why are rich assholes so eager to be mocked?
The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness, and the optics of wealth
What does it mean when rich people applaud their own satirization? That's the question I keep returning to after viewing two recent pieces of media: Ruben Östlund's Palm d'Or winning Triangle of Sadness and the second season of Mike White's Emmy darling The White Lotus. In the former, a group of stratifying socialites and uber-wealthy businesspeople take an ill-fated luxury cruise. In the latter, a group of stratifying socialites and uber-wealthy businesspeople take an ill-fated vacation at an Italian resort. In both cases, calamity comes calling.
While the first season of The White Lotus kept audiences hooked by ratcheting up the pressure constantly, with each episode promising ever more debasement and shock value, its second is comparatively restrained next to the scatological bombardment Östlund literally pours across the screen in Triangle of Sadness. White clearly believes that creating a complex web of bedroom farces will satisfy, as if sex is inherently dramatic. Meanwhile, romantic dynamics factor into Triangle of Sadness, but Östlund wisely steers clear of sex as a focal topic until the film's third act, when it becomes a form of currency after the cruise ship's occupants are stranded on an island.
Both works are stunningly rendered, with both Östlund and White creating lush cinematic landscapes that ooze with unease beneath the surface. But that sense of sublime terror belies the central critique both works have of the 1%. Their fatal flaw, as Östlund and White would have it, is not their wealth, but how that wealth has allowed them to escape reality. Money has made them petty; it has made them soft and useless; it has destroyed their capacity for empathy. If only the moneyed class weren't so hopelessly out-of-touch, the two filmmakers suggest, their wealth and access to unlimited resources would be unobjectionable.
However, this simplistic philosophy creates a contradiction that must be addressed: is it money that corrupts, or do the corrupt make money? In other words, are the subjects of satire in these projects the way they are because of their riches, or did riches come to them because of how they are? Neither Östlund nor White arrive at an answer, though both thankfully find the courage to try. Here, too, both approaches are the same, as each presents us with an ensemble of characters whose paths to wealth differ by degrees of exploitation required to extract it. In Triangle of Sadness, we find among the ship's guests a British weapons manufacturer (Oliver Ford Davies), a Russian manure salesman (Zlatko Burić. "I sell shit," he proudly declares), and a pair of models whose stay is comped by the cruise company because the woman, Yaya (the late Charlbi Dean), is an Instagram influencer. The White Lotus correspondingly gives us a Hollywood producer (Michael Imperioli), a neurotic heiress (Jennifer Coolidge, reprising her Emmy-winning role from Season 1), and two couples, one of whom has been wealthy for years and one who only recently made their fortune.
The similarities between the two works transcend their conception of the upper classes. Even the iconography shares a kindred spirit. Both make extensive use of water imagery to convey their ideas. In Triangle of Sadness, the ocean tosses the cruise ship around like a child playing with a bathtub toy, while The White Lotus juxtaposes images of the rocky Italian coast against those of the pristinely kept swimming pools inside the resort. In both cases, the conveyed idea is the same: the wealthy have barricaded themselves inside a protective bubble of privilege, but the forces of nature will inevitably puncture it, revealing them to be utterly unfit for the real world outside.
That is how you make the very people you're lambasting give you a standing ovation at Cannes or shower you with Emmys. Neither work is a true examination of the systems of harm that enable capitalists and allow them to indulge their worst impulses. Instead, they posit that the real problem is one of taste. The rich are not bad because they've exploited the working class, but because they are uncouth, hedonistic, and vain. If a work were truly sharp and insightful in its critique of the uber-rich, other members of that economic class would be chastened by it. The fact that such people instead lavish these works with praise betrays the toothlessness of both Triangle and Lotus. In these works, the elites who enjoy them see not a reflection of themselves, but of other elites who don't know how to behave respectably. Östlund and White are making a surficial, aesthetic critique of wealth rather than a substantial analysis of its power. Their latest works have the sound and fury of a tidal wave; if only they carried the force of one as well.
——M.A.M.