Hollywood’s new wave of movies satirizing the wealthy and powerful are garnering plenty of money and critical acclaim. But they’re also perpetuating destructive myths about wealth and inequality that will harm the very marginalized class the industry claims to be defending.
Takedowns of the rich are nothing new in Hollywood. From Citizen Kane to Wall Street to Wolf of Wall Street, American cinema has a long tradition of pulling the elite classes in our society back down to earth. But there seems to be an uptick in the number of these movies and their vitriol. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed.
In what’s become known as “Eat the Rich” films, featured in “best of” lists at places like Salon and Collider, this subgenre doesn’t just caution against the excesses of the uber-wealthy but indulges, as one writer put it, an “aggressively anticapitalist hue.” Think such critical and commercial darlings as Get Out, Parasite, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Ready or Not, Glass Onion, Saltburn, Dumb Money, and Blink Twice.
The plot is similar for most of these movies: A poor or middle-class outsider gets invited by a mega-wealthy person to enter his world. The outsider usually (though not always) thinks it’s amazing at first and enjoys being apart of how the other half lives. But then he or she discovers—or it is revealed—that the wealthy person or group has a dark secret that forces the hero to kill the rich to survive, or at least destroy their wealth. Although the details differ, the themes are the same. Wealthy people are wicked and corrupt. Their wealth is a privilege they do not merit. Any relationship built between them and the lower classes will lead to the lower classes being exploited. The only way out is through violence.
I’m a fan of satire sending up the rich and powerful. Knives Out and The Death of Stalin are two of my favorite movies. Dumb Money is surprisingly funny and heartwarming. And as a culture critic, I’m keenly aware of how the stories we tell, particularly a bunch of tales with a common theme, can help us understand the world we live in. Films that deconstruct society’s wealthy unpack how the powerful can abuse their power—a necessary cautionary tale so that we as a society can both anticipate and correct such abuses.
But just as movies can help us understand the world we live in, they can also hurt the most vulnerable in our society by making us misunderstand the world we live in. Unfortunately, recent “Eat the Rich” cinema mostly does the latter.
The first myth these movies perpetuate is that people get wealthy through either pure privilege or outright evil.
In Parasite, the poor family that scams its way into working for an upper-class family is shown to be far smarter and more competent than the rich family. In Glass Onion, the wealthy people whom we’re supposed to believe are smart are revealed to be idiots who got their wealth through theft and connections. In Triangle of Sadness, the rich are portrayed as utterly incompetent and helpless when they are on an island away from a society made for them. In Ready or Not, the Old Money family has acquired its wealth as a result of a deal with Satan. In all the cases where the underprivileged are able to change their circumstances by the story’s end, it’s because they copy the worst traits of the wealthy: they lie, they steal—or worse, they kill.
This idea that it’s entirely luck or immorality that creates wealth keeps the underprivileged stuck by making them think a change in their station in life is virtually impossible—or that success is possible only through vice. But in reality, there are pathways out of poverty that rely on virtues that anyone can develop.
One way out of poverty is known as the “success sequence.” If you get at least a high school education, work full time, and marry before having children, you are far less likely to live in poverty. How much less likely? As sociologists Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang reported at the American Enterprise Institute: “Among Millennials who followed this sequence, 97% are not poor when they reach adulthood. The link remains strong when this cohort of young Americans reaches their mid-30s.”
This effect is even more pronounced among people from disadvantaged groups.
Young adults from disadvantaged circumstances who follow the sequence are markedly more likely to overcome challenges and achieve economic success. The vast majority of black (96%) and Hispanic (97%) Millennials who followed this sequence are not poor in their mid-30s (ages 32 to 38), as is also the case for 94% of Millennials who grew up in lower-income families and 95% of those who grew up in non-intact families. Moreover, for those who do not have a college degree but only finished high school and who work and marry before having children, 95% are not poor by their mid-30s.
A culture of poverty that discourages—or at least doesn’t encourage—these things is one of the biggest challenges the poor face. Will Redinger noted in his review of vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy that “learned helplessness” was one of the biggest factors in keeping Vance’s friends and neighbors stuck.
In a state of learned helplessness, people who are suffering consistently feel like something has been done to them, rather than seeing how their economic difficulties can stem from not having done enough for themselves. They may not want to confront the possibility that their vices prevent them having better lots in life. Vance argues, bluntly, “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
In contrast, “The lessons imparted from [Vance’s] grandmother ‘might have just saved’ him: she taught him to believe in himself (contrary to the explicit and implicit messages of the broader community) and taught him how to overcome problems he encountered.”
And yet, “Eat the Rich” fables perpetuate this “learned helplessness” by divorcing the link between positive behavior and success. Author Rob Henderson calls out this tendency of those with high educational and economic status (such as those making most Hollywood films) for encouraging what he calls “Luxury Beliefs.” Luxury Beliefs are those only the privileged can afford to hold because they are shielded from the consequences of them. Luxury Beliefs, like “all families are equally valid,” make you seem progressive if you’re rich. But most of the rich grew up in traditional households and will push their kids to follow suit when they’re of marrying age—because a traditional family structure means children are more likely to thrive.
There are things the privileged can do to help the economically disadvantaged but that “Eat the Rich” movies actively discourage—for example, developing relationships with people of different social classes.
The New York Times reported on research that showed that poor children growing up with more friendships that cut across class lines was a huge factor in how much they earned in adulthood.
The effect was profound. The study found that if poor children grew up in neighborhoods where 70 percent of their friends were wealthy—the typical rate of friendship for higher-income children—it would increase their future incomes by 20 percent, on average.
These cross-class friendships—what the researchers called economic connectedness—had a stronger impact than school quality, family structure, job availability or a community’s racial composition. The people you know, the study suggests, open up opportunities, and the growing class divide in the United States closes them off.
As the old saying goes: “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” The more people you know who have achieved financial success, the more likely you are to have access to opportunities for advancement yourself, as well as to the habits it takes to succeed.
We know this applies to other relationships as well. Women advance more in the workplace when they have male mentors. And black authors have spoken about the necessity of interracial friendships to advance racial conversations. Books like Hillbilly Elegy and The Great Dechurching have discussed the deeply important role the church plays in helping people with resources connect with those who need them. And far too often, church folk aren’t doing enough to reach out to those in their community who need extended social networks.
Culture critic Aaron Renn recently discussed how this problem of disconnectedness has only gotten worse as the social classes have moved farther away from each other.
Today, the working class and non-working class increasingly inhabit parallel worlds. The geographic, consumer habits, and mores—much of the experience of life—of the college educated are distinct from those without. The city where I live is 75% people with college degrees, for example. Even for those of us who want to help working class men improve their fortunes, we don’t necessarily have the perspective necessary to design public policy.
Yet the “Eat the Rich” genre stokes fears that any time a person with higher status develops a relationship with someone of lower status, it can only result in exploitation. In Get Out, the upper-class white people build relationships with black people—only to steal their bodies. In The Menu, the working-class girl is invited to the big dinner so she can be killed. In Ready or Not, marrying into the family also means having to die. In Blink Twice, the heroine is invited to the island to be raped. These flicks also create paranoia in the rich toward the poor. Films like Saltburn and Parasite are built on the premise of the poor developing relationships with the rich only to take advantage of them. The villain of Glass Onion got his position because he was a loser who took advantage of his friends’ compassion.
Obviously, the powerful do exploit the weak. And less powerful people sometimes try to mooch off the powerful. But the number of such horror stories that show only the dangers of cross-class relationships makes it seem like those dangers are bigger than they are, and the benefits smaller than they are.
If these films don’t encourage solutions to poverty that we know work, what solution do they encourage? Violence.
“Eat the Rich” movies nearly always end with the poor rising up and killing the rich or destroying their stuff. Get Out’s hero kills the wealthy white family. The heroines of Ready or Not and The Menu leave them to die to save themselves. The heroines of Blink Twice kill their captors and then brainwash the remaining one. The cook (probably) kills the model at the end of Triangle of Sadness. Parasite ends with a mass stabbing. The hero in Snowpiercer destroys the train they’re all living on. The heroes at the end of Glass Onion blow up the villain’s home and the original Mona Lisa in his possession. (Something climate change activists are doing to museum paintings in the real world.)
One could point out that this is dehumanizing, even if those humans are rich. But that plea doesn’t typically move people. They usually respond that such dehumanization is harmless because the wealthy and powerful can always protect themselves in the real world from such grotesque destruction.
But there are a few problems with this attitude. First, if it’s true that violence against the upper classes will never actually happen, then you’re admitting that “eating the rich” is not a viable solution to the plight of the underprivileged. That makes “Eat the Rich” movies cynical cash grabs—the Hollywood rich exploiting the resentments of the working-classes. It’s just another form of “bread and circuses” to keep the masses content while big studios and A-list stars preserve the status quo. In other words, Hollywood is the villain of its own films.
But it’s not true that the average moviegoer has no power to use violence against the rich. They can vote. More specifically, they can vote for a tyrant.
The history of the word tyrant is fascinating. As I brought up in my analysis of Dune: Part Two earlier this year, the word tyrant has its roots in ancient Greece and typically referred to an aristocrat on the fringes of nobility who obtained absolute power over the government by gaining the support of the common people who felt disenfranchised by society’s elites.
This is the dystopian endpoint of the “Eat the Rich” story. If the only way to avenge the injustice of the privileged is through violence, and the poor don’t have the power or opportunity to effect that violence, then the only option is to give power to a charismatic leader to use that violence on their behalf. But the only way to give him more power over other powerful people is to give him more power over you, too. So he becomes one of the new elites to oppress you. Which is why every French Revolution becomes a Napoleon dictatorship, and every communist revolution becomes a Stalinist or Maoist totalitarian nightmare.
Fittingly, the Dune series has a much more realistic view of what “Eat the Rich” leads to than do most of the tales we’re subjected to. After ages of being oppressed by outerworlders, and being unable to beat them, the Fremen make an aristocratic outerworlder (Paul Atreides) their leader, one who promises to overthrow their oppressors. He does, but—as we see in the later books—he becomes a more genocidal tyrant than they ever suffered under before.
Stories have power. The stories we tell—particularly the stories we tell over and over again—shape the way we see the world we live in. That’s why it’s so important that the stories we tell the truth. Otherwise, we might end up creating the very dystopian world we’re warning against.
