Eat the Rich is Bad Art
On agreeing the fuck out of cinema
As a smug metropolitan British liberal, I am genetically predisposed to the smug metropolitan British liberal comedian, Stewart Lee.
In his 2018 show Content Provider, Lee takes a swipe at Brexit.
Now, I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, cos I was trying to write a show that I could keep on the road for 18 months and as I didn’t know how Brexit was going to pan out, I didn’t write any jokes about it in case I couldn’t use them in the show and monetise the work I’ve done, right?
So, I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, cos I didn’t see the point of committing to a course of action for which there’s no logical or financial justification.
It’s a clever joke. We in the Brexit-hating audience duly laugh, of course, followed by a self-satisfied cheer and ripple of applause. Lee crouches, grimaces, and turns against us.
That’s right, clap the things you agree with! Clap, clap, clap! Agree, agree, agree!
“Did you see Stewart Lee in Southend?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it funny?”
“No, but I agreed the fuck out of it.”1
In the late 2000s, there was a minor event known as the “Great Financial Crisis.” Surprisingly, this led people to feel a little hard done by modern capitalism. By the late 2010s/early 2020s, this anger curdled into a wave of movies that fantasised about browbeaten workers unleashing bloody vengeance on wealthy villains.
These movies are satirical. They employ ludicrous, clearly fictional scenarios like a luxury restaurant that slaughters its guests or a billionaire paedophile island. They are cathartic, too, systematically dehumanising and humiliating their villains for our amusement.
I’m a bit late to the “Eat the Rich sucks” bandwagon.2 A common critique is political: these films are made by corporations providing a harmless outlet for our frustration while retaining the structures that suppress us. They offer fantasies of individualistic vengeance that undercut the cooperative action truly required to achieve change. Et cetera.
My issue is different. Eat the Rich cinema is bad art. It is designed to make people who already think a certain way feel better about themselves for doing so.
Henry Oliver writes that “all art has some moral purpose—it surprises or familiarises in order to call us to the things of this world.” Eat the Rich cinema abandons this moral purpose. It neither challenges our worldview nor helps us clarify it. We may have a good time, but our understanding of reality remains the same.
Lee’s Brexit bit is a well-constructed joke, just like Ready or Not is a well-constructed thriller. But the challenge to the audience, and thus the artistry, emerges from his follow-up, which replaces our self-satisfaction about Brexit with unease at how easily we were manipulated by the joke. Ready or Not provides no such concerns. Everything we bring into the movie is left safely intact.
“Hmmm,” you may be saying, “not every movie has to be some sophisticated deconstruction of our worldview. It could simply be entertaining while gesturing at some larger themes.” To that I say: where is your ambition? Where are your standards? The great works of pop entertainment had a moral purpose. The Rebel Alliance was inspired by the Việt Cộng!
It’s no coincidence that the one Eat the Rich movie that can claim to be art is the one that sits most uncomfortably in the subgenre. The fact that Parasite can alternatively be read as a story of middle-class envy, a reactionary fable or a sweeping critique of capitalism speaks to its ability to both surprise and familiarise; to “call us to the things of this world.”
Not every movie should be a poke-in-the-eye provocation. I don’t think the answer is Eat the Poor (although the little stinker in me would at least like to see a filmmaker give it a try). Nor do I want a happy-clappy “we’re all friends and should get along” Panglossianism. But if Eat the Rich is to endure as a subgenre worth our time, it needs to aspire to more than getting us to agree the fuck out of it.
Some good pieces: The deliciously empty appeal of eat the rich cinema (Aamatullah Rajkotwala), the Emptiness of Modern “Eat the Rich” Cinema (The Backdrop), The Movie Industry’s Confused ‘Eat the Rich’ Fantasy (Vulture)
The ‘Banksy Argument’ all over again!!
Might be an odd choice but my fave "Eat the Rich" moment in a movie is when Mick Dundee knocks that posh bloke out cold in an Italian restaurant. Deeply satisfying.