Fine Young Cannibals

A spate of recent glitzy films have asked us to eat the rich. But what, asks Amber Husain, are we really swallowing?

- Amber Husain

How do you like your rich? Shrouded in a marshmallow mantle ready to be toasted, flamboyantly, alive? Or simply dressed, freshly caught and about to be bludgeoned with a rock? This past year a parade of ‘eat the rich’ films has served Anglo-American audiences a healthy selection of gastronomic styles through which to wreak revenge on money. While less literal than the class-inflected spectacles of actual cannibalism we saw in the era of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the bloodthirsty attitudes of black comedies Triangle of Sadness (2022) and The Menu (2022) are still culinarily packaged and capital-critical in name.

Supply of this kind of cultural product would seem to follow current demand, at least on a superficial level. For weren’t the years of high pandemic a social-media feeding-frenzy for wealth-hating Gen Z? Weren’t influencers on the left and further-left staging threats to ‘vore’ the Forbes richlist and stab Jeff Bezos with forks? The haste with which producers served the people what they wanted has gifted us a flurry of fabulous scenes. Who wouldn’t delight, just a little, in witnessing the wealthy guzzled by those who have been eaten away by financial hardship? And yet, if we attend more closely to the influential burghers of TikTok, we will find this is not quite what they ordered.