eat the rich?

I’ve been telling everyone I talk to that Bones and All made cannibalism sexy, the way that vampires have become sexy thanks to Anne Rice and Twilight. No one wants to hear it. It’s true that it’s a graphic and stomach-churning film, but I think it’s also extremely beautiful and creative and, like all good body horror things, works on a number of levels. To me, it’s a film that asks the question: what does it mean to consume someone?

I thought The Menu was also about cannibalism in a less tender way until I saw it recently (I also thought they would resort to cannibalism in Triangle of Sadness). During the whole film, I was waiting for them to start eating each other. In my head, it was about a restaurant that started serving up its guests who were willing to consume each other until it got to their own turn. I accept that this imaginary premise might be hokey, but I still think it would have been better than the actual plot, which, like much of the recent lives of the ultra-rich content, I found incredibly banal. In theory, I think the idea behind these films and shows is to undo the material allure and glamor of being wealthy — all the weird things that ultra-wealthy people seem to do and want and have, their isolation and paranoia. In practice, I think it just feels bland and pointless, a mildly satirical version of wealth porn. This is definitely because it lacks ideology but I also think it fundamentally has to do with the lens through which these films are made.

In the social sciences, there’s a concept called “studying up.” This is as opposed to the traditional roots of anthropology/sociology, which focused on studying marginalized people, often colonized or indigenous people, in the case of anthropology, or poor people, in the case of sociology. The idea that you would study wealthy people or countries was seen as radical. Those people, it was assumed, could not be studied academically the way that people who were less civilized or had less consciousness could be, because they had evolved beyond the blunt cultural theories used to explain different ways of life. A lot of this, obviously, came down to who was doing the studying, mostly wealthy, white European and American academics. In response to this, studying up makes sense. Why wouldn’t you study systems of power in the same way that you would study a culture unfamiliar to you?

The issue with studying up to me, and with a lot of rich people satire, is the vantage point it’s often done from. Most filmmakers and many actors are upper middle class. It’s very expensive to make movies, expensive to study film, and difficult to break in without connections. It’s also hard to spend the requisite years that most people put into building art careers, making very little money and devoting a lot of time to creativity, when you have to pay rent. I’m not saying that the people making all this content are the same as the weird super-rich class featured in it. But they do have a specific relationship to wealth.

Wealth looks different depending on where you stand. If you’re wealthier than most people (in absolute statistical terms) but not super wealthy, there’s a specific kind of aspiration and comparison that goes on. It’s less an idea of upward mobility or a visceral fantasy of excess and more technical. That’s why all these satires are so focused on specific aspects of wealth. Sometimes they are the most visual ones for sure, but shows like Succession or Industry do a better job at dramatizing the giant, abstract bureaucracies of money and hierarchy that come along with wealth, and deemphasizes things like the details of resort vacations or eating food that’s been turned into foam.

It’s not a secret that the people creating these satires have their own entangled relationships with them. Mike White, creator of The White Lotus (a show that rich people love in my experience), owns a house in Hawai’i. In an interview with the New Yorker, he says that his house is surrounded by much bigger and more expensive houses, that he loathed Mark Zuckerberg for getting a house in Hanalei. “And I’d be, like, Ugh, those guys. They own the world! And then I was, like, I am that guy.” In Glass Onion, the second Knives Out movie, Kate Hudson’s character is a faded starlet trying to cover up accusations that her athletic clothing line was being produced in sweatshops. The reveal is played off as a gag when she tells her assistant that she thought sweatshops were for workout clothes (sweating, get it?). Kate Hudson herself founded an activewear line called Fabletics and fielded sweatshop accusations. She’s self-aware, I guess. Good for her!

I wanted there to be more horror in The Menu just to shock you out of the banality of a pretentious, overpriced restaurant. It’s such a self-referential film, and the jokes about food criticism, about the worst crimes of the rich (graduating from Brown without student debt or making bad movies) are aimed at such a specific niche of movie-goers. I understand the idea that a lot of the things that come along with extreme wealth feel banal and meaningless, but that’s also relative. Wealth is relational. From a different perspective, it literally consumes the bodies of people who labor to produce it.

Horror is an incredibly powerful medium to convey this. It’s often at the core of Jordan Peele’s filmmaking. In Nope!, a chimp which has been exploited to the breaking point by the film industry goes on a killing spree, digging its teeth into its victims. The alien swallows a whole crowd alive. One of my favorite horror writers, Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez, seamlessly blends horror, fantasy, and history to dig into the surface of reality. In her sprawling speculative novel, Nuestra parte de noche, a wealthy colonial British-Argentine family maintains their power through satanic rituals in which they offer up victims to be literally eaten by the void. The violent, authoritarian military dictatorship of the 60s and 70s conveniently offers them an endless supply of bodies and plausible deniability. Elsewhere in her writing, a child living on the street is murdered and dismembered in an offering to San la Muerte, a folk saint personifying death. In an interview, Enriquez remarked that “Readers get horrified when they read one of my stories, with a child that lives in the streets, for example, but the truth is that they see children like that everyday. When fiction does the trick of moving people, it’s like they can look at it again.”

I don’t think the movies and shows I've been talking about do that work of defamiliarization. At least they didn’t for me. Instead, they defanged our world and made it bloodless. We deserve to be more horrified. To be clear, I think satire can do that also. I just think most of these barely qualify as satire. They’re more like psychodramas, the voyeurism of reality TV with an arthouse veneer. They’re a space for someone, the creator, the actor, the viewer, to work out their feelings about wealth.

I recently saw The Witch by Robert Eggers for the first time. It's usually described as a parable about feminism, which it definitely is, but I saw it more as a film about manifest destiny. What’s scary about the witch isn’t so much the black magic as being totally immersed in an absolutist framework in which the world is utterly predestined and in which damnation is almost certain. The Witch describes itself as a folk tale, and it also draws upon that genre of Victorian children’s literature where pioneers eke out a godly existence in a harsh and unfamiliar land (like Laura Ingalls Wilder). It feels like a child’s nightmare, a fantasy of self-sufficiency and abandonment. The family in The Witch also consume each other in a horrifying mixture of brutality and tenderness.

A lot of straight genre horror devolves into a kind of Darwinian food chain view of the world: either eat or get eaten. This also makes consumption pretty meaningless and less frightening to me, and more disturbingly, fulfills a specific kind of blood lust. Maybe the same kind of blood lust that is fulfilled by exploitation. Subverting that takes some skill and creativity but also a desire to look at the world with fresh eyes, as Enriquez says. To notice the horror.

The funny thing about Bones and All, which is a movie about teenage cannibals in love and not a movie about wealth, is how it was created by Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet and how they insisted it had absolutely nothing to do with Armie Hammer. Maybe they both just love cannibals. All the rich people movies have nothing on Armie Hammer and his family’s violent delights though. No one’s actually eating the rich, literally or metaphorically.

Maybe the best recent cultural content about this is simply this TikTok from sylvaniandrama (my favorite TikTok account). It doesn’t miss a beat.