"eat the rich" and other false promises

the lip-service marxism of post pandemic pop culture

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Listen. I loved The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I gobbled down every episode of The White Lotus in a few weeks. Knives Out is one of my favourite comfort films. But I’ve had my fill of stories about the fantastically wealthy where I’m meant to find them insufferable but also pine for their aesthetic lifestyles. This piece is an attempt to understand where this obsession has come from and what value it has, if any.

This week I watched You season 4, which I have been patiently waiting for. If you don’t know, Joe Goldberg (the show’s stalking/kidnapping/murdering protagonist) is played by Gossip Girl boy-next-door Penn Badgley. You starts off season 1 as a response to the teen drama era of the early/late 2000’s, epitomised by Gossip Girl in American culture, that raised younger millennials and older Gen Z. In these movies and shows, protagonists were either outright wealthy, or headstrong socially mobile teens with proximity to wealth in some way.

The love interests in these shows are often humble, protective, but controlling and insecure boys. We were conditioned to love them, and that’s why You's original concept was so interesting. What if we take an actor whose defining role is this “chivalrous” and “protective” character beloved by an entire generation of teenage girls, and put him in a character where these traits actually make him a murderous psychopath? It’s a direct test of the kids who grew up on this sort of TV, who are older now and understand that Rory shouldn’t have ended up with Dean. Season 1 of You is intelligent, nuanced and true everyday horror. Season 4 is a botched attempt at satirising the wealthy that aggressively pivots from a story worth telling to a pale attempt at what is popular right now. (Also I’m not here to be a TV critic but some of the acting/dialogue/characters were abominable lol.)

The new characters in You are heiresses, art curators, nobility, socialites and present numerous opportunities for a dissection of the blind veneration of generational wealth in British culture. Their stories, however, feel lazy and cobbled together, with overdramatic and infantilising stabs at social criticism that don’t feel true to the insidious nature of the long shadow of class discrimination in the UK.

The satirisation of wealth has always been a key component of You but is always secondary to the crux of the show, which explores Joe’s predatory behaviour towards women and the culture that enables it. In Season 4, however, the show becomes a “eat the rich” whodunnit (and I’m just saying they even say in the show that whodunnits are the lowest form of literature…).

What is really strong this season, however, is the aesthetic.

Joe walks around a leafy red brick university campus, teaches in a classroom with floor-to-ceiling grand wooden bookcases containing leather-bound classics and aesthetically placed lamps. His new colour palette seems intensely curated to match his new dark academia professor look. Watching it, you can already feel the Pinterest boards being created from stills of the show.

What I mean to say is that when the satire is weaker than the aesthetics, it becomes marketing for the pursuit of wealth rather than a condemnation of it.

What is satire anyway?

There have been debates about the real definition or purpose of satire since the inception of the term, but satire is widely considered a literary device used to expose or ridicule “folly or vice”. It’s considered most useful when used by the powerless as a weapon against the powerful, hence its association with wealth and social class.

The first prominent literary satirist was Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726) and many other works of satirical fiction in the 18th century. In Gulliver’s Travels , Gulliver finds himself a giant among the tiny Lilliputians’ who capture him, and he becomes witness to their nonsensical customs. It is satirising English customs, quickness to war and the politics of the time (for example - Lilliput is at war over which end of an egg should be broken). It’s considered to be a masterpiece (mostly for inspiring the film adaptation starring Jack Black).

Satire isn’t just popular because sometimes it’s funny to be a hater, but historically it’s also a powerful tool of social criticism that plays into wider acts of social and political activism and change. Works of satire have been banned under fascist regimes and have acted as crucial components of political campaigns, they are integral to newspapers and most modes of art.

However, satire is notoriously tricky to get right in both literature and on-screen and can be misaimed in problematic or harmful ways. It’s important not to romanticise its effectiveness in inciting social change, which leads me to my next point.

Satire vs Romanticism

(Reductress)

Satire and romanticism are like Joe and murder, they just can’t seem to stay away from each other, no matter how much they’d like to. Steven Jones writes in his book Satire and Romanticism:

“Romantic poetry is conventionally seen as inward-turning, sentimental, sublime, and transcendent, whereas satire, with its public, profane, and topical rhetoric, is commonly cast in the role of generic other as the un-Romantic mode.”

I say all the time that we’re in a new Romantic period. It’s a direct impact of the pandemic and the crises of justice we have faced in the last few years. Pseudo-philosophical trends like “romanticising your life” and being the “main character” feel deeply capital R Romantic in nature, and I think have had a net positive in how we find meaning in difficult times.

But TikTok is the main social indicator on how this romanticism, when mindless, trickles down into our consumer habits or participation in capitalism, with trends like dark academia, coastal-grandma chic, the “old money” aesthetic (side eye on that one) popping up everywhere that fetishise the aesthetics of wealth. Even the “That girl” or “corporate girl” trends have a romantic narrative spin that romanticise the pursuit of wealth, or just the appearance of it.

It’s interesting then to see the counter-swing of satire aimed at the rich and powerful. It’s been a major theme over the past few years, intensifying in the last few months it seems. It’s a topic that resonates with a wide audience since abuses of privilege are universal. Except in a culture where we are bombarded with pressure to aspire to wealth, it’s even more difficult to pull off a true work of satire when all we do is expose more people to the life they are told that they want.

Adding in political disenfranchisement, social isolation, and blockers from the literal governing bodies of our countries, we are faced with the problem and paralysed in action against it.

It’s so difficult to escape the internalised romantic narrative of the pursuit of wealth, especially when it is pushed back to us daily even in conjunction with the satirical media that we consume, wildly mixing the signals for how we should interpret it. We know that these characters are not deemed good by wider society and act in ways that are universally considered wrong, but it’s so easy to dismiss what they do when we’re blinded by what they have: access to 5* luxury holiday resorts, expensive clothes, owning not just their home but land and additional property, and opportunities they didn’t have to work for.

Ultimately, the appeal of these shows is feeling in on the joke. In a media landscape where it is increasingly difficult to know who to trust, having your autonomy as a viewer recognised through characters presented for your judgement feels like a nod to your intelligence, a nice change from being used as a blind consumer.

I think we’re at the saturation point of “eat the rich” stories just socially acceptable enough to be farmed to us by huge media companies with stakes in the labour of our aspirations and political disenfranchisement. They know the satire isn’t strong enough to actually incite any sort of social action.

Personally I’m just bored of it being used as a trope that is losing meaning with every bad rendition of it. The cognitive dissonance of enjoying these shows and movies while knowing all of this is becoming more difficult to stomach for me, and I wish we’d just move on from pretending we are supposed to watch them purely from a critical standpoint.