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From Squid Game and Parasite to Cannes film festival prizewinner Triangle of Sadness, the every day super rich are getting their comuppance from every day people. In the wake of these successes there is a clear global appetite for exposing and satirising the huge gaps in wealth and status.
article here
Super rich here is
relative. In recent film’s such as Jordan Peele’s US or Todd Phillips’ Joker
the target of revenge is anyone perceived as being more privileged by those who
perceive themselves to have the right to take it.
Contrary to the
meritocractic ideal of the American Dream, Peele was suggesting that class (not
just race) is responsible in the United States today for division.
“There is a certain
horrific, physical element used to undermine the rich in these stories that
taps into a well of anger against the system,” says film critic and producer Jason Solomons in The
Guardian. “I think filmmakers are
intuiting the levels of anger and frustration out there, the frustration of
trying to break through and earn a living, and offering audiences the pleasure
of some catharsis.”
In the same article, Vanessa Thorpe highlights two more
recent films: The Forgiven, and I Came By
challenging the received social order. The former stars Jessica
Chastain and Ralph Fiennes as rich travellers to Morocco. The
latter has [the hither Hugh Bonneville
[best known as the genial Earl in Downton Abbey] as a wealthy London philanthropist who is not all he seems. In both films the comfortably-off are
revealed to be callous, hedonistic and detached, and in the case of
Bonneville’s Sir Hector Blake, very dangerous.
Like US, director
Jessica M Thompson takes class war firmly into the realms of horror in her
film The Invitation, released last month.
The Invitation centers on Evie, a struggling artist in New
York who has just lost her mother to cancer after losing her father as a
teenager, and is feeling lonelier than she ever has before.
“I really identify
with Evie,” Thompson explained in the film’s production notes. “When I was 24, I moved to New York City
to become a filmmaker. I didn’t know a single soul. I struggled for quite a
while – working survival jobs, figuring out how to thrive in this incredible
city, how to fight for what you want, how not to feel lonely. Of course, things go awry. But through that [Evie]
finds her strength, her conviction of
character, and literally gets to stick it to the man.”
The motivation of Triangle of Sadness director Ruben Östlund are similar. He told The Hollywood Reporter: “Quite often I feel trapped in the culture
that I live in. I want to be somewhere else, but cultural expectations are
forcing me into a corner. There’s the dilemma between what I want to do and
what I feel that I have to do. I write the scenes to make it as hard as
possible for the characters to deal with the situation.”
The Triangle of Sadness is set on a luxury cruise, then a desert island, with a rogues’ gallery of super-rich passengers including a Russian oligarch and a British arms dealer. The cruise ends catastrophically and they find themselves marooned on a desert island. Hierarchy is suddenly flipped upside down. The lowly housekeeper now has power since she is the only one who knows how to fish.
The ship’s captain
(Woody Harrelson) plays a Marxist who quotes from The Communist Manifesto while
his passenger’s puke with seasickness. Yet Östlund is as interested in the tawdry economic
value of beauty as he is on inverting class structure.
“You know, if you
are born beautiful, it can be something that can help you climb up in society,
even if you don’t have money or an education,” he tells THR. “Most of us are brought up by our parents saying,
‘Looks aren’t important,’ but it’s so obvious we live in a world
where looks are very important, maybe even more important today in this digital
image world than they had been before.”
One of Östlund’s most obvious influences is director Michael
Haneke, whose most extreme satire of European bourgeoisie is Funny Games. Here,
a well-off family are brutally attacked without mercy or provocation, other
than being symbolic of wealth and privilege.
The callousness of the attack in Funny Games, and
that the protagonist is dressed all in white, deliberately recalls Stanley
Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ satire A Clockwork Orange.
Three years earlier, lead actor Malcolm McDowell had also starred in Lindsay
Anderson’s Cannes Palm D’Or winner If… about a group of pupils staging a
savage insurrection at a boys' boarding school.
The renegades of If…
(see also the anti-heroes of in Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde and The
Wild Bunch – all 1969) died violent, bloody but romantic deaths as if their
revolt were not in vain.
Fast forward to now and the serfs, the servants, the
commoners, the poor and the less than rich are turning over the established
order and surviving to rule the roost.
In one of Östlund’s
previous films, Force
Majeure, a supposedly exemplary family man flees to save himself instead of
his wife and children at the first sign of an avalanche.
“It has become a universal and caustic indictment on the
proclaimed values of a democratic society and capitalism,” finds
Movieweb https://movieweb.com/ruben-ostlund-films-satire-triangle-of-sadness/
Östlund’s himself appears more
nuanced in his feelings about the ultra-rich. Putting himself in their shoes he says he is interested
in how we all react
when we are spoilt.
“For example, when I fly business class, I behave
differently to when I fly
economy. I sit there and read more slowly and drink more slowly as I watch passengers heading for economy class. It is almost impossible to
not be affected by privilege.
He adds, “Successful
people are often very socially
skilled otherwise they wouldn’t be so successful. There’s an ongoing myth that
successful and rich people are
horrible, but it’s reductive. I wanted the sweet old English couple [in Triangle of Sadness] to be the most sympathetic characters in the film. They are nice and
respectful to everyone – they
just happen to have made their money on landmines and hand grenades. It’s probably a more accurate description of what the world looks
like.”
In White Tiger,
Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation for Netflix of Aravind Adiga's novel, the story is
about Balram, who comes from a poor Indian village and uses his wit and cunning
to escape from poverty – by learning from and plotting against his far richer
employers. Balram is the hero because his employers are not only rich but seen
to be rude and abusive to Balram whom they treat as less deserving.
So from South Korea to India to the US and beyond, class and
class warfare is a universal phenomena. But nowhere more entrenched surely than
in the UK.
James Cameron’s Titanic leant none to subtly on a
romance about love being blind to class. The film’s poor, the Irish the Leo
DiCaprios are forced below decks while those on the upper (class) deck enjoy
fancy dinners, ballroom dances and the Captain’s presence. Billy Zane takes the
role of pantomime villain and posh girl Kate Winslet lives to tell the tale.
It’s no coincidence that The Invitation is set in
aristocratic England too (albeit filmed in Hungary). You don’t need a Phd in
sociology to know who the real blood suckers are in this vampire story.
The film’s costume designer Danielle Knox, says that when
heroine Evie goes to England,
she is contrasted with another world.
“We’re going back
into the past – an era that is her complete opposite. That’s the introduction of the horror:
putting her in a rich, stuffy environment.”
Anyone who caught even a glimpse of the pomp and ceremony attending Queen Elizabeth’s funeral will realise that this rich, stuffy environment is alive and well in the UK. The Queen herself may have been a decent sort, but the institution of an hereditary monarchy upholds the wealth, power and priviledge of an elite.
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