In 2021, as Hurricane Ida battered the northeastern US, a video of a delivery man, wading through waist-high water to make a delivery in Brooklyn, New York City, went viral on social media. The image showed the extremes to which the precarity of the gig economy pushes those on whose labours it is built. It is a precarity that, in recent memory, has been best captured in the South Korean drama series Squid Game. The show became one of the biggest hits of all time for Netflix, and made history at the recent Emmy Awards, where it was nominated in 14 categories, with a Best Actor win for its lead Lee Jung-jae.
Would a show with Squid Game’s sharp, unsparing depiction of late capitalism and the bleakness of lives driven into crippling debt have been as popular if it had come out before the pandemic? With millions of lives and jobs lost, Covid-19 exposed the brutal inequalities that drive the global economy. Squid Game, released in the middle of the pandemic, hit the right nerve. How much longer, it seemed to ask, would we submit to this machine that grinds down the vast majority of us, for the benefit of the privileged one per cent?
Different, but related questions about the nature of the capitalist beast seem to have been asked by the other two shows that dominated the Emmys this year. HBO’s Succession is about more than just the super-rich Roy family’s infighting and chaotic relationships. The story unfolds around the media company Waystar Royco, which gets bigger by swallowing smaller companies, making more and more money for its owners who only seem to get more monstrous in their dissatisfaction and pettiness. Dollars, even in the billions, evidently don’t bring happiness and avarice, in the ultimate count, does not serve even those who make a success of it. The White Lotus, the other HBO show which won top honours at the Emmys this year, differs sharply in tone from Succession, even if it tackles a similar subject — the messy, unhappy lives of the rich and privileged, juxtaposed against the lives of quiet desperation led by the far less privileged. The pursuit of money, we learn, is uniquely empty and the game is always rigged.
It’s not as if anti-capitalist commentary, whether as satire or serious drama, hasn’t been made on the screen before. Movies like The Big Short (whose director Adam McKay is an executive producer on Succession), American Psycho, Glengarry Glen Ross, Parasite and The Wolf of Wall Street tried to do just that. Even Wall Street, the Oliver Stone film starring Michael Douglas as the ruthless Gordon Gekko, was meant to be a screed against the “decade of greed” that was the 1980s and the criminality it engendered (mostly insider trading). The difference between these movies, however, and the current crop of small screen shows is that the message in the former was all too often lost in the trappings of glamour and “wealth porn” that they indulged in (Parasite being a notable exception). This is best exemplified by Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech — written as a dark manifesto of capitalism that is supposed to incriminate him, it ended up seducing viewers with its vision of “steak lunches, hunting and fishing trips, corporate jets and golden parachutes”.
Succession and The White Lotus, the shows that come closest to falling into the “wealth porn” trap, evade it by keeping their focus on the emptiness of ultra-rich lives. Succession, in particular, resists making anti-heroes of its villains (pretty much all of the Roy family) by refusing to turn them into larger-than-life figures who might, like Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, be misconstrued as idols or inspirations. The Roys, as we see in episode after episode, are petty, bored people, dissatisfied with their lives, as are the vacationers on The White Lotus and the almost-caricaturish rich viewers of “the game” in Squid Game. The moral of the story: The great, big capitalist machine might make you all the money in the world — or nearly all of it — but you won’t be any happier than the gig worker forced to work during a storm just to keep his head above water.
Write to the author at pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
