The Contemporary Art of ‘Eat the Rich’ Media

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The idea first introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that ‘when the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’ has dominated cultural discussions for the past few years in a shortened form – ‘eat the rich’. In 2022 especially, there was an increased interest in critiquing the ultra-rich in mainstream media, for instance in our fascination with ‘nepo babies’, as shown in the virality of New York Magazine’s article ‘Extremely Overanalyzing Hollywood’s Nepo-Baby Boom’.  

Our collective obsession with the wealthy has always existed, but our gaze into the lives of these select individuals has changed drastically due to reality TV and social media. The latter has magnified the material differences between us and our favourite public figures, which has led to growing frustrations with the rich. Theoretically left-leaning cosmopolitan rich people have demonstrated that their liberal posturing does not shield them from being tone-deaf. This is particularly apparent when this class of society reacts to economic and global crises, as with Gal Gadot’s infamous 2020 ‘Imagine’ video.   

This cultural climate set the stage perfectly for the emergence of ‘eat the rich’ film and TV. This recent media phenomenon (not to be confused with everything with an anti-capitalist message) contains all the ingredients needed to satiate our hunger to finally ‘see the rich suffer’, as put by Grace Dodd for VICE. This medium offers a satirical focus on the everyday toxicity of rich characters, as opposed to attempts at serious analyses of capitalism that we have collectively grown to find boring.   

The humorous emphasis on tantrums and bickering between the characters allows these films and shows to subtly highlight the extent of elites’ dangerous behaviour without being overly moralistic. Furthermore, foregrounding the rich in their natural habitats is far more fun than any realist critique of the rich, as it satisfies our ancient voyeuristic desires to see excesses of capital as a means of escapism. It is also newly entertaining because the characters’ hypocrisy and incompetence have consequences (a rare occurrence outside of fiction) which often cost them their lives.      

Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022) is perhaps the most on-the-nose example of this audio-visual movement. The narrative premise of the film is relatively simple: rich people travel to an exclusive restaurant on an island, and are subsequently killed by the Head Chef and his team for their sins. These sins are this elite’s vampiric greed, one that is mainly expressed through their collective disinterest in food itself. Because food, for these characters, is not a source of joy and nourishment but is instead an art piece to be compulsively dissected or a status symbol.   

Because of their pretentious perversion of food, the Head Chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, decides they and the chefs (for they too are complicit in this miserable system) must pay by contributing to his final masterpiece, a human s’mores barbecue; this cements the film’s place as the sweetest embodiment of literally eating the rich! The only character spared from this fate is Margot, who is saved by her ‘trailer-park’ roots and order of a cheeseburger, the most democratic and enjoyable food ingested in this movie.  

Opting for the everyman’s food, a burger, also saves Woody Harrelson’s character, the captain of a cruise, in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022). His food is uncorrupted, unlike the fancy dishes served to the rich clientele, which causes them to spew out their insides. The general preoccupation with food in this genre of media is no doubt due to overeating and the wasting of food – which is something we rely on to survive – being a powerful visual symbol of gluttony that can shake the viewer viscerally.  

HBO’s Succession presents material luxuries similarly, as the Roy family’s extensive collection of properties are not places of entertainment or relaxation. Instead, they are perverted symbols of power and the family’s desire to compulsively conquer.   

Succession also embodies a final key feature of ‘eat the rich’ media in its emphasis on comedy. The quick comebacks and the caricatured aspects of the characters’ personalities are necessary to fulfil the satirical objective of ‘eat the rich’ media. Olivia and Paula’s characters in Season 1 of The White Lotus are a prime example of this, as they spend their days reading Fanon by the pool but are unable to translate their knowledge of theory to instances of real-life injustice. These hypocrisies present in the characters’ behaviours are presented as being moments of great irony and farce for the viewer, as opposed to attempts to induce our anger. This mode of comedy aligns perfectly with the current, mainstream political mood which is reliant on detached irony and postmodern satire.  

Ultimately, ‘eat the rich’ media dominated 2022 and will likely continue to do so in the next few years, with releases like the fourth season of Succession in early 2023 and the promise of a future The White Lotus season. While I am not claiming that this form of media is the most effective type of revolutionary praxis, throughout history the rich and powerful have mocked the lower ranks of society as a form of entertainment; the ‘eat the rich’ phenomenon has now given us the inverse with plots about elites fighting amongst themselves. This has been very cathartic for audiences experiencing feelings of disillusionment and despair towards the society they live in.    

But it must also be stressed that this phenomenon’s inception does by no means trace back to explicitly anti-capitalist roots and is on the contrary often born out of big budget networks like HBO (the parent of much of this media). For this reason, this boom cannot be viewed as a victory for alternative viewpoints in cinema or marginalised people themselves. We have simply become more critical of capitalism and this shift has been reflected in the things we find funny, which currently is watching the downfalls of the rich on the telly.   

The camp core of ‘eat the rich’ film and TV is this media’s chief merit as it allows us to laugh and not cry at the obscene wealth on display, since these characters are exaggerated acts of fiction. This type of humour reliant on extreme irony has proven to being well-suited to social media algorithms and has created a genuinely innovative form of comedy. The White Lotus diva Tanya’s Twitter-viral ‘These gays, they’re trying to murder me’ scene crowned her the contemporary equivalent to Marie Antoinette, proving that the pleasure of audiovisually ‘eating the rich’ might be like the cake of Antoinette’s famous words, leaving us with the predicament - the rich are the ones making money from ‘eat the rich’ media.