Have you noticed the recent trend of eat-the-rich satires releasing lately? Our appetite for the genre has never been so insatiable, what with frustration towards the 1% being particularly galvanised in response to recent events.
Companies have noticed, rolling out TV shows like Beef, Veep, and The White Lotus, as well as countless films including Saltburn, The Menu, and the Knives Out trilogy, to rapturous reception. They capitalise on our embitterment with the elites, exposing them as ridiculous caricatures: their greed an object of mockery.
However, in engaging with these farcical portrayals being paraded in front of us, are we being pacified? So often, we watch these works with smiles on our faces, laughing along at the silly old rich people and leaving satisfied when they get taken down by our righteous heroes.
Better still, they sometimes realise the error of their ways! Their inspirations, on the other hand, are far more insidious; the terrifying reality that looms over us — the top dogs controlling the narrative and the future to our daily detriment — is ground up and reduced to comedy.
Can we still laugh at these nightmares when we live through them every day? Moreover, should we? It’s a dilemma deliberated in Digger, the divisive new Tom Cruise-starring satire of global warming and the upper echelons of society.
On the surface, actors in absurd costumes set in motion that our world is barrelling rapidly towards the irreparable wreckage beyond the climate point of no return. This story is far from unfamiliar, being very reminiscent of Netflix’s smash-hit film Don’t Look Up. That’s only one side to its dual-narrative structure, though.
The other half of two-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest feature is a fascinating reckoning with questions of how helpful that approach to storytelling really is. By turning evil into a joke, are we minimising it? Or is it valid to want to distract ourselves from the stresses of day-to-day life through comedy?
And can it actually help to motivate us to action by drawing attention to it? If Digger’s disastrous financial failings are anything to go by, people don’t want to think about it at all. Despite audiences’ apparent adoration of similar eat-the-rich comedies, this more self-reflexive exploration is sadly set to be a historic Hollywood bomb, set to lose around $245 million.
That’s not exclusively down to ideological rejection, poor marketing and mixed reviews are surely the main causes of the film’s downfall, but it’s certainly a factor. The reality is that audiences don’t want an examination of how they escape and whether that’s productive; they just want to escape.
Maybe, though, what’s turning people off so much is the definitive - ness of Digger’s assertion that wanting to avoid our troubles is so wrong. It’s true that demoralising daily stories of the rich and the powerful messing with and manipulating us for their own gain can take a toll.
These films and shows, then, can serve as much-needed relief for our collective mental health. Indeed, for many, finding humour in the horror is hopeful in and of itself; making light of what bothers us most can make the weight of it all a little less heavy. Ultimately, the purpose of satire can go both ways, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing.
Sometimes, such sarcastic humour can make a genuine difference by raising awareness of societal issues and making us more critically consider the status quo. Other times, it’s just a therapeutic distraction, where the problems that plague us become the comedy we laugh at.
Not all satire has to have such grand aspirations; giving us a space to stop worrying for a few short hours is noble enough.