Billionaire Noir
The Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr and Nation magazine television critic Erin Schwartz on the dark understory in our politics that’s being told on the screen. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime on our website.
For own angle on the impeachment story, we decided to look at pop culture’s versions of the sort of oligarchs now under scrutiny. Some of the best stories on the subject, we’ve realized, aren’t from Hollywood. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite depicts the divided, exploited, alienated victims of hypertrophied capitalism in South Korea. It’s the story of a poor family preying on a rich one (and vice versa), and as that brief summary alone might suggest, it displays a complexly corrosive social scheme, something bigger than simply good or bad individuals.
For a domestic story of class tensions, we looked to HBO’s Succession, a show about the vulgar, ruthless billionaire class and their power games that increasingly run our world. Succession and Parasite are two satires of very real problems related to wealth inequality; in a way, they tell similar stories.
But as Ty Burr explained in our show, American commercial storytellers tend to shy away from the most discomfitingly pressing social issues; he reminded us that even the biggest anti-war movies during Vietnam weren’t about Vietnam technically. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H was set in Korea and Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 took place during World War II. Films like Coming Home and The Deerhunter were made only after the war was lost and troops came home.
Similarly, American movies or TV might satirize the wealthy—see Succession, see Arrested Development—but rarely, as Burr pointed out, do we see in them the kind of brutal class conflict that we find in Parasite. So it’s a good thing there’s a been a decades-long, booming South Korean film industry, in which daring filmmakers actually do address class conflict, imaginatively exploring the severe inequality in South Korea. Meanwhile, here in the U.S. we have billionaires planning to join the presidential race, in opposition to the rare instance of major presidential candidates primarily concerned with the sort of inequalities running through Parasite.
Is Parasite resonating in the U.S. because it tells a story that’s been resonating through a popular socialist presidential campaign? Or is its success due to its brilliant, Hitchockian artistry? Close readings of all kinds are in order—reading of film, of television, of political campaigns.
Erin Schwartz did some close reading of Succession for us. This is the show that satirizes the wealthy without presenting much of a human perspective of anyone who isn’t wealthy. Its biggest fans seem to be people in the same industry as those in the show: media people (guilty as charged). The show is obsessed with the media world around its oligarchic, Murdoch-ish family—Erin told us that scene in a Vice-like office included a the same picture she once saw in the real-world Vice office. This kind of thing delights media people, those yearning to be insiders in the world of Redstones and Murdochs and Roys (the family in Succession) and those who delight in their failures and foibles. Commercial entertainment in the U.S., it seems, might dance around major social problems while still feeding our self-centered American appetites, still appealing to our darker ambitions.
A lot was learned in this show, and a lot of fun was had—a lot was learned about fun. We caught Ty Burr in between movie screenings late this week (Waves gets a big thumbs up, and he calls The Irishman a masterpiece. Read his review here). After listening to the show, you’ll wind up with a list of films you’ll want to see and a new appreciation for what filmmakers outside of Hollywood might tell us.
Watch: The Host (2006)
After you’ve watched Parasite, look to Bong Joon-ho’s earlier movies, like The Host, a monster movie also starring Song Kang-ho. Here’s what Empire had to say about its complexity, its novelty, its unpredictability:
The Host is a masterclass in misdirection. Scenes that begin with grief-stricken intensity end in a flurry of windmilling slapstick; an even bigger threat than the monster suddenly thuds into view; initially playful twists brutalise the genre into being scary again. Most notable of all, the standard heroes have been defumed and deregulated. They’re not the familiar cops or labcoats; they’re working-class plebs so used to getting trampled by the state that a two-ton monstoid doesn’t make much of a difference. You can’t help but root for Song Kang-ho’s dumb slob — or the rest of his clan of downtrodden proles — as they take on the system, the military and the giant slobbering threat to their lives. It’s as if Ken Loach remade Godzilla.
Read: Emily Dickinson
Out in Amherst, away from it all but not really away from it all, Emily Dickinson took a different approach from Bong Joon-ho’s — she wrote about the mystery of language and selfhood, about solitary contemplations. But we’re seeing a lot of new Emily Dickinson stories coming out lately, focused not on her solitary quest alone, but on the situation of that solitary quest in a particular historical moment.
There’s Dickinson, the show on Apple TV; there was Wild Nights with Emily, the movie starring Molly Shannon. There was also A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon. And commercial televisual culture is far from done with Dickinson—as we’re all drawn together into the same cultural conversation (we all talk about Succession, or football, or Trump tweets) we’re sure to see ongoing puzzling over a person who pursued such an individuated adventure.
Listen: Mahler’s 4th Symphony
The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed Mahler’s 4th symphony this weekend. So, while we’re thinking about filmmakers responding to their time: what about musicians, what about composers like Mahler? Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa talked about this very question in their book, Absolutely on Music.
Here’s some of their Mahler conversation, beginning with Murakami’s reflection:
We talked a great deal about Mahler. As we spoke, I realised what an important part of Ozawa’s repertory the music of Mahler has been. I myself had a problem getting into Mahler for a very long time, but at a certain stage in my life the music began to move me.
Haruki Murakami: Among musicians who perform Mahler — and maybe among his listeners, too — there are many who think a lot about the composer’s life or his worldview or his times or fin-de-siècle introspection. Where do you stand with regard to such things?
Seiji Ozawa: I don’t think about them all that much. I do read the scores closely, though. On the other hand, when I started working in Vienna more than 30 years ago, I made friends and started going to the art museums there. And when I first saw the work of Klimt and Egon Schiele, they came as a real shock to me. Since then, I’ve made it a point to go to art museums. When you look at the art of the time, you understand something about the music. Take Mahler’s music: it comes from the breakdown of traditional German music. You get a real sense of that breakdown from the art, and you can tell it was not some half-baked thing.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
Uncynical outrage in the New Yorker. Keys to mythology different from Casaubon’s. An interview with Tommy Pico. What happened with WeWork. Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims. Another terrific profile from Taffy Brodesser-Akner; this one on Tom Hanks. Leslie Jamison on The Cult of the Literary Sad Woman. The French Economist Who Helped Invent Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax.
See you next week. Stay warm! And if you’re a billionaire, think of leaving a little something in the OS tip jar!
Your Open Sorcerers.
