> The true villains of our time are ensconced in cocoons of comfort, immune to accountability. They enjoy their lives; they are not burdened by guilt or shame; the other shoe is never going to drop. To see them suffer, we have the cinema.
And
> As critics have noted, there is an element of feeble wish fulfillment in these works, an unctuous eagerness to flatter the audience’s moral sensibilities while satiating a furtive lust for class warfare. (Somehow, hostility to the ultrarich has become a marker of modish cultural literacy.) At other times, a frisson of class consciousness serves only as an alibi for an audience eager to live vicariously in luxury. (HBO’s White Lotus and Succession, which Mylod frequently directs, manage this dance particularly well.) As viewers, we get to have it both ways: Indulge in a fantasy of extravagance, and then, remembering we’ll never have it for ourselves, relish watching it turn to (literal) shit.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 16.6 ms ] thread> The true villains of our time are ensconced in cocoons of comfort, immune to accountability. They enjoy their lives; they are not burdened by guilt or shame; the other shoe is never going to drop. To see them suffer, we have the cinema.
And
> As critics have noted, there is an element of feeble wish fulfillment in these works, an unctuous eagerness to flatter the audience’s moral sensibilities while satiating a furtive lust for class warfare. (Somehow, hostility to the ultrarich has become a marker of modish cultural literacy.) At other times, a frisson of class consciousness serves only as an alibi for an audience eager to live vicariously in luxury. (HBO’s White Lotus and Succession, which Mylod frequently directs, manage this dance particularly well.) As viewers, we get to have it both ways: Indulge in a fantasy of extravagance, and then, remembering we’ll never have it for ourselves, relish watching it turn to (literal) shit.