These films use similar ploys to Reality TV, which magnifies the basest aspects of human nature, so we can mock and hate those on screen while feeling we ourselves are not so bad
Illustration/Uday Mohite
I’m sorry (mostly for myself) to report that last week I watched The Menu, the latest in allegedly anti-capitalist works.
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It left me even more dispirited than The White Lotus Season 2, which, dressed in Edenic island locations, promises wickedly intimate observations of human venality but eventually leaves us, well, halfway to paradise, with the stunningly banal moral that sex is merely power and relationships only transactional. Also rich people are bad. Yawn. White Lotus at least has decadent quantities of beauty and naked Will Sharpe, but this is not enough to offset the hundred clichéd shots of portentous ocean to let us know that there are, yeah, undercurrents. Gosh, how clever. The Menu also features islands, venture capitalists—whom it has now become safe to villainise—and culinary horror so tedious, the only thing on edge are your teeth. When everyone is served their, you got it, just desserts, we are too bored even to be relieved it’s over. The predictable redeemed character watches the spectacle while eating a cheeseburger. Is that supposed to be us? Oh, how absolutely not discomfiting. This metaphorical moral binary—the ordinary cheeseburger versus gourmet faux fare—suggests there is no possibility for that which is both, beautiful and nourishing. Such are the convenient political self-absolutions of nihilism.
These films use similar ploys to Reality TV, which magnifies the basest aspects of human nature, so we can mock and hate those on screen while feeling we ourselves are not so bad. Similarly by presenting rich people as so caricatured that they lack all menace or darkness—albeit more stylishly—they help us feel oh at least we are not so bad (but really, mostly because we are not so rich). Nothing unsettles the status quo in our hearts and minds.
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My mum often used a sardonic phrase “Columbus discovered America” when you announced your “discovery” of something that had been there all along. This is a very useful response towards films and shows which declare with an air of revelation: Rich people are hypocritical! There is no such thing as love! And other insights beloved of undergraduate boys. Why are these claims to political insight sufficient to elevate such films to significance? In that they are an extension of much political discourse in the time of social media.
A lot (not all) of social media cultural critique has two strong tendencies. One is this tone of discovery, as if things scholars have worked on for decades, ideas feminists have developed over generations, commentary people have written in newspaper columns for years, are cool hipster finds in a flea market of ideas, discovered by some influencer or platform, like Columbus discovered America or Emily discovered Paris. So, it is with these works that don’t seem to build on a history of conversations on class or gender or draw us into a relationship with them. Second, social media cultural critique overwhelmingly focuses on what is said, constantly examining terminology and stand-alone utterances, over contextual conversations and connections. This allows a bare minimum political correctness to pass for politics (and in this case, art) discouraging complicated messages and weakening our ability to engage with contradictions and complexities. A friend responded to my complaints about The Menu—“whiteness is bored of itself”. We understand, you are a dying civilisation white boyz, but itna toh #BoreMatKarYaar.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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