Thrillers on inequality: 5 films about the rich and the poor murdering each other

[Attention! Despite my efforts to make this post spoiler-less, minor spoilers may have sneaked in… Read at your own risk :)]

I haven’t watched many films from 2019 — yet. But I may have already noticed a trend: quite a few films released this year can be interpreted as (or sometimes obviously are) films about inequality. Many of them show a sharp contrast between the two worlds: that of the rich and that of the poor. The main collision in their plots is the meeting of these two worlds. And when the meeting happens, violence happens too.

Violence: a key element in one particular film genre, thriller. So, unsurprisingly, many of these films — films about inequality — are thrillers. There aren’t many comedies about inequality, or romances, or musicals… Films about inequality depict uncertainty, fear, and blood. It’s almost as if some storytelling genres serve as better containers for particular social messages than other genres, and thriller is a perfect container for the reflections on inequality.

Below I list five thrillers where inequality sets the stage for violence. But not just that. After the list — a few thoughts about inequality on screen and outside of it. Particularly, I noticed that the contrast between the rich-and-successful and the poor-and-unlucky is not only depicted in these films, it is also demonstrated by them…

But first — the list itself.

Burning (2018/2019): My favourite of the five. It has only three main characters: two young people of poor origins and their new rich friend. They meet by accident, and as the plot unfolds we learn how different their worldviews are. The movie begins as a modest, almost boring, everyday story, but slowly develops into an intense mystery thriller.

Parasite (2019): Bong Joon Ho, the film’s director, is known for inventively combining several genres into a single film. Here, we have a comedy, a social drama, a thriller — to name a few. Plot, in brief: a young university student, penniless son of penniless parents, becomes a tutor for rich people’s kid. Very soon he starts parasitising on their wealth. The main question, however: is he really a parasite?

Joker (2019): Probably, you have already watched this one. In brief, an unsuccessful comedian accidentally becomes a symbol of the poor’s uprising against the rich.

Ready or Not (2019): The least sophisticated movie here: a straightforward plot, flat characters, torrents of blood. But, at least to me, it suggests a deeper reading. A modern-day Cinderella marries a Prince — a young man from a wealthy but “quirky” family. On the wedding night, she learns the worst of the family’s quirks: a ritual of hunting down the newlywed— and so the fairytale rapidly becomes a tale of horror. One of the lines in the film — “It’s true what they say: the rich really are different” — could easily appear in any of the movies on this list.

Us (2019): It’s hard to describe the main social message of this film without spoiling its plot. Thus, I will only say that it is the only movie where a Marxist interpretation (something like “the conflict between the characters stands for the class struggle”) is the most fitting one.

All these films depict inequality — at least, that’s what I see in them. But they also demonstrate inequality in a different way. The distribution of success between these films — the money they managed to gross — points exactly to the problem they show on screen.

Look at the plot below. The grey bars show the box office of each movie (according to Box Office Mojo). The highest grossing movie was Joker, with its 1,07 billion dollars. The lowest grossing movie was Burning, with around 7 million dollars. Box office is a pretty good measure of success, and Joker turned out to be 150 (!) times more successful than Burning.

The blue line shows something different: the “performance” of each movie: its rating on the website Metacritic. Metacritic collects film reviews by professional critics, gives each review a numeric score — from 1 to 100 — and then averages these scores. This averaged number is the Metacritic score: a supposedly adequate valuation of how “good” a movie is. As you see, Joker turns out to be the lowest-rated film, while Parasite and Burning are two highest-rated ones.

Even if we decide to not trust Metacritic, it would be safe to assume that the “aesthetic value” of all these films is similar. After all, Parasite is less than two times better than Joker. Not 150 times. Only two. Roughly speaking, these five thrillers are equally good. But their success is nothing but equal. Why is this happening?

I see two contributing reasons.

Reason #1. In his book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success Albert-László Barabási describes five general principles (he calls them “laws”) that can be observed whenever we deal with the phenomenon of success. One of these principles is this: “Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded”. Performance of a movie (that is, its “aesthetic value”) is limited because of inescapable natural and cultural bounds: all these films, essentially, are shot on similar cameras, by similarly ambitious directors who had similar training, with similarly good actors… Why wouldn’t they be similarly good?

Success (here, understood as box office) is different. It depends on the society’s interest and, thus, is subject to peculiar mechanisms that happen in social networks. One such mechanism is what Barabási calls preferential attachment:

Success breeds success. […] those seen as successful attract more success, regardless of their performance (The Formula, p. 127).

This mechanism is better known as the Matthew effect. In cultural evolution theory, it is roughly equivalent to the evolutionary mechanisms of conformity and drift.

The Joker movie is based on an already popular character from DC Comics. Besides, Joaquin Phoenix is a superstar, unlike the actors from Burning or Parasite. Finally, Joker is produced in Hollywood: the center of the cinematic world-system, the capital of fame. Korean cinema, meanwhile, is definitely strong, but far from being the global capital of cinema. Thus, Joker was more successful than other movies even before it was shot. It resembles a sprinter who starts his 100-meter run 20 meters ahead of the competitors. Of course he will win!

Reason #2. The second reason is that film market, like many other markets in today’s globalised world, is a winner-take-all market. The economist Robert Frank:

Piano manufacturing, for instance, was once widely dispersed, simply because pianos were so costly to transport. […] But with each extension of the highway, rail, and canal systems, shipping costs fell sharply, and at each step production became more concentrated. Worldwide, only a handful of the best piano producers now survive (Success and Luck, p. 42).

And so, the piano market became the winner-take-all market. The winners — a handful of the best producers — occupy the biggest share of the market. The reason for this is the lack of boundaries between the different segments of the market — destroyed, for example, by the decrease of transportation costs.

Now, what is the “transportation cost” of films? Almost zero. Besides, many other boundaries preventing the global spread of films are being removed as well (for example, the language barrier: films are being translated and adapted to the needs of each separate country). As a result, most of us watch the same limited set of “winning” movies. Usually, these are the movies that had a better starting position than their competitors: those cheating sprinters. In the case of Joker, this better starting position is, among other things, its DC Comics franchise. (By the way, when watching this movie, I couldn’t get rid of the thought that the movie’s story and the characters could have easily existed separately from the DC universe. Framing the plot about a troubled man and a social uprising as a story of a DC villain is just a good way of giving a competitive advantage to the movie.)

The winner-take-all film market, of course, is a local example of the globalised winner-take-all world, where we are living for the last 30-or-so years.

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Inequality on screen, inequality outside of it. What’s the solution to this problem? Clearly, the solution suggested by the listed films is violence. And, as strange as it may sound, this isn’t an unlikely scenario. Wars and revolutions have always been the most effective way of redistributing wealth. And so, thrillers about inequality are fairly prophetic. I still have hopes for other, less violent fixtures: say, progressive income tax (as advocated by Thomas Piketty) or universal basic income (championed, among others, by Guy Standing). But, until these imagined solutions become a widespread reality… let’s watch some thrillers.