It’s no secret that the world is obsessed with the ultra-wealthy. Their clothes, their eating habits, their strange and ancient rituals (see: buying $20,000 hyperbaric oxygen chambers, going to Burning Man); there’s nothing we love more than probing the inner workings of the super-rich. We love watching them buy opulent houses on Selling Sunset, bickering over family loyalties in Succession or towering over history in The Crown. But, oh, how this obsession can so easily curdle into bitter and primal hatred – we’ve relished seeing the gruesome downfall of our most glamorous long before Marie Antoinette was guillotined in 1793. This was just the year Hollywood finally caught up.
From satirical thrillers like The Menu to dark comedies like Triangle of Sadness, there’s been a spike in what you might loosely term “eat the rich” films. Even HBO series The White Lotus turns a luxury hotel chain into a microcosm of America, the spiky, sumptuous black comedy investigating the excess of the wealthy and their disdain for those beneath them. But these films and TV shows don’t just simply investigate the monstrous habits of the ultra-wealthy as films like Wolf Of Wall Street and Ready or Not have before them. No: now, we want to see the rich suffer.
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Take Ruben Östland’s Palme d’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness: Russian billionaires and model influencers board a luxury yacht for a weekend of complete indulgence. They eat exquisitely bizarre meals which wibble and wobble and have something raw inside that probably shouldn’t be raw. They bask in the sun, make outlandish demands of the yacht workers and spend dull, countless hours posing for Instagram photos. By the mid-point of the film, however, each and every one of our entitled, beautiful characters are vomiting. Uncontrollably. All over the plush, high-pile carpets, tailored clothes and private suites. Vomit everywhere.
Östland doesn’t stop with this toe-curling extravaganza – he spends the rest of the film offering a delicious spectacle of their utter downfall. But this isn’t your regular old stabbing or loss of wealth as in Bong Joon-Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite or Rian Johnson’s murder-mystery Knives Out. This is a spectacle of vomit, starvation, dead bodies floating in the water, pretzel sticks and revenge. Triangle of Sadness goes the whole nine yards to burn the rich and famous to the ground. It’s outlandish, hide-behind-your-hands uncomfortable, and – oddly enough? – just that little bit satisfying.
Triangle of Sadness isn’t alone in this spectacle of catharsis. While Knives Out sees the humble maid of the Thrombey family inherit the entire family’s riches, Johnson’s follow-up Glass Onion ups the stakes with a billionaire’s private island literally going up in flames. Similarly, wealthy one-percenters are roasted alive in The Menu, albeit as part of an exclusive culinary experience.
Perhaps the rise of anti-capitalist shows – as in, these movies literally depict the downfall of scumbag capitalists like Glass Onion’s trillionaire Miles Bron – suggests we’re entering a new era of TV and movies. Instead of fixating on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, we’ve grown fatigued of their tone-deaf excess. As we trudge through economic recession and hopelessly unsteady government, maybe the collapse of the wealthy is truly on the horizon. A distant horizon, sure, but is it that far away? Maybe we’re all secretly waiting for the day when Elon Musk’s empire crumbles and he becomes the regular old IT guy of a regular old primary school; the day private jets are banned and we share £20 Ryanair flights with Jay Z and Taylor Swift. Maybe one day, the rich will finally understand our upset with Tesco meal deal prices increasing.
Whatever the case, these films and TV shows are a small price for them to pay right now. They can go on with their beautifully crafted lives off our screens, but within the four corners of our overheated laptops, they finally face cathartic – often savage – punishment for their sins in a modern world plagued by inequality. It’s a little sadistic, sure (morally ambiguous, certainly) but these films express a deep-rooted anger. It’s white-hot rage at a class of society that lives so opulently while the rest of us sit and suffer. Call it Marxist, call it socialist, call it whatever you like. As truly fascinating as we’ve always found the wealthy and famous, it seems this year – perhaps always – we love seeing them fall.
