A striking number of films and shows today are answering the age old question, “Can money really buy happiness?” with a resounding “No.” Everywhere we turn, we’re seeing unhappy rich characters, whether in Succession, The White Lotus, The Menu, or Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. So even though today we’re pushed constantly to lust after having money in our culture – and having enough money is obviously important – why does lots of money still turn you into a bad or miserable person?
TRANSCRIPT
Poor rich people. A striking number of films and shows today are answering the age old question, “Can money really buy happiness?” with a resounding “No.” Everywhere we turn, we’re seeing unhappy rich characters, whether in Succession, The White Lotus, The Menu, or Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. So even though today we’re pushed constantly to lust after having money in our culture – and having enough money is obviously important – when is it too much? And why does lots of money still turn you into a bad or miserable person?
Cassandra Brand: “This rich people shit is weird.’‘—Glass Onion
Spoilers ahead for the Menu, Glass Onion and Triangle of Sadness!
As a culture, we are obsessed with money and watching people who have it on screen. We love reality shows that peek into how the other half lives, from older examples like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Cribs to newer shows like Real Housewives and The Kardashians. But one of the reasons we enjoy these properties is due to the semi-absurdity of many of the stars’ crises, which couldn’t exist in less wealthy environments. It’s certainly true that money can solve a lot of problems but it can also create new problems, particularly if you’re part of the super rich class. In an article for The Guardian, a therapist for hyper-wealthy clientele notes that having a lot of money can often lead to fears that people in your inner circle are just using you.
And the rich characters we see onscreen are overwhelmingly isolated. In the opening credits of The White Lotus season two, the picture shown over the name of Jennifer Coolidge – who plays wealthy, emotionally lost Tanya – is of a woman stuck in a tower, accompanied only by a monkey on a chain. The image mirrors Tanya’s intense loneliness, the way she feels trapped by her wealth, and the way she has only chained pets like her assistant Portia around her.
Tanya: “But I feel like that if you really loved me you wouldn’t leave.” - The White Lotus
At the same time, many of these rich characters who fear no one loves them for them directly create a situation where they only allow people to interact with them as a “rich person” – reinforcing the very same kind of transactional relationships that they’re afraid of. In The White Lotus season 1, Tanya dangles a business opportunity in front of working-class hotel staff Belinda so that she’ll care for her, but when she gets preoccupied by a new relationship with Greg, she suddenly leaves Belinda and the business plan behind. The humor in her words – that this behavior isn’t healthy for her – is revealing, because it’s so clear she’s not thinking at all about what’s healthy for Belinda or anyone else.
And too much wealth can also result in moral deficiency because it encourages a lack of regard for others. The rich person’s disconnect from the world everyone else lives in extends beyond buying a $43 billion dollar app just for the hell of it or racing other billionaires to see who can get to space first, it can also include the simple act of facing consequences for your actions. Though as we’ve seen on film and in television, the rich are able to get away with a lot because they can pay off anyone who could enforce punishment.
Miles Bron: “I’ll pay you a billion dollars if you tell me which one of them tried to kill me.” - Glass Onion
The desire to do the right thing becomes weaker as they realize that they can essentially do whatever they want, and can lead to them callously putting other people’s lives and livelihoods on the line. Infinity Pool creates a sci-fi world where the wealthy vacationers of a fictional island pay the local government to clone them so that they can commit wild, hedonistic crime sprees before safely heading back home, while their doubles pay the price of arrest and execution.
In The Menu, rich Tyler hires Margot, an escort, to come with him to a mysterious, fancy dinner, but because he’s paying her, he thinks he can treat her however he wants. And he even knew beforehand that she likely wouldn’t make it out of the hellish night alive.
In Succession, Kendall Roy is tortured by his culpability for driving intoxicated with a waiter in the car and leaving the young boy to drown after the car crashes into water. But tellingly, his father doesn’t care in the slightest, except that Kendall’s guilt is a gift he can use to bring his wayward son back under his thumb.
Just as Cameron gradually grooms his newly rich college friend into becoming a more dishonest, philanderous person, there’s a sense that being a true member of the wealthy elite means getting rid of those pesky moral compunctions that middle-class people get hung up on. Rich characters might soothe their consciences for their typically bad behavior by donating to charity, as if paying off their sins, even though their donations do little to address any real problems of structural inequality.
Captain Thomas Smith: “You’re rich so you’re a philanthropist so you can clear your conscience for not paying taxes, not contributing enough to society.” - Triangle of Sadness
But overwhelmingly, the rich characters we watch are not particularly nice or kind and they don’t seem to feel it’s even worth developing interpersonal skills. They act as if the usual rules of behaving decently or nicely is only something anyone does if they have to, again feeding into a mindset where you implicitly think there is no intrinsic value in human bonds – that all interaction is just in service of financial transaction, and so you discount others who are worth less than you. Actually, this ends up hurting the rich character too. Tanya lashes out at a psychic who’s trying to genuinely warn her of danger, because she only wants to hear false reassurances that everything’s fine. And eventually, she’s easily taken in by con men because she just wants to be flattered instead of doing any of the more challenging work of looking honestly at her life or paying actual attention to other people.
Many of these rich people stories underline that humans perpetually look for money to solve problems that it can’t. From Jay Gatsby desiring the love of Daisy Buchanan to Charles Foster Kane wanting to go back to the lost joy of his childhood, classic literature and film are full of warnings that trying to get rich in order to find love and happiness doesn’t work. In Citizen Kane’s case, the path toward getting rich directly took him away from the simple happiness he felt as a kid connected to his family – which is why on his deathbed, he’s thinking about Rosebud, his sled.
Charles Foster Kane: “Rosebud.” - Citizen Kane
There’s a reason for the trope of the lonely rich person who has everything except the one thing they truly want, which money can’t buy. It’s not just that money doesn’t buy happiness, but that if you expect it to, you end up investing all of your life into amassing wealth instead of building and maintaining the relationships that will truly fulfill you.
Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy Disney, has been outspoken about class disparities, and about how disconnected billionaires actually are because of their extreme wealth. As she noted in an article for The Atlantic, as wealthy people become accustomed to more and more comforts like flying first class, or even in private jets, those comforts become so commonplace that they feel like necessities. It can result – like in the character of Tanya – in a sense of weakness and incompetence, in the person feeling that they’re unable to function normally without all these aids.
Chef Slowik: “You enable her Phil, you buttress, you coddle.” - The Menu
All of the adult children of billionaire Logan Roy in Succession are profoundly lacking in self-confidence – while they’ve been falsely empowered by their extreme wealth to feel superior to everyone else, their lack of true personal achievement and expectation of a hyper-rich lifestyle makes them privately insecure with a childlike immaturity.
So interestingly, the fundamental problem of having a lot of money (or devoting a lot of your time to getting it) is that you overvalue the role of money in human existence. You end up worshiping money, thinking you couldn’t live without being rich, caring more about the money than the people in your life, and missing the significant joys of human existence that don’t involve money at all.
We often falsely imagine that wealthy people have so much money to spare, they wouldn’t particularly care about giving up some of it. But in The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert notes that for many wealthy characters on television, “the curse of the privileged is that they would rather be miserable than lose even a tiny fraction of the things they’ve been given.”
We can see this play out in Succession, as each of the Roy children fight each other and people around them for a shot at the CEO job in their dad’s company. Even though they have everything they could ever need to build a happy, comfortable life, they’re unwilling to step away and live their own lives separately from the family empire.
Roman Roy: “Dad why?”
Logan Roy: “Oh go on, fuck off you nosy fucking pedestrians.” - Succession
This feeling that the rich person couldn’t live without every bit of their money and lifestyle can even lead to a disconnect from the actual value of things so extreme it’s arguably a form of insanity. In The Menu, rich foodie Tyler wanted to go to this fancy dinner so badly that he didn’t even care it meant literally throwing away his life.
Wealth becomes even more emotionally complicated when it’s inherited, as then even family dynamics center around money. In many families, love is unconditional, but in those with extreme wealth, family members are often pitted against each other and taught to care more about winning than supporting each other. The Roy siblings haven’t learned how to talk to each other openly, only how to compete with and mock each other. When people’s most personal and intimate relationships ring false, it can be destabilizing. Glass Onion showcases these kinds of false relationships, as all the characters are essentially on Miles Bron’s payroll and therefore hesitant to criticize him or go against him.
Cassandra Brand: “Everyone knows who Lionel works for that’s no secret, and we all know who bankrolled Claire’s campaign.” - Glass Onion
Yet Miles’ own inability to listen to criticisms ultimately leads to his downfall, as his entire compound is blown up and destroyed because he wouldn’t accept the dangers of experimenting with a prototype chemical he thinks will make him even more money. After his ship sinks, his “friends” all turn against him, since they were only friends with him for his money.
A lot of people think wealth makes you invincible. While there’s absolutely truth in this, there are certain human experiences that no amount of money can shield you from. In The Menu and Triangle of Sadness, rich people are put into situations where their vast sums of money are useless. The Menu’s guests are invited to a fine dining experience that turns dark as the head chef announces that everyone on the island will die, including the staff and himself. The only person who is able to escape the dinner is “Margot” (real name Erin).
Chef Slowik: “You thought I couldn’t tell? Oh I know a fellow service industry worker when I see one.” - The Menu
She eschews the chefs expensive, exclusive dishes and instead asks him for a cheeseburger and fries, appealing to his happy memories working in a greasy spoon diner. Margot understanding the value of human, non-transactional, middle-class experiences allows her to escape, and it’s the one thing that none of the wealthy patrons can do.
In Triangle of Sadness, a storm makes the luxury cruise boat so rocky during the fine dining experience that the guests all get seasick. The tilting camera conveys that the order of things is threatened, and the absurdity of all these guests getting sick suddenly makes their expensive food appear worthless, even revolting. Soon after this period of literal instability, an attack on the boat ends up stranding only a few survivors on an island, and one of the cleaners from the ship, Abigail, is the only person able to fish for food and start fires – so all the wealthy people become totally dependent on her.
Abigail: “Do any of you know how to make a fire?”
Everyone: “No.” - Triangle of Sadness
The power dynamics from before are totally flipped, yet the system of oppression continues. Triangle of Sadness is titled after the region in the face between the eyebrows. But the title doubles as a description of capitalist hierarchy. The triangle has a few people on top while those at the bottom serve them, making most people sad. And even if the triangle rotates in a different direction, it just shifts the winners and losers and isn’t truly different, as long people are living by the mantra that some people should get greater rewards than others.
We often think that rich people accrue their money by being smarter, or more capable than the average person. But these stories make it clear how extreme wealth is highly subject to environment and having some resource or ability that is deemed valuable in the wider society (often obtained through luck, genetics, circumstance, or immoral behavior.
Benoit Blanc: “Miles Bron is an idiot!” - Glass Onion
Ultimately, the myths we tell about money – that it’ll make you happy, that some people are just more deserving of wealth, that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve riches – all cover up a much darker truth. Systems that allow for extreme wealth are detrimental for people without riches, but also unhealthy for people who are corrupted and isolated by their affluence. It may be the thing we’re taught to value above all else, but ultimately, as today’s media proves, your money will not save you.
Sources
Cockrell, Clay. “I’m a therapist to the super-rich: they are as miserable as Succession makes out.” The Atlantic, 22 Nov 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/22/therapist-super-rich-succession-billionaires
Disney, Abigail. “I Was Taught From a Young Age to Protect My Dynastic Wealth.” The Atlantic, 17 June 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/abigail-disney-rich-protect-dynastic-wealth-propublica-tax/619212/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAtlantic+%28The+Atlantic+-+Master+Feed%29
Gilbert, Sophia. “The Awful Secret of Wealth Privilege.” The Atlantic, 16 July 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/white-lotus-rich-people-vacation-privilege/619450/