The Movie Industry’s Confused ‘Eat the Rich’ Fantasy

Some good quotes:

> The true villains of our time are ensconced in cocoons of comfort, immune to accountability. They enjoy their lives; they are not burdened by guilt or shame; the other shoe is never going to drop. To see them suffer, we have the cinema.

And

> As critics have noted, there is an element of feeble wish fulfillment in these works, an unctuous eagerness to flatter the audience’s moral sensibilities while satiating a furtive lust for class warfare. (Somehow, hostility to the ultrarich has become a marker of modish cultural literacy.) At other times, a frisson of class consciousness serves only as an alibi for an audience eager to live vicariously in luxury. (HBO’s White Lotus­ and Succession, which Mylod frequently directs, manage this dance particularly well.) As viewers, we get to have it both ways: Indulge in a fantasy of extravagance, and then, remembering we’ll never have it for ourselves, relish watching it turn to (literal) shit.