The Aesthetics of Wealth Inequality
Sometimes richness looks like an opulent mansion, sometimes it looks like a sleek modern home. In these different aesthetic visions of wealth, we get different accounts of its injustices.
There’s much that is textually similar about the first two of Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc mysteries: Knives Out and Glass Onion. Both films satirize rich people, where in contrast to the typical whodunnit trope of having ambitious underlings be the murderers, guilt ends up squarely on the richest, most privileged characters. The central murders in each film are both explicitly characterized as an attempt by the wealthy to keep total control over their oligarchic power. Yet for two films both about the injustice of wealth inequality, the visual styles they use to depict that wealth could not be more different.
Knives Out is a notoriously cozy film set in an old-timey New England mansion; Glass Onion is on a billionaire’s extravagant private island in the Mediterranean. Knives Out’s aesthetics are a classical Victorian; Glass Onion’s are distinctly modernist.
The divide between these depictions of wealth extends well beyond the world of Benoit Blanc. Recent films and series have given us strong representation of wealth on both sides. In the classical vain, there are Knives Out, The Brutalist, The Phoenician Scheme, a handful of Atlanta episodes (but most notably “Teddy Perkins”), and most versions of the Dracula/Nosferatu story, including last year’s directed by Robert Eggers. But plenty of works focused on wealth inequality use modernism for their wealth aesthetics: beyond Glass Onion, there are Parasite, The Curse, Severance, and Bugonia. Through these two broad camps of wealth aesthetics, we get two different conceptions of the injustices of wealth inequality. The classical styles come to represent an overbearing, historically institutionalized form of oppression, whereas the modernist styles reflect a more insidious form of oppression, based around the invisible barriers of hyper-capitalism.
