When I was a child, I was given a tape recorder as a present. I taped everything. The radio (illegal). Me singing along to the radio (should have been illegal). And once, accidentally, my mother. ‘We can’t all live in Ravelston like the Browns,’ she’d said – an innocuous comment to me, but not to her. ‘Erase that,’ she commanded. ‘What if they hear it?’
‘They won’t hear it,’ I laughed. ‘How will they hear it?’ But my mother was adamant, so it was erased.
Ravelston was a posher Edinburgh neighbourhood than ours. The Browns had moved there from our street after Mr Brown got a promotion in the impenetrably opaque finance job that all men seemed to do. They’d recently invited us for lunch, and while they were still the same kind, down-to-earth people, their new house was fancy, with high ceilings, six bedrooms and a carp pond. ‘Thick skirting boards,’ my mother had noted, on the bus home. ‘And beautiful cornicing.’ Pause. ‘But a bugger to heat.’
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I was reminded of this conversation as I watched the latest, and final, season of Succession. Launched back into the drama of the Roy family, where non-members are vulgar enough to bring oversized handbags to a birthday gathering, it’s just one of a slew of recent TV shows and films satirising the rich. Succession is about many things, including the endless oneupmanship of wealth, and the unhappiness that lies beneath the outward trappings of the extremely wealthy. Too much is never enough, and never will be – a theme also explored in The White Lotus, which invites you to envy the characters’ lifestyle and hate their entitlement but also to feel peculiarly sorry for them. Imagine drinking Veuve Cliquot at breakfast before nodding off on your sun-lounger, your diamonds glinting in the sun – yet still feeling empty inside.
Then there’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s courtroom drama where no one could have cared less about the outcome (who skied into who on a Utah mountain back in 2016), but the viewing stakes were high thanks to the Goop founder’s beige-tinted, cashmere-heavy courtroom wardrobe and the inconvenience of it all: Paltrow lost half a day of skiing and was barred from bringing in pastries for the court bailiffs.
Rather than being bitchy, the caveat is there to console ourselves that the lives of the one per cent aren’t perfect either. Their heating bills are huge. That they can afford them is irrelevant: the point is that the more you earn, the more you spend – and the more you have, the more you are responsible for. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, to paraphrase either Shakespeare or Stormzy, depending on your age. Since we may never emulate the rich, we tell ourselves that their lives are complicated and stressful.
This is the message hammered home by the avalanche of films, TV shows and cultural commentary currently preoccupied with examining the wealthy and powerful through a critical lens. Rich is the new black, the hot topic du jour, its accoutrements satirised either mercilessly or humorously. If you want to laugh at people who pay hundreds of pounds for a globule of foam, there’s The Menu. If you want to remind yourself that billionaires have f*cked-up families too, there’s Succession. If you want to remember that rich people aren’t actually cleverer or wiser than you are, there’s Glass Onion. If you want to remind yourself that the one per cent are often more unhappy than you are, there’s Triangle of Sadness.
That these epic takedowns are proliferating now is no surprise, even if the trend has been gaining momentum since 2016, when a former reality-TV star was elected 45th President of the United States. Like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump invites both parody and forensic examination. So it’s hardly surprising that a whole genre has sprung up devoted to lampooning men like these.
It’s also unsurprising that the increasingly outrageous, morally questionable behaviour of the super-wealthy has resulted in the phrase ‘eat the rich’ making a comeback. First attributed to the political philosopher and writer Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who, during the French Revolution, opined ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich,’ it was chanted by protesters following the death of George Floyd in 2020. On TikTok, #eattherich currently has 850.6 million views.
With wealth inequality widening by the day, we are constantly reminded that the pandemic only united us for its duration – and, even then, the rich still escaped its worst constricts by jetting off (privately) to sunny climes, or bending the rules imposed on the rest of us. We stood on our doorsteps clapping for carers who the government claimed to respect, though not enough to give them a pay rise. During the pandemic, the 10 richest people on the planet doubled their wealth, making them richer than the poorest three billion in the world put together. According to the 2022 Forbes World’s Billionaires List, Elon Musk’s wealth shot up from $24.6bn to $219bn from 2020 to 2022, while Jeff Bezos’ wealth increased from $113bn to $171bn. Millions of people far less wealthy than these men are inured to the horrific upward spiral of gas and oil costs, which have affected food prices, which in turn are giving the poorest people in our country sleepless nights.
As someone who has dipped a toe into the world of the ultra-wealthy (as a fashion editor, I spent many years covering the Paris couture shows and their attendant dinners and parties, cheek by jowl with the 0.001 per cent), I can both recognise their foibles and afford to laugh at them. I doubt whether a person on universal credit (£334.91 per month if you’re single and over 25) would be so well-disposed. ‘I can’t watch The White Lotus,’ says Imani Roberts, a nurse. ‘I won’t be able to afford a holiday this year. The last thing I want to do in my downtime is be reminded of what I’m missing.’
Like Roberts, many people have lost patience with conspicuous consumption, made all the worse by apparent blindness to privilege. When New York magazine ran a cover story about nepo babies last December, it sparked a global conversation, with camps coming out either for or against them. Hailey Bieber (father: Stephen Baldwin) owned it by donning a ‘Nepo Baby’ T shirt, while Eve Hewson (father: Bono) owned it in a less Hollywood way by saying, ‘If I can’t laugh at myself... well then I really am a privileged c*nt.’ No amount of criticism will stop nepotism in its tracks: Hollywood is founded on parental privilege, as is the British film industry, the modelling industry, the finance industry and more.
Including the media – as Succession brilliantly explores. First released in 2018 and now in its fourth season, Succession is a particularly noteworthy example of the ‘eat the rich’ genre because it both predates the pandemic and has survived it, and its storylines reflect this. While it holds up a mirror to modern life, however outlandish its plots, real life has a habit of exceeding them. Disgraced politician Matt Hancock appearing in I’m a Celebrity, promising to donate a portion of his fee to charity then giving a scant 3% is a plot Succession’s writers would have rejected as too unbelievable – as is the prospect of Trump standing for re-election.
However deft the satire, real-world events constantly remind us that reality can still exceed the writers’ best efforts. Take The Menu, the black comedy that sends up the fine-dining scene with dark, devastating aplomb. When the film’s main character, Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), serves up his ‘breadless bread plate’, some diners are horrified, others enraptured. The Menu premiered in 2022: its director could never have known that, four months later, one of the restaurants that best exemplifies the hubris of fine dining, Noma, would announce it was to close in 2024. ‘It’s unsustainable,’ chef René Redzepi told The New York Times in January. ‘Financially and emotionally, as an employer and a human being, it just doesn’t work,’ he added of the lauded Copenhagen restaurant where dinner costs more than £400 without wine.
Whether Redzepi watched The Menu, wept, considered turning his salty tears into a jus then decided against it, we will never know. But at a time when more people than ever are having to choose between heating or eating, there’s something particularly immoral about a £500 meal lovingly prepared for customers who might not even appreciate it. ‘It’s cod, you donkey,’ screams Chef Slowik at a customer so rich that he can’t even remember how many times he’s visited, much less what he ate. However pompous the dishes are in The Menu, they fail to exceed that of the trompe l’oeil beetle that once featured at Noma. An unpaid intern spoke of how she was charged with assembling these creatures, which were made of fruit leather cut from stencils then pinned into a glass box. That she’d allegedly been ‘forbidden to laugh’ during their assemblage is another reminder that, while you might be able to eat the rich, it is far harder to lampoon them. (A spokeswoman for Noma told the New York Times that the intern’s story ‘does not reflect our workplace or the experience we wish for our interns or anyone on our team.’)
This is why so many films have failed adequately to satirise the fashion industry, from Pret-A-Porter (1994) to The Devil Wears Prada (2006) – a hit that, while enjoyable, didn’t touch the sides in terms of documenting the industry’s worst behaviours and excesses. One of my favourite scenes in Triangle of Sadness involves fashion-show guests being told to move seats in order to accommodate the late arrival of a famous person. Some are literally sat upon, while the person at the end of the bench simply slides off and is left to sit on the floor. Far-fetched? No: these things actually happen. Both have happened to me.
If the trappings of power and privilege can lead to entitled and vile behaviour, why do so many still aspire to it? This was a question on Succession’s Brian Cox’s mind when I interviewed him earlier this year. ‘I’d been living in this Logan Roy [Cox’s media-tycoon character] bubble, and needed a cold shower,’ he said, explaining what had motivated him to create How the Other Half Live, a documentary about the grow- ing wealth gap. ‘The rich have no sense of what the world really is, and very little care. The greed imperative is so strong, and has never been stronger. Money has become the new god. Yet money is also the cause of so much unhappiness.’
Never was a truer word spoken, nor a theory more thoroughly analysed on film and TV. I don’t idolise the rich but I do envy their trappings. More than the cars, clothes and Cliquot, though, I envy their headspace and freedom. They can try things and fail. They can sleep in till noon. They can live free from the tedious life admin binding the rest of us. They can buy themselves out of anything, like Lydia Millen, an influencer with 1.2 million Instagram followers, who checked into The Savoy because her boiler broke.
‘A million one, a million two/A hundred more will never do,’ Frank Ocean sang on his 2013 single Super Rich Kids. Ten years on, the only thing that’s changed is that the rich are even richer. All we have to console ourselves with is their dissatisfaction. For as long as script writers mine this theme, they’ll have an audience. We may want to live in their mansions. But we still like to think they are ‘a bugger to heat’.
