Are ‘eat-the-rich’ films like Oscar nominee ‘Triangle of Sadness’ really radical?

On the first day of the new year, the International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva told American television network CBS that one-third of the global economy will face recession in 2023. “Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people,” she said. Meanwhile, massive tech layoffs are already underway. According to the Business Insider, January, 2023 has seen more tech layoffs than the entire first half of last year. The top one per cent, of course, don’t have anything to worry about. Except in the movies.

Anti-elitist ‘eat-the-rich’ media has been around for ages, but never before has there been so pointed a global trend. In 2022 alone, we got Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Knives Out: Glass Onion and the second season of the HBO series The White Lotus. The most accomplished of these, Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s English-language Triangle of Sadness, is one of the 10 nominated films in the Best Picture category at the 2023 Academy Awards; its other two nominations are under Best Director Best Original Screenplay categories. Last year, it won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

While the effectiveness of their critique can be debated, it is no doubt that anti-capitalist themes are, at least, currently in vogue (for good reason), and a lot of these productions are simply chicken soup for the soul.

The power games

Arguably, it all began with the blockbuster critical and commercial success of the South Korean film Parasite (2019), where a family of have-nots secure employment in a rich household through devious methods, and, predictably, all hell breaks loose.

This was followed by the phenomenal global response to another South Korean production, the Netflix series Squid Game, which began streaming in 2021. Squid Game follows hundreds of contestants from impoverished backgrounds competing in a deadly contest to win a massive cash prize. Created by Hwang Dong-hyuk as a response to economic inequality and capitalism in South Korea, Squid Game has bizarrely (but believably) inspired Netflix to create an actual reality television competitive show based on the series.

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The currents were simultaneously being felt in the West: 2018 had HBO premiering one of their most well-regarded series, Succession. While not bringing the 99 per cent into the picture, the series focuses on the power games within a Murdoch-like business family that heads a global media conglomerate. Created by Jesse Armstrong, the series’ assessment of the uber-rich is hilarious, cruel, and occasionally sympathetic.

Three seasons down with the fourth one to be premiered this year, Succession took its time to be a hit, unlike HBO’s follow-up The White Lotus, which was a buzz generator right from season one.

Mike White’s series looks at a group of privately unhappy and publicly dysfunctional guests of a luxury beach resort. Its first season from 2021 was an obvious stab at criticism of the usual: Wealth, Whiteness, being American, but it felt lukewarm in comparison to the scalding whiplashes of Succession. The second season went easy on the class angle and instead pumped up the catty melodrama that comes from unfulfilled love lives. (The White Lotus is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar).Of course, the sting is losing its strength. Eat the rich! Sure. And?

The Netflix film Glass Onion: Knives Out is a perfectly enjoyable murder mystery. A goofy detective, played by Daniel Craig, investigates a murder on a private island where a tech mogul has invited his best friends whose professions are among the most controversial and frequently parodied in the context of late-stage capitalism: a men’s rights activist; a liberal politician. The jokes feel stale, because you have already read them on Twitter, but it works as pulpy timepass.

Less frivolous and angrier is The Menu, a theatrical hit in the United States. Again, there’s a secluded island, where a mysterious chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) invites select guests from the financial and cultural elite for a special dinner where Slowik’s treats include revealing their hypocrisies and cruelties before delivering justice. It is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.

Regurgitating old resentment against capitalism

Of course, these films are only regurgitating old resentment as something radical, all of which unfolds within the ambit of what is being criticised in the first place: capitalism. As theorist Mark Fisher wrote in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, “What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.”

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Triangle of Sadness, in comparison, stands out, particularly because of its third act. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and has since been screened in India at the Kerala and Kolkata film festivals. It is yet to have a theatrical or digital release here. The film carries Östlund’s recognisable style of anti-elite and anti-bourgeois critique we have previously seen in the art world-based The Square (2017) and the hilarious Force Majeure (2014).

Once again, a group of wealthy people (social media influencer, arms trader, Russian business tycoon, etc.) are brought together, this time, on a luxury cruise.

Triangle of Sadness too suffers from heavy-handed theorising. One scene set in a fashion show has models walking down the ramp against a giant screen throwing up platitudes like: “Cynicism masquerading as optimism”. In the second act of the film, the American yacht captain, who believes he is a Marxist, argues with the Russian capitalist, in a manner that embarrassingly spells out the film’s themes.

Triangle of Sadness really blooms in the final 40 minutes, when the yacht has wrecked and everyone is stranded on an island. Suddenly, class boundaries are erased and new potential for camaraderie and cooperation emerges. Suddenly, a White billionaire is trading jokes with a Black person who’s a suspected pirate. (These moments are reminiscent of Östlund’s 2011 film Play, which upends how we look at societal power games: a group of Black boys rob some White boys). In this section of the film, unlike the aforementioned releases, we find some semblance of newness, a new world, although the filmmaker eventually draws back his fangs and returns everyone to the warm embrace of Capital.