What are the rules to sneaking your way up to the 1%? Let’s go over them, shall we?
- Do not be ugly. Example: Lady Elspeth in Saltburn has an utter horror and fear of ugliness.
- Speak in hyperbole often. “Oh, she’s been so excited; if she sees you, she’ll die!”
- Walk like all of your hierarchy of needs are met.
- Spy and gossip always. When Pamela dies, Lady Elspeth says, “She’d do anything for attention.” Yes, even die.
- Be decadent. Morals are for people who need them. You don’t.
Gold-trimmed windows and velvet curtains of a Victorian mansion somewhere in Sweden, England, Scotland, or elsewhere along Western Europe and the U.S. aren’t full of hope anymore. Gatsby has a glass in his hand, and he confesses to being insecure. Since the 2010s, the party, spectacle, and glamour of wealth in cinema have altered their perspective. The writers don’t flatter it anymore; they reveal the hidden layers of lies, manipulation, sorrow, distrust, and animalistic behavior done on a much more elegant stage. The billionaire bachelor isn’t a god anymore; he is a man who is as capable of evil and kindness as the next hungry predator who thirsts after his golden life. Morality is skewed and grey. It is ugly and performative for the elite, and boy, are we happy to see it raw! We’re talking bodily fluids and gambling debts, to who carries my dish to the kitchen and who controls the estate. The rich are not clean symbols of evil or heroes who exhale kindness at every turn. They are people, just like you and I, however, disguised behind their towers of private jets, islands, model bodies and faces, and luxurious gardens.
Each one of these films confronts wealth as an environment—a habitat of sorts, where inequality and power are pawn moves depending on the family you were born into, your bank account, whether or not you have a trust fund, and an Ivy League education.
Saltburn (2024)
Oliver Quick, played by Barry Keoghan, is a highly manipulative student from Oxford who studies the habits and lifestyle of Felix Catton, another student from an aristocratic family, and ends up spending the summer at his family’s estate, Saltburn, on the leverage of pity. The estate itself, Saltburn, feels alive, full of history and secrets, with its massive parties, portraits of dead members of the British royal family, a library that holds original copies of Shakespeare’s folios, a maze, a pond, a courtyard, east and west wings with butlers and maids waiting to be called upon. It doesn’t stop moving or watching, and it plays perfectly into the unsettling awkwardness of the characters themselves. The texturous wealth almost seems suffocating and all-consuming. It’s no wonder every guest feels so comfortable. You quickly forget that you are not ‘one of them.’ It’s a beautiful burning house full of addicts and a lack of self-control or moral training, other than surface-level, kind conversation, and gossip. At Saltburn, nothing is grey or neutral. Breakfast is a spectacle, and so is dinner. All must be entertaining in some way, lest it be boring enough to move on to the following item.
As the watching audience, each scene feels exceedingly tense as the boundary of class is ever so present. Poor Dear Pamela, as she is called, friend of the lady of the estate, Elspeth Catton, is so dear, but done away with once a new spectacle comes into the household mix, when Oliver with his pitiful story, is the family’s new shiny toy and portal of experiencing the ‘outside’ world that they can’t understand themselves. The hospitality they offer is genuine and comfortable. But what happens when you linger a little too long at the buffet? The waitress who welcomed you in with a smile begins to walk past your table now and then, hoping that you’ll pack up your things and be gone.
In a three-way conversation between Farleigh, cousin of the Cattons, Oliver, and another professor, Farleigh reveals that it doesn’t matter what you argue, but how. This is a common thread throughout these upperclassmen films. It all matters in the how—how you look, how you are portrayed, how people see you, how you pick up a fork and set it down, how you walk, how you speak, even in how you cuss. The content, the substance of meaning, is thoroughly washed out, and class is identified by this great ‘how.’ Everyone who tries to add themselves to the established structure of Saltburn and the lifestyle of the Cattons is immediately recognized by their how—How they desperately try to get the approval of the children or the parents, and how they linger around a bit too much, and do not have another place in the ether to stay once their presence starts to get boring like Poor Dear Pamela. Only one of them remains and gains it all, but only through unscrupulous means. Oliver’s desperation is calculated and feline. He is ruthless in his methods and disregards boundaries to get what he wants—everything. He is what happens when we entertain envy and jealousy for too long.
Farleigh Start has his education sponsored by the Catton family because his mother was estranged and cut off after she moved to America and wasted all her wealth and inheritance. As a result, Farleigh became financially reliant on the Cattons. However, blood ties play a significant role in the social freedom that Farleigh enjoys as a semi-permanent member of the household. His race, his mother’s financial position, his reliance, and his impoverished financial situation at the family’s feet place him closer to the category that Oliver and Pamela are in. Oliver himself isn’t poor. He isn’t even remotely helpless. He is the only child of a seemingly kind and sweet middle-class mother and father who are exceedingly proud of their son, who is studying at Oxford, making his approach and ruthlessness for control and power more sinister. He moves through the family like a serpent and kills with lies, haunting truths, and words of comfort. His kindness is weaponized to fit what he wants. Desire is a disease, and self-control is the most potent weapon anyone can hold. Unfortunately, the only one to wield its power entirely is Oliver Quick, and he lives up to his name. He quickly makes his way to establish control through sex with Venetia Catton, the family’s daughter, and Farleigh.
Even though there are apparent failures in the plotline, it is undeniable that this film is an aesthetic marvel, an ode to economic class, and a standard for cinema.
Triangle of Sadness (2024)
In a scene preceding the ultimate seasickness disaster, the guests are devouring mounds of expensive dishes, including oysters and caviar, accompanied by the intimate sounds of slurping and chewing, which contribute to the disturbing atmosphere. As the ship rocks and sways against the impartial waves, guests vomit all over tables, food, and they are all human once again. However, the true essence of the movie reveals itself once the ship wrecks and gets bombed by armed pirates. Ironically, one of the wealthy moguls on the ship and his wife are attacked by the same grenade they manufacture for war. She picks it up and says, “Oh, Winston, isn’t this one of ours?”
A few of the guests—the model couple, Carl and Yaya, Russian oligarch Dimitri, his wife, Vera, his mistress Ludmilla, the war-rich couple, Winston and Clementine, one cleaner, Abigail, and the yatch steward, Paula, find themselves stranded, wounded, and injured on a remote island without any way of contacting the greater world for rescue. We finally see the rawness of inequality in survival as physical capability itself becomes its own monetary value and a means of access to power on the remote island. All formal names and dignitaries are stripped when desperation becomes the language of the day, and the least valued person on the luxury ship, Abigail, is the most powerful. She becomes the ‘captain.’ On the boat, she cleans toilets and is barely noticed, and on the island, she decides which one of the wealthy group gets to eat the food that only she is capable of cooking and catching.
In this movie, power is a never-ending cancer. It continues to grow and permeate every relationship, group, conversation, and situation. Even the nature of altruism in this film is completely self-serving as one of the guests demands that all the crew, forgetting their tasks, must go swimming, because ‘she’ wants them to ‘have fun.’ The ship’s staff are motivated by money and the ‘huge tips’ they will receive by giving the guests whatever they want. Their attentiveness is only transactional and lacks human depth.
This film serves as a cautionary warning about the destructive effects of money and power on individuals. We can never know ourselves until we get into a position of power—not the kind of power where gossip can ruin, but the power where you are almost god-like. Your hand determines which group of people gets to live or die. You can act on some of your darkest fantasies and not be scrutinized because of fear and subordination.
The Riot Club (2014)
At Oxford, a group of privileged, well-dressed, educated monsters who prepare themselves for their set position of becoming major powers in the world upon adulthood. They are the ones who would ‘rule’ tomorrow. The Riot Club offers a fresh perspective on this theme—scrutiny of the Upperclass and their desire to stop performing morality and release their inner animals. In this film, the Upperclass are a theatre group; they orchestrate a ritual of entitlement and embellish their shortcomings with metaphors from ancient Greece and Latin words/phrases within their haven and lifelong membership of the notorious Riot Club, which has sustained itself for centuries. They dazzle themselves with debauchery and disdain morality while priming themselves for the future. Their rooms are inherited from father to son, no matter how ancient, and their legacies are written into the very portraits hung on the university’s walls.
In this film, the young men become monsters due to their lack of boundaries, understanding, and empathy. With their wit and charisma, they disarm the sheep, eventually harm them, and walk away without any trace of blood. The film comes to a head when the group heads to a local pub, rents out a dining room, and takes on the night with layers of disruption on the basis that their heavy wads of cash could pay for anything lost. The boys act on their fantasies, bring a sex worker to the restaurant, flirt with the waitress, assault and bully one of the members’ girlfriends, an Oxford student, and eventually take turns to assault the restaurant owner, Michael Jibson, beating him to a pulp upon a simple confrontation where he asks them to leave. In the end, they mostly walk unscathed and have their promised futures in power waiting for them, while the family suffers in grief over their vegetable of a father. Although one of the members, Myles Davis, shows a glimpse of empathy and good judgment, the others speak with arrogance, influencing his silence.
An eager young man asks George Balfour (played by Jack Farthing) of the Riot Club, “How do I get in?” And the member responds with, “If you’ve got to ask, you’re not really the right sort of chap.” This is another point to the ‘how.’ Within these spaces, you either are or you aren’t. You cannot rise your way to the top here. You must just ‘be.’
All of these portrayals help us as the audience to understand that the devil isn’t lurking behind doors; he is in your Stoicism class at Harvard, quoting Marcus Aurelius under a picture of his Ferrari, while he supports his father’s diamond mining business in Congo. The devil is what we see when we choose the baser parts of ourselves over what we know is right. He is what comes out when we see morality as a ‘rule,’ rather than a virtue that must be lived up to for its own sake.
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