabulary. The narrating-I appears reflective through ironic distance from the
acting-I, yet this split rarely becomes moral answerability. The voiceover does not
simply recount criminal ascent; it sells a socially desirable identity built around
money, masculine confidence, risk and survival. IMDb reviews further show that
viewers publicly negotiate the same tension. Many reviewers describe the film as
energetic, funny and seductive, whereas others criticize its lack of morality, victim
erasure and possible glorification of Belfort’s lifestyle. This pattern is described as
pseudo-dialogical moral self-construction. These findings extend interactional
pragmatics beyond participation management by demonstrating how voiceover
systematically organizes moral positioning and how this positioning is reproduced,
resisted and complicated in public reception discourse.