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