How to Eat the Rich

By Luka Mullen

2022 WAS A YEAR full of movies and TV shows satirically portraying rich people, with their bizarre extravagance and warped worldview in focus. Season Two of The White Lotus was a big hit, and Knives Out: A Glass Onion Mystery was the larger, flashier, emptier, less meticulous sequel to the 2019 novelty whodunit. I didn’t care for either, never making it past the first episode of The White Lotus largely because of the slow, awkward performances and Twittertalk. There were two movies that epitomized this new era of eat-the-rich filmmaking, both noteworthy. One was good, and the other — bad. One question among many stands out: how do you blindly follow a trend — and how do you set yourself apart from it?

The Menu is a movie about a bunch of rich people who pay to travel to an island, where a master chef cooks them the multi-course meal of their lives. Among these guests is Margot, who is not like the others — she is only there because the very slappable food snob Tyler invites her along on a date. The chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, has intensely schemed to teach all of these rich people (their final) lesson.

I couldn’t stand this movie. There was little to laugh about and even less to contemplate. I’ll tell you why, and spoil the movie in the process.

Take the characters. Were there any? No. There were the guests — the finance douches, who were really into finance and being douches; the food critic, who enjoyed saying nothing and sounding stupid, along with her devoted henchman; and Tyler, who seems like he really cares about the food itself and is above it all, but who also turns out to be another rich piece of dogshit. I can’t remember the others. These were caricatures, not characters, and no one will disagree with me. Caricatures can be totally fine, given a few conditions: they are funny, or novel, or both, and they are offset by characters, or otherwise backed up by a strong, committed, holistic aesthetic.

The humor thing is a matter of taste. If you enjoyed these characters, I can’t argue with you. I even enjoyed them to a certain extent. My problem is with the movie’s indulgence. It reinforces the same tropes about each character, over and over again — ones which were not too insightful to begin with. The film fully relies on the audience to revel in the glory of how annoying, stupid, and bad each of them are. The same joke is repeated. A good caricature still has dimension. That really is the problem with this film — its increasing indulgence in its own emptiness. This shows itself in many respects. The title cards, which present each new dish, are perfectly logical and acceptable for the film’s aesthetic. But over the course of the film, they become wacky. They start placing jokes in them, bad ones, nudge-nudging the audience with a repellent self-satisfaction. The s’mores? Ridiculous and dumb. Maybe you take The Menu’s increasing absurdity as a commentary on the absurdity of it all, but I don’t see it so favorably. I see it as the film, maybe the writer, really feeling itself and throwing any thought, meticulousness, and artistry out of the window in favor of fun in the writer’s room, the editing room, or on set — indulgence. Maybe that should be the subject of the movie. I mean, the burger? Give me a goddamn break.

Let’s talk about this burger. That’s why Chef Slowik is not a character. Fiennes gives a strong performance, and it is easily the best facet of the movie. The chef clearly possesses strength of character and commitment to his ideology. He wants to show these rich people what’s what? Go for it. Color me curious. I want to know what’s going on inside of that head.

Wait — he’s getting all sentimental on us over a burger order? Did he just deus ex machina Anya Taylor-Joy out of her imminent death? Okay, he’s lost me. And are we supposed to think Margot (Joy) is supposed to be clever for making a cheeky burger order? I mean how the hell did this crazy motherfucker wind up letting her off that island?

Anya Taylor-Joy was fine. She also did not possess a character in this movie. Margot was just a person who wasn’t rich and wasn’t bad like the rich people. She got in a sticky situation because one of them fucked her over. Then she got out of it, not by being clever, but because the movie chose to let her do that. I couldn’t relay a single personal quality of hers.

So what is the takeaway? Rich people don’t appreciate their food enough. And the chefs and servers are sick of it. But maybe — maybe — if they started ordering burgers more often, it would revive their love for cooking and they wouldn’t be so pissed off all the time. Ever thought of that? Of course you did! You, the viewer, are not the problem. It’s those finance douches and food critics. Doesn’t it feel amazing to watch them and their stupid faces in the marshmallow outfits burn?

Okay, I guess we can zoom out a bit. Rich people are too frivolous with all of their resources. And the people who work hard to serve them everyday are tired of it. And those people will soon ignite a potentially violent revolution against the rich. If you’re not rich and bad, you may be caught in the crossfire, so be careful. Just… ask for a burger, or something, to show that you don’t care about expensive things like the rich people, and people will know that you are on their side, and they’ll actually enjoy accommodating your requests.

Even when I perform mental gymnastics to make something meaningful from this movie, it doesn’t work. And I understand that most people aren’t into this movie for its profundity. They think it’s fun, and will think I’m no fun for not being amused or impressed. To that I say, fine.

Triangle of Sadness I can get down with. It does not have the same single-minded resoluteness in its concepts or plot trajectory. While this is not exactly a point in its favor, it does seem to go hand-in-hand with its relative subtlety and breadth. Here, there are characters — not just tropes — and it is because each of them are allowed to exist naturally and face a range of circumstances. The caricatures similarly represent archetypes, but they are ones with a tradeoff, or at least aren’t completely despicable, scratching the ironic itch while still conveying a critique in the process. The old British couple are cute and boring until they reveal that they’re rich from grenades, where they gain a hilarious, unwitting wickedness. The Russian guy is greedy and a dick, but he’s also affable. The old blonde woman has decent intentions, but her intense ignorance makes her really miss the mark as she gets the entire crew to swim and they, confused and unenthusiastic, oblige.

The island balances the role of the characters as contributors to the film’s themes and as real individuals with agency. When they arrive at the island, a hierarchy is soon established, with Alice as the new boss. The commentary is clear — our instinctive ideas about hierarchy are arbitrary and can easily change given new circumstances. What I want to focus on is how the movie, instead of perpetually reinforcing this hierarchy, settles it over time. The social order and relationships become more fluid and complicated, and characters are depicted having fun, existing independently or despite this social order –that’s realistic. What would The Menu do? Have each character act precisely in accordance with their new role, and every moment would serve to emphasize that dynamic, rather than coexist with it. It’s just simplistic and narrow.

Despite what I said about the single-mindedness of Triangle of Sadness, it is still maximalist (like The Menu). Everyone on the ship throws up, while the Captain and the Russian argue about capitalism and communism and then the captain reads from Marx. At the beginning of the film Carl, the model, directly relays the film’s own commentary on the gender dynamics of bill-paying. The film often wears its messages on its sleeve, but it is multi-directional and ambitiously broad, and these messages come through amid a grounded and chaotic universe. Characters are full people, plot points are occurrences, and meaning naturally comes out of reality rather than being serviced by it.